Itaewon and Seoul Food

Korea is an interesting contrast of socially conservative yet technologically liberal viewpoints. On the one hand you'll have a rigid social hierarchy and the encouragement of submission to elders, and on the other hand you have Aegis-equipped destroyers and 90% of the population owning a mobile phone. But I guess a land of contrasts is always going to be more interesting than a land where everything makes perfect sense.

This is exit 6 in Gangnam, a focal point for post-midday meet-ups. Across the road you can see some dazzling vertical light poles. These are a new addition to the city and are interactive 'meeting aids'. You can tell someone to meet you at one (they're numbered), and they have all sorts of information about restaurants and things to do in the nearby area. Each one has its own phone number, so if you're going to be late, you can text message the pole and the message will appear on a screen so that your friend can see it. You can even get it to take your photo and it will email you the image.

This is the artificial CheongGyeCheon stream that runs through central Seoul. It was the brainchild of current president Lee Myung-Bak back when he was the mayor. Although there was a lot of opposition to its construction, after it was completed it became hugely popular with families on the weekends.

In this photo, all of the people in pink are doing synchronised aerobics to promote fitness. Koreans have an affinity for synchronised things in general, and dance-aerobics are performed together by supermarket workers at special times during the day. A few years ago, some guy called Sun Myung-Moon got thousands of couples all married together at exactly the same ceremony.

Recently World Vision held a community donation event near City Hall. People came and threw their coins into this pit throughout the day. When I was young, I always had dreams of swimming in money, but now I think it probably wouldn't be so enjoyable.

A couple of weeks ago, Seoul National University put on an international food event. International students were allowed to set up stalls and sell traditional foodstuffs to the university community. We had a browse for a while but only the Uyghur and Pakistani students seemed to have previous cooking experience. The French students made French toast, the New Zealanders made sausages and the Chinese made ramyeon.

I had a class at 1pm that day and the ticketing system was too complicated so we went to the Korean outpost, patrolled by a cadre of ajummas.

Here are the ajummas busy at work. An ajumma is a broad term that refers to any middle-aged married woman. In Korea I've heard them described as being as fierce as a lion, and having the femininity of a cement truck.
But from the ones I've met, I'd describe them more as hard-working, blunt and rough, but also caring and compassionate.

These are some staple Korean dishes that you can find everywhere. At the top left is sundae, which is an intestine sausage made from mung-bean noodles soaked in pork blood. It tastes a lot better than it sounds. The colour is a dark brown due to the oxidation of the iron in hemoglobin. It's a little similar to how a rusted nail will turn from red to brown. Below the sundae are mandu, ubiquitous Korean dumplings that are usually stuffed with meat and chives. On the right is a pajeon, a wheat pancake that is characteristically eaten undercooked, when compared to the texture of a western pancake. It was all fairly good.

Anthony came up for a visit a little while ago and we hung out in Itaewon. This suburb in central Seoul is fast becoming my favourite place to visit. It has a high concentration of foreign residents, with all of the benefits that multicultural communities enjoy.

And in my books, the number one benefit of multiculturalism is the variety of food choice. Anthony and I found a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican taco place on one of the side streets and decided to stop for a snack. I had a single soft shell beef tobacco, that you can see in the photo. It came with home-made Tabasco sauce and was fantastic. I gave it a 9 out of 10.

And yes, if you look closely, you can see that there's a real lime floating in the Corona.

One thing you quickly notice in Korea is that what Koreans consider an appetising picture is often entertaining. The home shopping advertisements on late night tv here will sometimes show a family intensely enjoying a meal cooked by some nifty device. My favourite ad was one that had a crab-cooking machine, and there were close-ups of the crab being slowly eviscerated and pulled to pieces to show the succulence of the meat.

Oh and there was this other funny ad that featured a water purifier. After a lengthy 'scientific' discussion on how good the filter was, the presenter poured himself a drink and tasted it. You should have seen the look on his face. You'd never think that filtered water could make someone so ecstatic.

One place that had caught my attention a lot was this burger joint called Smokey Saloon. Every time I walked passed it, there was always a line up of people, which is a sure sign that they're doing something right. After a bit of dilly-dallying around (Anthony and I are both slow deciders), we agreed to eat lunch here.

