Honeymoon: Foods not Found in Korea

Before even setting foot in Australia, I had already planned out a mental 'to-eat' list in the weeks leading up to it. Most of the foods on it were Chinese or Malaysian, with a couple of pies thrown in for good measure. Some people eat to live. Some people live to eat.

I just eat.

If you're wondering what's happened to the photos, well I've taken some good advice from Chris in South Korea, who suggested I use Flickr to upload photos, and then link them to my blog. So that's what I've heeded, and things are turning out well. Now the photos are clearer and bigger, and I also get an unlimited amount of photo space that I never need to pay for. Thanks Chris!
In the photo above are steamed scallops with ginger, soy, spring onion and coriander. It's a simple recipe but never fails to impress.

We went up to Marion Shopping Centre for lunch to visit my old workplace. Marion is owned by the richest man in Australia (Frank Lowy) through the Westfield brand, which is now the biggest operator of shopping malls in the world. My old boss told me that he came to eat in our restaurant on opening day.
The best thing about working in a shopping mall is that it's convenient to pick things up on the way to work.

And here's the kitchen space where I used to cook. Back in those days, I could cook three different dishes in those three woks, simultaneously. These days though, I'm limited to a little gas burner and a tin saucepan in our dormitory. Wok frying is a fun thing to learn, if you don't mind getting burned every once in a while.

This is our updated menu. I can cook pretty much all of the dishes on this, and I've cooked some of them over a thousand times. Impressed yet?

I hope so.

In the top photo is one of Casuarina's Signature Dishes™, called Singapore Fried Noodles. Jimmy came up with that specific recipe, and it's a little different from the authentic ones. The bottom photo has a char kway teow and a vegetable stir fry.


And here's Heather and me with my sister, James Tan (the current manager of the restaurant), my dad and my brother. If you're in Adelaide and heading to Marion, eat at the Casuarina Restaurant. It's to the right of the cinema steps and is actually the largest traditional Malaysian restaurant in the southern hemisphere.


This is the carpark for the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. I used to park here during my undergraduate years at university, because it's a lot cheaper than parking by the Torrens. On many a lazy afternoon, I would come back this way and relax in my car for a while, pondering the complexities of adolescent life before zooming off for my night shift.

Quiet moments of reflection can bring welcome pockets of clarity, if you do them right.


Adelaide is very small and very quiet, when compared to Seoul. The city centre is laughably cute, and has about the same number of buildings as my current university. Still, it's one of the best places to grow up in and I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.


Here's Heather standing on some blocks at the Festival Centre. It's a part of the modern art installation they have there, and I've never worked out what it's supposed to represent. I think they look a bit like the exhaust funnels of cruise ships.


Mum invited us for dinner at the Adelaide Hyatt, which was incidentally opened by the same Peter who is running the L'Arc in Macau. Hyatt buffets are pretty good, and they get extra points for having fresh oysters. The best oysters in the world are from Tasmania and Coffin Bay.

In my opinion, anyway.


And there happens to be a very good Vietnamese beef noodle shop across from Regency TAFE, called the Yen Lin. I used to come here a lot after a long night drinking.


The restaurant is pretty busy these days, and like many Asian diners in Adelaide, the questionable service is more than made up for with delicious food. Waiters in these places will come up to you with a notepad and pen, and blurt out "WHAT you wan?" You tell them, and they go into the kitchen, having never made eye contact. You could have fluorescent green eyes and they'd never notice.
But sure enough, 5 minutes later a delicious bowl of steaming noodles comes out and you're making a mental note of the restaurant's location.


This is what beef noodles should be served with. Hoisin and Sriracha chilli sauce on the side, with copious quantities of Thai basil, lemon, beansprouts and coriander. At this point in time I will refrain from pointing out the numerous indictable offenses regularly committed by Korean beef noodle restaurants.


On the left is fresh coconut juice and in the middle is Vietnamese filter coffee. It's quite strong and is served with a layer of condensed milk on the bottom. You stir it up and add it to the cup with ice in it. After a few of these, you'll be resembling some sort of fusion between a meerkat and a hummingbird.



Here's me, waiting for my beef noodles. Three years is a long time to wait.

See, I already poured my sauce in the sauce holder.


Combination beef noodles are called phở đặc biệt in Vietnamese. You need a couple of awkward diphthongs in there if you want to pronounce it properly, but most of us survive by using the word 'fur'. It's simple, pure and delicious.

And it should not have a side of kim chi.


Heather thought the noodles were quite appetising. But what often happens in situations like these is that I hype something up way too much beforehand. So anything less than an out-of-body experience is going to disappoint. I really need to stop doing that.


Another thing I hyped up a little too much was Adelaide's nice weather. When we got to the beach, it was about 14 degrees C.

