Busan, Korea (Part 4 of 4)
Cooking classes and a special visitor
I had asked my cousin to find me a cooking course geared for locals (instead of the “let’s make bibimbap” for foreign tourists), so she signed me up for a one-day Kimchi Class and a 12-session cooking class at the Lotte Department Store Cultural Center in Centum City.
In the basement at Lotte, next to food stalls and restaurants, there were classrooms set up for lecture series, exercise and yoga, baby & me classes. Classroom #3 was a large demonstration kitchen outlined with sinks and ranges, with tables and chairs in the middle of the room. The instructor area had an angled mirror that allowed students to see what the teacher was doing.
On the first day, attendees filtered in, most of them seeming to know one another already. There was one outgoing friendly lady in a large blue double-breasted suit (for a cooking class!) and red turtleneck who lent me a pen as I was fussing in my bag for one; in my table sat another who introduced herself as a 3rd generation Chinese-Korean who had lived for 10 years in Vancouver and just moved back to Busan. I later found out that an older member of this group had been coming to this cooking class for eight years.
The format of the class was fairly straightforward: the teacher demonstrated the process — cutting, assembling, mixing and then cooking — and we students were to follow with the ingredients prepared in each station. I was paired with the Vancouver lady. On today’s menu were a stew with Napa cabbage, sesame leaves and beef for the main dish — called, in an international jumble, a Millefeuille Donabe — and a side dish of seasoned burdock root. Both were good dishes, tasty and easy to make.
Four of the attendees gathered together for coffee afterwards and invited me; they were kind and talkative and funny. I felt as if I were in one of those K-Drama scenes where the gossipy ladies are always in gleaming coffeeshops. According to one, they saw the course not so much as a serious class as much as a way for the ladies to spend time together in a social setting, making friends and dinner. (They did comment that my language skills seemed unvarnished and innocent and compared them with those of someone from North Korea. I was not sure if that was a compliment or something else…). They also mentioned that on Wednesdays they went to a tarot-reading class — would I like to join them? I passed on the tarot card reading, thanked them for the coffee and excused myself to go to the Kimchi Class.
I learned a few useful tips — don’t choose the largest Napa cabbages; make the kimchi sauce and let it sit for a day before using it — but more than that, I learned that my usual methods and ingredients had not been not too far off.
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The end of the year brought a special visitor to our Busan shores: our adult son braved the 16-hour non-stop flight to spend a few days with us. So we took the opportunity to go on a road trip in search of crabs and oysters.
Our hesitation about driving in Korea had been based on 20-year-old memories of chaotic scenes of traffic jams, cars interspersed with jaywalking pedestrians and, often, five lanes of cars on a street designed for three.
But as we drove our rental car away from the center of Busan, traffic jams did not disappear, but all our other fears had been outdated. Cars now followed clearly demarcated lanes in civilized fashion. But wait, there was more: in order to make the exits from the highway absolutely clear, someone in the traffic department had come up with the idea of painting different colors for different exits. So for example, our navigation app instructed, “Please follow the pink — or blue — or green — exit for…” (travel and learn, we say). It took N. only five minutes to get comfortable behind the wheel.
We drove on the Gwang-an Bridge — a popular landmark in Busan — and passed by the Jagalchi Market neighborhood; we skirted the Gimhae airport and drove through several more bridges and tunnels. As we left downtown Busan behind, the monster apartment buildings thinned before disappearing altogether and, in their place, we could see more blue skies, more green tree cover. We made a quick pit stop at a rest area, before finally arriving at Geoje Island.
And N. could not help but be disappointed.
For all the time we had been in Busan, he had waxed poetically about “small fishing villages”: how he wanted to visit one, how he wanted to eat in one. In his head, Geoje Island was supposed to be a small hamlet of a place, with a road through the center of the town without a traffic signal, with old men trading fishing stories while drinking makkoli, a traditional Korean rice wine.
Well, it turned out that Geoje Island covered a territory similar to the greater Busan Metropolitan area. Yes, its southern shores were part of the Hallyeohaesang National Park, but besides its own downtown area — multiple traffic signals — there were several busy cities within the island. N. would have to find his small fishing village elsewhere.
We headed to a restaurant that specialized in the one dish that our son had wanted to try while in Korea: marinated raw crabs. It may sound strange, but the combination of the sweet crabs with a spicy garlicky sauce or a soy sauce marinade was an umami feast (the salt content of both dishes basically “pickled” the crabs, making them safe to eat).
We then drove a bit aimlessly around the coast and we stopped randomly at a coffee shop in front of a small beach. Just to make conversation while the guy made our drinks, I asked, “So how are things? Is it busy during the holiday season?” He mentioned that, yes, people were still making trips to the island, and by the way, he made over 10 million Korean won through this cafe and the 5 hotel units above. Which I thought was a weird TMI until he gave me his card and mentioned that he wanted to retire and this place was up for sale. Would we be interested? No, we were already retired, thanks.
