It was snowing - snowing! - in Nagoya when I left, so I left early in case everyone freaked out and the trains ran late. As it turned out they were fine, so I left Nagoya on schedule. The first thing I saw out the window of my plane was this:
It was late by the time I made it to my hostel near Hongik University, so I went out to find some food.
Hongik university station area is completely covered in stalls selling all kinds of street food. If it were Japan, I'd have assumed that a festival was going on, but it looks like Hongik just looks like this all the time.
This stall was selling fried food on sticks. The big plastic cover keeps the heat in; on the right you can see people under the cover eating their snack. It was cold outside, but it stays pretty warm in those stalls.
Oh, and Koreans are every bit as crazy about cell phones as you have heard, too.
And on the subject of cheap, there were trucks everywhere selling whole crates of strawberries for 6000 won. I couldn't believe it. Japanese people love to tell you that everything in Japan is expensive because it's an island, and small (I'm pretty sure they believe it wholeheartedly, too), but everything in Korea is cheap... and it's an island too. And smaller than Japan.
Korea is really big on communal eating - Korean barbecue is cooked up to share at your table, and bulgogi restaurants will only seat two or more people at once. A lot of the places offering street food would only do a huge plate of it to share with other people. Food is big entertainment - most of the restaurants around Hongik were packed, long after restaurants in Japan would have closed. I began to wonder if anyone ever sleeps in Seoul, and went into a restaurant serving tteok stew.
They had a really charming "menu for only foreigner", which had things hilariously translated into weird "English". I ordered a stew with tteok, egg, negi, nori, and meat.
The stew came, of course, with kimchi (in the back), and a metal bowl of rice. The chopsticks are metal, too. (They gave me a cute paper card with outlines of chopsticks and a spoon on it, as a utensil rest...) I'm sure metal chopsticks are better for the environment, easier to clean, and so on, but I have to say, it's a lot easier to eat when you get wooden chopsticks and you're allowed to pick up your rice bowl. Sorry Korea.
The drink you see is barley tea - just like the Japanese stuff, except warm. Which is weird as hell once you're used to drinking barley tea as a cold drink in izakaya, especially in the summer. (Sorry again, Korea.) One thing I wish Japan had is kimchi, though. You always get pickles when you order at a Japanese restaurant, but they're just... not so good. (Sorry Japan.) I really liked kimchi though. Unfortunately for me, this place had the best kimchi of everywhere I ate on the trip, so I spent the rest of my time being disappointed.
The stew itself was really delicious, and really filling. I barely managed to make a dent in it. After that, I went back to the hostel to digest.
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