Oops.


Glenelg beach is a nice place to visit in the warmer months. It's also a focal point for New Year's Eve celebrations, with fireworks and large crowds. There's a tram service that goes from here to the city centre, and my uncle once had his wedding party on it.


Here's Heather wearing my jacket on the end of Glenelg jetty. The purpose of a jetty is to allow people to walk on them and peek into fisherman's buckets to see if they've caught anything.

And then we ask "Caught anything mate?", even though we know the answer. It's all a part of being an Australian.


Heather and I played the poker machines in the hotel on the right. We like to dabble with statistical improbabilities, from time to time.


Oh, and fish and chips. My United Statesian friends in Korea often wonder what's so good about fish and chips. That's because they have nice Mexican food available around the clock.

Somehow I don't think fish and chips would be as fun to eat if they didn't come wrapped up in an unnecessary amount of paper.

And when you unwrap any paper bundle on an Australian beach, the birds slowly begin to circle the sky.

Or hover, squawk and chirp, as the case may be.


Having learned my lesson from reading The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock, I hastily decided to share the bounty with my feathered friends.


These days, the seagulls take the chips right out of your hand, which is something that they never used to do. It's funny because if you outstretch your arm with a chip, they hover in the air for a little while and you can see them hesitating. In their minds I can imagine a whole lot of IF/ELSE statements working in overtime.

That's all for me this time! One more honeymoon post, and then we're back in Korea.

And I hope you like the new photo format.

Honeymoon: Old Friends in Adelaide

The three best things about returning home are food, friends and family. I don't know if it's abnormal, but I've been lucky enough to have never experienced homesickness. Although I always look forward to returning to Australia, I also enjoy being in other places too. I think the key is to focus on the 'here and now'.

Korea has some good food, but nothing ever beats food from home. Hong's Dad opened a new barbecue restaurant while I was away, so we went there to eat for lunch. Barbecue pork is one of those things that I never see in Korea, even though Korea is otherwise a pork paradise.

Once upon a time, when I was a young lad, I worked at a Malaysian restaurant as a kitchenhand and then a cook. It was a defining part of my adolescence and I learned a lot about working and making an honest wage. For six of those seven years, I was under the mentorship of a respectable chef called Jimmy Lai, who ended up opening his own restaurant called the Kopi Tim. On our first night back in Adelaide, we went there to eat.

Jimmy cooked brilliantly as always. He taught me most things I know about wok frying in particular, and has had a colourful life. In the photo above is crispy skin chicken, one of his personal specialities. He also made his signature fish head curry, which is a delicacy no one else in Adelaide can execute perfectly. Including myself, even though I learned it from him.

Roti bread is Malaysia's version of Naan bread. According to legend (and Jimmy), when the first Indian migrants arrived in Malaysia, they closely guarded the technique for making Naan so that their restaurants would always have customers. The local Malays experimented with different ingredients and eventually came up with Roti, which has non-raising flour. Roti became a hit in Malaysia, and the tides turned, with the Malaysians keeping the Roti recipe a secret. Even now in Adelaide, Jimmy still doesn't teach anyone how to make it.
In order to aerate it properly, it's spun in the air with a difficult technique. The chefs will spin it so thinly that a small tennis ball sized lump of dough will expand out to the size of an open umbrella. Then they fold it up and fry it, before whacking it with bare hands into a fluffy and crispy pile of pastry.

And here are my boys from back home, laid back and straight from the west side. The biggest downfall to living in Korea is not being able to hang out with them.

Here we are after eating voraciously. Old friends and good food - what more could anyone need?

And here are Jimmy's sons, who work in his restaurant. I used to tutor them in English and maths when they were much younger. At that time, they were about waist high, but now they're taller than me. That's what happens when you eat Jimmy's cooking everyday.

We're a very close group of friends back home, and Hong's family let us stay in the spare room at the back of the house. I used to live just around the corner right before I left for Korea.

And here's Hong's dog, Pow-Pow. He's an eccentric German Shepherd cross, and is very picky about who he gets along with. We'll be hearing more about him in another blog post.

Australia is a big country with around half the population of Korea. Space is cheap and most houses have front and back yards. A large portion of my childhood was spent looking at things like insects and dog poop in my backyard.

The funny thing is, three years ago when I started this blog, I was mainly describing interesting things about living in Korea. Now I feel like I'm introducing Australia.

"Hey look everyone, this is what we call a backyard."

Hong's parents raise ducks and chickens, which are great for getting rid of food waste and providing an endless supply of fresh eggs. Every once in a while, Hong's mum will bring one to the chopping board and later there'll be a smallish looking chicken on the dinner table. I usually think of myself as your average tough guy, but chopping off a live chicken's head makes my legs go a little wobbly. Then again, I've seen Hong's mum squash spiders and cockroaches with her bare hands and then put them in the bin. She'd give the Korean ajummas a good run for their money.

