Today features what I believe will be a unique experience during my trip, I spent the day with a Korean person.

Yes, you read that correctly.

In fact, I spent time with two Korean people; a nice chap from my Kakao chat group and (later in the evening) his girlfriend. Before coming to Korea I was aware that the main messaging service used here is Kakaotalk, it’s pretty much the equivalent of using What’s App, but with a few additional features, one of which is Open Chats, groups that you can join and chat to people from, well, anywhere really.

The group I’m in happened to have Jaewon as a member and he has been helpful a couple times in giving me information and advice when I’ve had questions about my trip. Therefore I thought it would be nice to bring him a couple little things from the UK to say thanks and have a quick cup of tea, which turned into a guided tour/afternoon jaunt up a mountain/food extravaganza. I’m now feeling slightly bad that one of the things I gifted him was a jar of Marmite, he might not be too fond of me once he’s tried it…

Jaewon and I agreed to meet up outside one of the subway stations and, after a brief slightly awkward hello that comes from meeting a brand new person you’ve never seen and you’re both from different countries, Jaewon took charge and walked us over to a local Korean restaurant for some lunch.

I did try my best to contain my excitement, honestly. I promise I didn’t look like a muppet or anything. However, this was my first time ever in such a place and so everything was super fascinating.

It was 100% filled with Koreans (bar me), the tables had a ceramic hob in the middle for your cook pot, and a drawer underneath filled with chopsticks, spoons, and tissues. A lady came over and Jaewon ordered us a soup of some sort and dumplings. And I just grinned. A lot.

We had a little small talk, Jaewon not only speaks English but teaches it at a school too. I told him a little about my trip so far. He asked me what the UK thinks about BTS and if Korean men are seen as unmanly.

Our soup arrived and as I had no clue what to do with it, I watched Jaewon perform the chef duties. Here I will now apologise for the lack of photos. It didn’t even occur to me to take any, I was simply too busy ‘experiencing’. Sorry.

Anyway, a pot filled with broth, mushrooms, and ‘greenery’ was placed on the hob and turned on. I can only assume the soup was warm already as it only took about 2 minutes and it was boiling away. Alongside the soup came a dish of meat (소고기 – very thin sliced beef strips) and a bowl of noodles (no idea what kind, but quite thick, dense and chewy). A side dish of kimchi (김치) was present as were the dumplings (in Korea they’re called mandu – 만두).

Jaewon added a few beef strips to the pot and in less than 60 seconds they had cooked in the soup, it was like watching magic. Using tongs he pulled some of the beef, mushrooms, and greens out and put them in my bowl and ladled a little soup in with it. In went more meat, and the process started again. And that how we ate the first ‘round’. Absolutely deliciously tasty, by the way. 

Time to try the dumplings. Usually, when I cook mandu at home, I fry them as I don’t have anything to steam them in. I honestly like them both ways, I can’t choose between the two. These were steamed. They were also huge. Unlike my store bought ones, these were obviously handmade and stuffed to the brim with meat (tasted like pork). I had two and felt full.

But the food didn’t end there – round two for the soup…

Now we had dispensed with the beef, it was time for the noodles to come into play. Jaewon tipped these into the pot, another couple minutes, a few more world travel stories between us, and it’s time for noodle soup!

The excitement I had for my first time eating in a Korean restaurant was totally justified. I love the cooking aspect of everything. The food was amazing, nothing spicy about it except the kimchi (which is to be expected given it is fermented cabbage in chilli paste), but just full of flavour.

Best bit of the meal though, hand down, being complimented by Jaewon on my chopstick skills 🙂

Right, time to walk off the lunch, so we head for our tourist sightseeing destination, Bukchon Hanok Village. What is a hanok I hear you cry? In very simple terms, a hanok is a traditional Korean house, first appearing in the 14^th century Joseon era. They are absolutely stunning from my point of view, and I suppose would kind of be the equivalent of a Grade 1 listed building in the UK.