There are only a few tables inside, but if you order take-away (or 'take-out' as the Americans say), you get express service and they even ring you when your order is ready.

This burger is called an Ambulance. I think it's named that way because you're likely to get a heart attack after you eat one. We sat down on some steps to investigate. On the bottom is a large hash brown, and there's also crispy red bacon, cheddar cheese and an egg. The meat patty was very large and the flavour was spot-on for what a hamburger patty should taste like, meaty, juicy and smokey. The buns were soft and slightly crunchy from being lightly fried in butter. I think the dressings were a mixture of a light barbecue sauce, tangy mayonnaise and tomato sauce. My verdict was that it was quite possibly the best burger I have ever eaten, although it loses marks for composition due to its unwieldy design.
Anthony was less impressed. But Anthony is what I like to call a 'burger-minimalist', one who only likes bread and meat with no condiments. No mayonnaise, no egg, no vegetables. Cheese or sesame seeds on the bun are likely to get a raised eyebrow or even two raised eyebrows. Hopefully he'll learn to appreciate the burger-renaissance that occurred after the 1920s and one day be using condiments like tangerine honey mustard or rosemary balsamic vinegar.

Our professor took us out to a restaurant at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel on a Friday. In the first level basement of the building is a buffet restaurant with everything from roast duck to tuna belly.

On the left is a cream fountain and on the right is a chocolate one. You dip your fruit on a stick in them, kind of like a fondue. The chocolate one reminds me of a topping you can get in Australia called Ice Magic. It's a runny chocolate that goes on your ice cream and in a few seconds you can remove it as a crunchy shell. It never failed to amaze me.

You know you're somewhere fancy when they have scampi on the menu. These miniature crawfish taste like a cross between lobster and shrimp. Half the fun is getting the meat out of them.

Here's Hu-Mei from Sejong University who came to join us. She developed an instant affinity for the scampi and ate around 15 of the little critters in under an hour. Although it was her first time to try them, she quickly worked out how to use her teeth to crack the shells in all the right places. She'll probably turn up in fairytales that scampi parents tell to their scampi children if they don't do their homework.

After that we went to a second round of drinking beer. Sitting around and getting tipsy with a camera can be pretty fun. Here's our first photo that was fairly modest. On the left is Chen-Jing, then Yong-Sung (one of the nice seniors in the lab) and then me. These photos are all from Chen-Jing's camera.

As we drank progressively more, our photos became increasingly creative. There's nothing like a 3 litre pitcher of beer to bring out the hidden artist in all of us.

This is us with seaweed in our teeth. I believe we were aiming to represent 'country-folk'.

And here's us with parsley in our hair. At this point we were experimenting with more abstract representations of the universe. All in all, it was an enjoyable night out.

I actually have enough photos for another blog post right now, but I'll chop the post here so its more digestible. Hopefully I'll have time to post them up in the coming week.

See you soon!

Life in the Lab

I had my first dream about an experiment last night. These days I'm dreaming (or at least remembering my dreams) more frequently than a few months ago. I heard as an explanation of dreams somewhere once, that during your dreams, your brain is busy sifting through the day's events and working out which memories should be permanently stored. The dreams we experience are a sort of conscious interpretation of the television-static-like jargon that is generated during this time. Anyway, I guess the fact that I dreamt about an experiment just goes to show that I'm probably thinking about them too much.

While I'd like to blog more about life in Korea in general, being in the lab for 75+ hours per week tends to limit the variety of photographs I have in my camera when it's blogging time. I hope that Lee's Korea Blog can still manage to be of interest to a wider audience as it inevitably makes a transition to something more like a 'Ph.D in Korea-Blog'.

But I must say that I am interested in what I'm studying. I guess my biggest challenge now is trying to stimulate your interest in what I'm up to these days. In the photo above is a petri dish with different colonies of blue and white bacteria growing on it. The black text just details the names of the chemicals that we're growing the bacteria on, and the red text is talking about the type of DNA that the bacteria are holding. The white bacteria are the ones that we're interested in, whereas the blue spots are the naughty ones that didn't do what we wanted them to. Bacteria are commonly used to store DNA and copy it for us, kind of like a photocopier. We even refer to them as 'libraries' at times. Such blatant exploitation of simple organisms to meet our own needs is probably worthy of more scholarly debate. But no one seems to care about bacteria these days.