We hiked a short trail on the Hallyeohaesang National Park that offered pretty sea views.
By this time, the sun had begun to set and the winds picked up, but we still enjoyed the ride up the Geoje Panorama Cable Car.
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After a night at a local hotel, we enjoyed a lazy breakfast at a nearby cafe that also doubled as a thrift store, where our son found himself a good deal on a sweater.
The dry weather recently — no snow, no rain — meant that the waterfall nearby was barely trickling, but the short hike was made more fun by a dog whose owner let him wander around the path, so we enjoyed seeing him enjoy his bit of freedom.
We were headed west, in the general direction of dinner — to Tongyeong, a town known for oysters — when on a whim, I navigated us to what on the map surely would be a pretty beach. It was a beach alright, but one that had marine storage containers with what appeared to be abandoned fishing gear, with trash strewn about. The only person we saw was a lone brave person who was walking by the waterline.
N. is willing to strike up a conversation with just about anyone. When this local heard his accent and realized we were of the touristy kind, he recommended that we go to a small island nearby and drive around its perimeter — it would take less than 30 minutes, but it was worth it, he promised.
Cue in the light-and-the-end-of-the-tunnel-and-the-breaking-apart-of-the-clouds: that is how N. was rewarded to a perfect example of his “small fishing village.” Sandaldo Island was exactly that — it had a village with a medical center and a couple of churches, a few motels, one coffee shop, and a working marina. The most striking aspect of this little island was its oysters.
The island was actually tucked in one of the many protective bays of Geoje Island, so all around it, we could see buoys floating on what that beach local said were oyster farms, in every direction around the perimeter of Sandaldo. And as we drove around the island, we saw the mountains of shells post-processing: they had been drilled through and then stacked and roped together. What we couldn’t figure out is what these shells would be used for. Calcium pills?
After passing quite a few of these shell mounds, we stopped by a the side of the road to take pictures and N. encountered another local. This one walked along the shore with a basket and a little shovel and from time to time, she bent over, poked around with her shovel, and picked something up. N. decided to approach her to ask what she was doing, but she was immune to his charms: he ended up startling her, and she dropped the contents of her basket on the rocky shores. That’s when N. found out that she had been harvesting oysters. She gathered her oysters and continued to ignore N., who got his message and got back in the car.
We ended our little trip in Tongyeong, a town that almost everyone we had run into had recommended to us when we mentioned going to oyster restaurants. Well, they were not wrong. We sat down for dinner, and dish after dish came out: oyster pancakes, oyster salad, grilled oysters, raw oysters, oyster soup. That was definitely too many oysters.
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Anyone looking out of a window on a flight approaching Gimhae Airport in Busan cannot help but notice the massive clusters of gigantic apartment buildings. According to N., in Korea, the larger the clusters of buildings, the better: large, multi-building developments are considered more desirable because they tend to be built by big name Korean corporations — Samsung, Pruggio, Hyundai. Such cluster communities also tend to have more amenities within the buildings — dry cleaners, restaurants, gyms, saunas, convenience stores, coffee shops. Korea has now had these apartment buildings for long enough that the old ones come under government re-development zones, which means that certain sections are earmarked for razing and re-building. New and improved. Onwards and upwards.
The one neighborhood that has been protected from such changes is Gamcheon Culture Village. Here we got a glimpse of an old neighborhood that never went through the apartment transformation, so nestled up along the hill were clusters of single family homes, usually no taller than the 2nd story, with metal gates and traditional clay roof tiles.
Offspring and I — N. was not feeling well — got off on the subway station at the bottom of the hill. Although I used a navigation app, it would have been just as easy to give oneself up to fate in that old maze; all one had to do was make sure to be going upwards. We passed steep alleys between homes secured behind metal doors — all different in design and size and artworks of their own. Often these alleys were no longer than five feet before they turned a corner and another tiny alley appeared. Onwards and upwards in Hobbit scale.
Eventually, we reached the top of the hill where we got a panoramic view. This was an old neighborhood of single family homes that happened, through several accidents in history, to have achieved the characteristics necessary for a tourist attraction: it avoided big development; it rose on the side of a low mountain; it was painted in colors that made it instantly popular on social media sites.
I was more interested in the tiny details that indicated that real people lived here — and were probably annoyed by their famous status. Next to the best spot to take a picture, a small sign (in Korean only!) begged people to avoid being loud. On many rooftops, laundry had been hung to dry, next to large pots that usually held a family’s store of soybean paste. A few pets wandered here and there.
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We started New Year’s Day 2023 at the Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, close to White Sands National Park in New Mexico, USA. We bid goodbye to 2023 on the other side of the world in Busan, South Korea. Here, New Year’s Eve is not as celebrated as January 1, when people plan special trips to see the first sunrise of the year. We weren’t planning anything special, but we did wonder: what would the new year bring? And where would we be?
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