The houses generally have some typical elements; built with wood beams and frames, walls constructed of straw and dirt, and soil baked roof tiles. Additionally, the houses have ondol, an underfloor heating system. In older times this consisted of a thick stone layer under the wooden flooring that was heated by wood smoke (i.e. there was a fire lit somewhere under the house and the heat of it spread by convection through the stones). Houses today in Korea are still well known for ondol heating, but likely now to be from hot water pipes.

The hanoks that I have seen (both in real life now, as well as drama) appear to be very open to the elements, with lots of windows with shutters to let lots of light and air into the home. I also watched a drama that heavily featured a hanok (Personal Taste – in case you want to see it), and the hanok in that had a centre landscaped courtyard area around which the main building was set in a square shape. This connected the outside space with the inside and made both functional useable living areas. It was incredibly beautiful.

Needless to say, I love these houses and would 100% live in one.

There are a number of hanok villages across Korea, here in Seoul the one in Bukchon is probably most well-known. I should point out that these houses are not museums or tourist attractions, they’re actually people’s houses and are actively lived in. I will therefore say I do actually feel incredibly sorry for the owners who must have people on their doorstep near on 24/7 taking pictures in front of their houses and making quite a lot of noise doing so (though there were staff-type people I saw reminding some of the rowdier people to keep it down).

After scaling the hilly hanok streets, Jaewon laid it on me that he had planned a walk for the afternoon up a ‘hill’. OK, I thought, no worries, I like walking and I like hills, great plan.

Right, see that thing there in the photo below? The massive mountain type thing between the houses?

Yeah. That’s the hill.

I also think now is a good time to point out that when I did my research about coming to Korea, I specifically wanted to visit in autumn. They have wicked hot and humid summers here and I wanted no part of that. Currently the temperature here is still anywhere between 26 – 30°C and yesterday was also at 80% humidity.

Yeah. Let’s hike that damn hill, why not.

Oh wait, quick refreshment first…

It’s at this point I discover something cool. Jaewon has a car.

Now, that might not seem like something that’s a big deal (everyone I know at home has a car), but actually, here in Seoul while there are a mass of cars, it’s not guaranteed everyone has one. For a start, finding a place to park a car is a nightmare. The roads are super crowded and in some back-of-beyond areas they are absolutely tiny. Also, most people live in high rise apartments with no place to put a car. Therefore I was slightly surprised to be led up to Jaewon’s very posh and new-looking Genesis (new brand for me!) and promptly felt awful about getting into it (cause I already felt pretty dang hot and sweaty).

Road tripping through Seoul is scary. I won’t lie. Not that Jaewon’s driving was bad, it wasn’t, but everyone seems to adhere to their own rules, likes to dice with death on a daily basis, and all appear totally ignorant to the fact there are about 5 million other road users around them. How on earth I haven’t seen a road accident yet or the death of a cyclist or pedestrian is beyond me.

Still, it was kind of nice to be in a car (air conditioning for a start) to check out the driving style (or lack thereof) as well as the signs, lights, and handy driving tips from Jaewon. As I am due to be picking up a car in October for my 2 month road trip, this was all very useful to me.       

We make it in one piece to the start of our hike up Inwangsan Mountain. And let me clarify, it is a mountain. At 338m it just slips into the designation (300m/1000ft), but in all honesty from where we parked we definitely didn’t hike from the base. Still, there was not one person I saw by the time we reached the top who wasn’t a bit shattered from the walk.

This was my first real experience of ‘hiking’ in Korea, and let me tell you this, Koreans like steps. Not so interested in experiencing a natural climbing path, nope, we want steps. Lots of them. The more the better.

Well, I did want to get a bit fitter on this trip. Between the 374,000 steps I will no doubt end up climbing and the fact I’m doing it practically in a sauna environment, I should be good for at least dropping a stone (though actually when calculated with all the food I’m eating, maybe not…).

However, as always, even though I may be secretly cursing in my head the whole time and huffing like a steam train, when you reach the top it is always so easy to forget all of that…

Remember how just a post or two ago there I was saying how I wasn’t being surprised about anything? Well, guess what?

This view floored me.

I was not expecting the sheer size of Seoul. Not at all. It really was quite extraordinary to look at and try to comprehend. I suppose I found it extra overwhelming given I don’t hang about in big cities and even when I’ve been in one, I’ve never gone anywhere really high to see the layout of it.

