Dinner at Sta Sera in Gangnam

 

Yet another Italian restaurant in Korea. This one had a wine buffet which lead to a bit of a hang over the next day. They do really yummy thin crusty pizza's along with all the salad and wine you can drink.

Die Dye Die

I needed a hair colour change. After a successful dying of Clare's hair we thought that I would be pretty safe to dye mine. Well...we were wrong. First attempt on Thursday night ended up with me having bright yellow (Korean blond) hair! Click the pic to see the colour better.

I braved the kindy classroom with my yellow hair but tried to dye it again at lunch on Friday only to have an orange result. Although it wasn't the colour I would have liked it is growing on me. So I will stick with it for the next couple of weeks. Hopefully I can get it a normal shade by the time I get to Matt and Karen's wedding!

Pretty Lights

For the X-mas New Year season a lot of businesses put up lights around Myeong-dong. We walked around on a freezing night to appreciate them.

New Zealand Cherries!!!

Here is Clare happy with her New Zealand cherries. She bought them on special. 280 grams for NZD$10. They were pretty good but they tasted a little jet lagged.

Seoul War Museum

We visited the War Museum in Seoul a couple of weekends back. The museum houses not only a well laid out history of the 1950's war but it also has sections about the wars defining the occupation of the Korean peninsula from 300-500AD onwards. It was a huge place and so much to read, watch and look at. One of the most enjoyable parts for me was walking around the exterior of the museum and viewing the tanks, planes and other war machinery. Below I am (wo)manning a ship's machine gun. I also got to see a B-52 Super Fortress. It was an excellent experience.

Fireworks in the street!

Hey everyone. Finally worked out how to put video on my blog! Hurrah! This snippet is after Marie purchased fireworks from a hawker on the street in Insadong. I joined in with the crazy Korean's celebrating New Year by holding fireworks and letting them off. Don't do this at home kids.

The sky was exploding while thousands of people let off roman candles over our heads. The smoke from all the fireworks made you cough and even after we retreated to the subway you could see smoke in the subway tunnel!

Food delicious food

Mum suggested that I write something about Korean food. It is very delicious and cheap so I'll tell you about a few of my favourite dishes in Korea. The food eat have eaten the most is Samgyupsal or Galbi. This is BBQ pork bacon or marinated meat. Many restaurants specialise in these types of food. You simply sit down at a table with a grill in front of you while your meat cooks to perfection. Pork is the cheapest meat here and it BBQ's really well. On occaision we have splashed out and had beef which is good too.

All Korean restaurants give you side dishes. The primary side is 'kimchi' which is a fermented chilli cabbage. It's really spicy and takes a little getting used to! Other sides may be soy bead products, marinated peanuts, pickled radish, seaweed,eggs (pickled, omlette) etc. There is a huge variety of sides. The side dishes are always served in odd numbers and traditionally the more sides provided the more fancy/formal the meal. So 3 sides is Jo Bloggs dinner while 11 sides would be very fancy.

The BBQ meat is eaten with lettuce, raw garlic (though I prefer to grill it!) and a red bean sauce. We also order mushrooms to BBQ which complement the meal really well.

Delivered food is also easy to get in Korea. Clare and I have spent many a freezing night comfy on our couch eating delivered food. We simply call our local restaurant and they deliver everything as it would be in the restaurant for no extra cost. Once you finish your mean you can put the dirty dishes outside your door and the delivery man takes them away. Brilliant for if you don't like to do dishes!

The dish below is Kimchi Chigae. It is a local dish which is essentially a mix of Kimchi, meat (pork)and tofu. It is very spicy but is very cheap and tasty. As you can see it is served with short grain white rice. Clare doesn't really like this dish. Here is a recipie if you want to make it. Good luck finding kimchi though! http://www.trifood.com/kimchichigae.html
This link is very useful if you want to know about more Korean dishes!

Hmmm, tofu. Thanks to Korea I have a new found appreciation for the soy bean and its goodness.

This is one of Clare's favourite dishes. It's called Don Gas. This is a picture of her half eaten Don Gas set we had delivered. Don Gas is crumbed shallow fried pork fillet. Typically eaten with short grain white rice and specialy BBQ sauce. The set that Clare gets also includes a fruit salad, kimbap (Korean Sushi) Tang Su Mandu (crispy dumpings) Korean style coleslaw (cabbage and mayo) and to top it all off a Udon noodle soup. It is big meal but it goes together very nicely. Sometime when we feel like pigs we get one each!

I haven't learned how to make any of these dishes. I blame it on only having a 2 burner gas hob...then again it is just so easy and cheap to eat out alot and cook easy things like eggs on toast or ranmeyon(noodles).