Destination: South Korea

Seoul’s Fish Market: One of the ‘Greatest Food Spectacles on Earth’

Seoul’s Fish Market: One of the ‘Greatest Food Spectacles on Earth’ Photo by Gael Chardon via Flickr (Creative Commons).
Photo by Gael Chardon via Flickr (Creative Commons).

So says Pulitzer-Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold, who recently visited Noryangjin Marine Products Market and reveled in the roughly 700 stalls hawking fresh seafood. Think “croaker and corvina, bubbling clams and great octopus whose arms extend farther than Shaquille O’Neal’s,” Gold writes in Gourmet, or “bottom-of-the-sea stuff whose uses are difficult to contemplate.” Like the pink sea squirts who resemble “throbbing uncircumcised phalluses”? Hmmm. I wonder what kind of Korean breakfast you can make out of that.


You Know Things Are Bad When They’re Taking Down Japanese Condom Ads

Disputed territories abound—there are hundreds of examples around the world—and they cause tempers to short circuit from time to time. In one, Cambodian and Thai troops nearly fired on one another yesterday. And not too far away, tensions between South Korea and Japan have been on the rise over the Dokdo Islands (known as Takeshima in Japan), a group of small volcanic islets nearly equidistant from the two countries.

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South Korean Tourist Killed in North Korea

Park Wang-ja was shot by a North Korean soldier while strolling on the beach near the Mount Geumgang resort in North Korea. “The timing of the incident, given the delicate juncture of the outside world’s diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang, could hardly have been worse,” reports Time.

Related on World Hum:
* A Visit to Pyongyang


Kim Sunée: Travel, Food and the Search for Home

Joanna Kakissis asks the author of "Trail of Crumbs" about her journey back to South Korea, the benefits of "not fitting in" and her view of wanderlust

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Fury Grips South Korea in Wake of Namdaemun Gate Burning

Turns out South Korea’s “National Treasure No. 1” was burned Sunday by 69-year-old Chae Jong-gi, a man with a grudge against the country’s government. Ever since, South Koreans have been reacting with grief, anger and finger-pointing.

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Fire Destroys Seoul’s Namdaemun Gate

“People’s hearts will ache,” South Korea’s President-elect Lee Myung-bak said. Namdaemun was a South Korean national treasure, a 610-year-old wooden gate located at the center of Seoul. Police have arrested a suspected arsonist, a 70-year-old man identified only by his family name, Chae. Before the fire, Namdaemun looked like this:

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Seoul Does Brunch: South Korea Embraces the Newfound Weekend


Photo by Presta, via Flickr (Creative Commons)

As globalization continues its culture-morphing march, it’s brandishing a powerful weapon: brunch. In Seoul, once a city so overworked from a six-day work week that tired South Koreans only socialized late in the evening, a Western-style brunch of toasted bagels and blueberry pancakes is the latest way to bond with family and friends, according to The New York Times.

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I’m Not a Doctor, But I Played One on Korean TV

I’m Not a Doctor, But I Played One on Korean TV Photo courtesy Brian Miller.

When the call came in that a local film crew needed foreign extras, expat English teacher Brian Miller donned a business suit and reported for duty.

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Border Stories: A Journey to Korea’s Joint Security Area

North Korea and South Korea meet at just one place, the Joint Security Area (JSA) at Panmunjom, about 40 miles north of Seoul. The demilitarized zone, the mine-riddled buffer between the two countries, doesn’t extend there. Instead, “on the demarcation line itself stand five huts,” writes the Telegraph’s Alex Bellos about a trip to the JSA. “In the middle one, which tourists are allowed to enter, the line bisects the middle of a shiny, wooden negotiating table. Meetings between the two nations still go on here. Once in the hut, you can walk round the table—thus stepping a few yards into North Korea.” Bellos provides a brief but insightful look at the JSA, with some telling details about the efforts of both sides to control the propaganda war tourists are inevitably sucked into.

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Bambi Roll, Anyone? Inside Japan’s Sushi Crisis.

How about raw horse meat? Japanese chefs are considering both because, given fishing limits and international demand for sushi, the country can’t get enough tuna. Martin Fackler writes in the New York Times that Japan has fallen into a “national panic,” with news programs devoting much airtime to the crisis. In Japanese sushi bars, the search is on for replacements. “At nicer restaurants, sushi chefs began experimenting with substitutes, from cheaper varieties of fish to terrestrial alternatives and even, heaven forbid, American sushi variations like avocado rolls,” Fackler writes.

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South Korea Develops ‘Five-Point Kimchi Scale’

Do you like your kimchi mild, slightly hot, moderately hot, very hot or extremely hot? The South Korean Ministry of Agriculture recently announced it has developed a five-point kimchi scale—Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell likens the “kimchi alert system” to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s threat advisory system—to help Westerners figure out what type of kimchi best suits their palates. The system will also measure fermentation levels. It’s all part of an ongoing effort to promote kimchi as a global food.

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Cullen Thomas: Inside ‘Brother One Cell’

The book's author spent three and a half years in South Korean prisons. Frank Bures asks him about his travels and his love for the country that put him behind bars.

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Trains Cross Between North Korea and South Korea For First Time in 56 Years*

The test run of two five-car trains today was met with “jubilation and pride,” according to the Washington Post. One train ran from Munsan, South Korea to Gaesong, North Korea, and the other linked the Diamond Mountain resort in the North to the town of Jejin in the South, and both journeys were covered live by South Korean television networks. Each train carried 150 people from North and South and “new hopes of peace and unification,” writes Joohee Cho in the Post.

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‘Expats’ in Busan: Rolf Potts in South Korea

Rolf Potts is filing stories from South Korea for Slate this week. His first dispatch came from the port city of Busan, where he attended a film festival. “I am here because I worked in Busan as an English teacher in the late ‘90s, and Korean-born U.S. director Wonsuk Chin has written a screenplay about this experience, titled ‘Expats,’” Potts writes. “Since Chin is at the festival, meeting with possible financiers for his film, I’ve made plans to see him this afternoon at the Grand Hotel.” It turns out Chin was inspired, at least in part, by a story Potts wrote years ago for Salon.

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No. 18: “All the Wrong Places” by James Fenton

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1988
Territory covered: Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea and the Philippines
James Fenton is not only one of the great characters of travel writing, having starred as the poet-sidekick of Redmond O’Hanlon in his Into the Heart of Borneo. He also happens to be one of the great travel writers, having authored classics of the genre like The Snap Revolution, about the chaos surrounding the fall of Marcos in the Philippines. At the time, the entire region was convulsing in the Cold War, and having been given an award for “traveling and writing poetry,” Fenton had to pick a place to go. “Looking at what the world had to offer,” he wrote, “I thought either Africa or Indochina would be the place to go. I chose the latter, partly on a whim.” Once there, Fenton watched governments rise and fall, and many of his stories in All the Wrong Places read like semi-comic thrillers. They are required reading for anyone traveling through Southeast Asia who wants to understand the background against which their travels take place.

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