I suppose you could do this in London. The Shard is the tallest building there at 310m, just a bit shorter than Inwangsan, so I guess you’d get the idea of scale there too. However, what you don’t get is the fabulous mountain scenery that goes with it. And maybe that’s what is making this view so very special. It’s not just a vast spread of urban monstrosity, it is mixture of things man-made and nature coming together and existing side by side in a sympathetic manner.

And I happen to like it very much.

What a wonderful resource just sitting on the doorstep of 9.9 million Seoulites. How very lucky they are.

With time ticking on we made our way back down the stairs, at which point I suddenly made a slightly off-putting discovery.

“Jaewon?”

“Yes?”

“This wall here that we are walking next to, I don’t suppose this is the city wall is it?”

“Yes it is, you know of it?”

Yes. I know of it very well. I am due to be hiking it next week. I’m going to have to bloody well hike all the way back up these steps a second time to complete the trail I’m walking. Dang it!

Our next stop was just a meeting point for picking up Jaewon’s girlfriend for dinner – the Seoul Botanical Park. I was excited to be meeting his girlfriend as he had already pre-warned me she didn’t speak any English, which meant I would finally get to practice introducing myself in Korean to somebody!

Well, hand’s down, his girlfriend was very sweet and very nervous and immediately presented me with a gift she had made herself!

I was totally blown away by this, and therefore all the more pleased when I not only introduced myself, thanked her, and asked if she lived nearby (in Korean). At least I felt I made an effort to be polite in her own language and was super happy when I heard her say that I spoke Korean well (which Jaewon then also translated to me). I grinned a lot for the duration of our stroll around the lake.

Our final destination for the evening was마실한정식 발산점. That’s the name of the restaurant by the way. Please don’t ask me for a translation.         

This turns out to be a different dining experience to the one earlier, for here were are eating a ‘course menu’. Basically, you order a set menu that has multiple types of dishes so you get to experience many things. Again, I failed on the photo front. However, I did find someone else had taken pictures of exactly the same thing we had, so here now are some slightly stolen photos, apologies.

Again, please don’t ask me to name what I ate. Let me just say it was all absolutely delicious and a real treat to have two Koreans sitting there to explain to me how to appropriately eat these things and try to explain what they were.

So let me try. In the first picture – one of the dishes was a vegetable pancake (which had an ever so slightly squishy jelly-type texture) to be eaten with the mixed veggies – veg wrapped in a slice of pancake and popped in the mouth in one go, using chopsticks (Cue another compliment on chopstick use!).

The orange-coloured soup was a beautifully sweet squash soup (like a pumpkin or sweet potato) and the other soup was vegetable based with kind of translucent gelatinous chewy substance (what Jaewon kept calling a potato, but wasn’t really, and upon research it’s actually like a little ball made of potato starch).

The second round of food had a plate with slices of boiled pork and a shrimp paste to dip them in, sashimi in chilli paste (that’s basically raw fish – this was the only thing I didn’t try and that was mostly because I think the chilli paste would have blown my head off), and kimchi (one slice and it was HOT – not just me, Jaewon’s girlfriend said so too!).

There was another soup, cold this time, and more vinegar in taste with chili, cucumber and acorn jelly – the sharp spicy liquid contrasted well with the cooler almost flavourless jelly. Finally there was a bowl of rice with ‘greens’ of some type. I do know this dish has a specific name, but don’t know what it is. You do however mix the greens and rice well together and then sprinkle the provided soy sauce (which has garlic and spring onions, I think, in it) on top – just a smidge though because that soy is STRONG and amazing!

We finished off with songpyeon (half-moon shaped rice cake), traditionally eaten during Chuseok. No picture of this, so you’ll have to look it up, and no, it’s not a rice cake like you are thinking. It’s almost akin to a chewy ball of dough (but not). The one I ate was dark green in colour and to me tasted a little like green tea.

And with that, we took a brief stroll to the subway, and I offered up all the thanks I could possibly muster for such as amazing day full of unique experiences and of course the offer to reciprocate should they ever find themselves on British shores.

And that happily concluded my day out with my two new Korean acquaintances.