Except when we're sick.

Laboratories all over the world often use very similar equipment, and there's a whole underworld of suppliers that specifically target the laboratory market. You never hear about these companies normally, because they only focus on advertising to their specific customers. In this photo, along the bottom line of the sticker above our fumehood, are some examples of the names of the suppliers that I'm talking about.
I guess that because most of the companies are started up by retiring professors, the names rarely get more catchy than 'Lonza' or 'Mupid'.

This is where we get our water from in the lab. It's a fairly souped-up filtration system that takes out whatever it is that makes tap water dirty. Because chemical reactions are often sensitive to things like heavy metals or chlorine, we need to be careful about the kind of water we use.
Did you know that pure water actually freezes at -42 degrees celsius? Zero degrees is when impure water freezes, and the ice crystals grow by forming around bubbles or dissolved impurities in the water. Most of the ice that we're acquainted with comes from water that isn't completely pure. But if you take out all of the impurities and try to freeze it, the water has a more difficult time forming ice, because it doesn't have anything to form crystals around. So to achieve the same effect, you need a lower temperature.

This is a PCR machine. PCR means Polymerase Chain Reaction, and it created a small revolution in the science world when it was invented. It basically uses a combination of special chemicals and temperatures to amplify DNA so much that you can see it and take a photo of it. This is important because DNA is usually invisible to us, so it's very helpful when we can see what we're working with. I'll show you a photograph sometime later.

One thing I have noticed is that they seem to be a little more lax about safety here. In Australia, you're not allowed to eat in the lab. But in Korea, they have coffee machines in operation a few metres away from the fumehood. I guess what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

This is a rather nifty device called a Speedy-Vac. What it does is dry things out very quickly. When you work with things dissolved in liquids a lot, you sometimes need to get the liquid out so that you can work with the stuff left over. It would seem logical to just heat it and get the water out, right? But the problem is that if you heat DNA too much, it disintegrates, which (as with most recently disintegrated things) tends to make it considerably less useful to us.
So what this machine does is spin things around like a Hill's Hoist in a vacuum environment. It sucks out the air in a kind of pressure chamber, which makes things evaporate without heat. The stuff you need doesn't get sucked out, because it's getting spun around so fast that inertia will keep it in place. Cool hey?

And here is my weapon of choice for most of the week. This is a pipette, and what it does is deliver precise amounts of liquid into whatever I'm making. It's important to know exact volumes when you're dealing with biochemicals, and this little thing is accurate to one-one thousandth of a millilitre.

Remember those tobacco plants growing in the lab that I showed you a few weeks ago? Well they've just started to grow flowers, so celebrations are in order. I had never seen a tobacco flower before, and I must say they're a lot prettier than I imagined. When I think about it, I probably would have imagined them to be sticky, black, cancerous things. But these are quite pleasant.
Economically important crops such as tobacco tend to have a lot more research funding directed at them. This means that we know a lot about tobacco, rice and corn, but not so much about Sturt's Desert Pea. We're not researching tobacco at all, but we use it in our experiments because there is a lot of information freely available for it. What we can then do is use tobacco as an analogy to other systems. Tobacco has big leaves, which makes it useful for things like microscopy or to track a bacterial infection.

What we're studying is rice, which I feel better about. It's nice to think of your research as eventually being beneficial to people who need it. Our rice in the greenhouse is starting to form grains.
Did you know that one rice plant, coming from a single seed, can yield around 10,000 grains of rice? It's amazing what a single plant can do with a bit of dirt and sunshine.

Science itself is not particularly difficult. The ideas can be complicated, but if you break things down and use less jargon, nearly everyone would understand the core concepts. The rest is just details.
To that end, I'm going to take you through the basics of a common thing we do called Bacterial Transformation. Transformation means getting some DNA (dissolved in liquid) inserted into bacteria so that they will do things with it for you. Bacteria can do all sorts of interesting things with the right kind of DNA. The first thing you do is take out your bacteria from the -80 degree celsius freezer. They live here in suspended animation when not in use.

Then you thaw them out slowly in an ice box. They're in the two circular tubes in the photo. You add your foreign DNA directly into the tubes, so the bacteria are floating around in solution.

The timer is used to keep a track of the time. Funnily enough.

Then what you do is plunge them quickly into a 42 degree celsius water bath. We call this a heat shock. For us humans, going from 0 degrees to 42 degrees all of a sudden isn't particularly interesting. But for bacteria it's another story. The 'skin' of most bacteria is actually more like an oily bubble that surrounds their inner fluids. When you change the temperature quickly, what happens is that their skins will form temporary holes as the heat stretches them rapidly. The holes eventually close up, but during this time, some of the DNA that was floating around in the liquid will enter the cell. That's how we get the DNA from the outside of the cell into the bacteria, creating a biologically modified organism. Pretty simple really.
You'd think that if it was so simple, a lot of drastic genetic modification would probably happen in natural situations.

Well, it does.

Then after their traumatic ordeal, we give the bacteria a nice shot of this stuff called Luria-Bertani broth. It's a mixture of everything that bacteria find delicious, and they basically throw a party if you give them enough. Bacterial parties are good, because they have a lot of babies and do interesting things with the DNA that we quietly slipped them before the party.

After all that science talk, you may be feeling like this. In this photo, Hoon and Eun-Hae are having a quiet nap on a Saturday in the lab. Rather than being a sign of laziness, it actually represents how much work they got done during the week.

With the weather warming up nicely, I went back to the frozen lake to have a look. It's all melted now and I tried to look for some of the fish that spend the winter under the ice.

I couldn't see any because the water was rather murky.

I'll occasionally eat out on the weekends when I'm by myself. There's not much difference between food in Seoul and Busan, but Busan has a lot more guk-bab (soup-rice). Around the corner from my place though, I recently found this dish, called kong-guk (bean soup) which I had never tried before. It's a brothy soybean stew that has cabbage and a bit of beef in it. It was fine, but nothing to go out of your way for.

Heather went to Australia this week and came back on Thursday. Because she's a good worker, the school lets her do things like that. Having not returned to Australia since arriving in 2006, I had a small shopping list for her. In the photo above are Mi-Goreng noodles and Extra chewing gum. You can't get these particular noodles in Korea, and I ate them a lot in Australia. As soon as Heather pulled them out, I cooked some up and a whole lot of memories came flooding back. Heather said they taste like Korean noodles.

I'd say they do about as much as Vegemite tastes like kim-chi.

We went out to the Gangnam area of Seoul, which is usually fairly busy. I hadn't been out this way since I moved. Seoul doesn't really have a city centre, it has hot spots of activity, of which Gangnam is one. There are a few more on the other side of the river.

This is the Kyobo building, which is the headquarters of a bookstore company. Korea has been investing heavily in education, so publishers and bookstores like this one have flourished. The country is striving for a knowledge-based economy, with electronics, robotics and biotechnology being focal points.

This guy was playing drums outside for a bar. There's always a lot of competition for exposure in Seoul, and there's only so much that a flashing neon sign will do for your business. Playing drums like this will certainly get you noticed, but whether that translates into more customers is questionable. The tune sounded something like ba-dum dum ching, ba-dum ba-dum ching!

It wasn't bad.

Here's Heather standing outside the Hard Rock Cafe in Itaewon. I had never been to a Hard Rock Cafe before, so it was interesting. All I knew about them was that they sell shirts and they're in a lot of big cities around the world.

I was right about the first two points, but I also found out that they have a lot of guitars hanging around the place.

I liked the decor and the atmosphere was classy but relaxed. When we walked in, they were playing 'You Shook Me All Night Long' by AC/DC. They're an Australian band who first got together around 30 years ago in a pub called the Pooraka Hotel in Adelaide.

The drinks here weren't especially pricey and we came back after meeting with Steve for dinner. Steve is an American adoptee who I met on the 2005 OKF tour, and is currently studying for his law degree in Tokyo. We were busy drinking and talking, so I forgot to get a photo of him. Steve reads this blog from time to time.

Hi Steve!

And to finish up with this week, here is a slippery dip on the side of a building here in Seoul. With land being so expensive, playgrounds are more of a luxury that can be easily outbidded by people with money. At least they're still trying.

That's all from me this time! I hope this blog can remain interesting and I'll continue to update for as long as I have things to talk about.