And they also keep a sizable vegetable patch. There's something remarkably satisfying about eating food from your own backyard.

And they have two beehives, which they use to extract litres of honey every year. They gave us around 2 litres of it and we've still got half left here in Korea.

Yeung is Hong's younger brother. He finished up his course and is now a qualified mechanic. In the photo above is his car, a Nissan Silvia. I think it has turbo and 4 megabytes of RAM and super duper stuff that even I don't know about.

I heard that it can go from zero to the speed of light in zero seconds. As soon as you start timing, it's already doing 300km/hr.

And because Yeung and Hong are both in the car business, they fixed up this Toyota and lent it to us so that we could get out and about while they were at work.

Life is all about having good friends and being thankful for it.

Here's a photo that Heather snapped while I was driving. She later commented on how serious I look when I drive.

That's because I'm a responsible driver.

So what's the first thing we did when we hit the streets of Adelaide? Well we went right around the corner to the Prospect Road pie shop. I had been craving a good old Aussie meat pie for an eternity. Even to the point where I had dreams about eating one and would wake up with drool on my Korean pillowcase.

We took our loot to a nearby community hall and playground. In Australia, you can hire out community halls for badminton or social events. And the playgrounds are often empty during the day.

I bought a pie, a pastie and a sausage roll for lunch. Quite a lot really, and I ended up being satisfyingly bloated.

Heather selected a sandwich. Australian sandwiches are superior to Korean sandwiches in every aspect of sandwich judgement. She also had a nibble of the pie, pastie and sausage roll, which she said were nice, but the sausage roll had too much pastry on the outside. I agreed.

In ancient Korea, the girls used to play on large swings suspended from the boughs of trees. Heather felt the ancestral urge pulling her to the playground swing and happily swang away for a while. I remember when I was young, I used to run under the swings while someone was swinging, even though the teacher told us it was against the playground rules.

And then we drove up to catch up with an old friend with an eclectic personality. I used to come this way a lot when I was living in Australia.

Mongkol is my Cambodian friend who hasn't left his house for a year. He has a fricative personality and enjoys creating complex situations. I chose the word 'fricative' particularly because it's entirely ambiguous.
Mongkol is one of the few adolescent males in the developed world who neither has a mobile phone or an email address. In fact, there is no way to trace him whatsoever from Korea.

For the occasion, we went out and bought some James Boag's beer and some Moet and Chandon, which we proceeded to drink on the porch in the early afternoon.

While waiting for Mongkol to get ready, we decorated his bird bath. Bird baths do not exist in Korea.

And because a guy like Mongkol would never have a champagne glass in his house, we drank the Moet from coffee mugs. That's some real Aussie culture right there - we're a country of classy mongrels. Australia is definitely where I feel most at home, although I'm happy living in Korea too. One day we'll be back to live, it's just a matter of when.

More of our trip to Australia coming soon!

Honeymoon: Macau Tower

Throughout my limited travels of the globe, I have come to learn that most respectable cities have their own tower, with an exception being my hometown of Adelaide. On our last night in Macau we went to Macau Tower, mainly because we were interested to see the lights of the city. The Portugese name for the tower is Torre Panorâmica.

The tower itself is 338 metres tall and was commissioned by Stanley Ho, the casino tycoon. He was apparently impressed by the Sky Tower in Auckland after a visit and decided to build one in Macau. In other words, it arose from the whims of a billionaire.

"Hmm, what shall I do today? I know! I'll build a tower..."

There was a fireworks show that night, part of a six night series in an international competition. Teams from different countries were invited to participate and we saw the Japanese entry, which was pretty good.

Just like the Sky Tower in Auckland, Macau Tower has glass flooring. Although I'm perfectly sure it was intelligently engineered, I still felt uneasy standing on it. Heather however, had no such qualms. She even did a little tap-dance to show me how safe it was.

Then we went back for one last night out on the town. One of the oldest casinos in Macau is called the Casino Lisboa. It looks pretty impressive from the outside, but you can tell from the worn carpets inside that many an ATM weary patron has dragged their feet along its halls.

Heather and I decided that our favourite casino is the Wynn Casino. We like the decor inside and the Japanese-influenced decor. In front of the Wynn is this electric fountain display, that shoots jets of water up into the air in time with classical music.

See that little guy standing in the walkway? He was standing there during the two times that we went, and like many other casino employees, his job was to give a human presence to the surroundings. The casinos are so large that in some corners there are no customers, so the casinos place workers who just stand around and show that the area is inhabitable.

Heather and I had cocktails that were around US$10 each and were mixed well. And they made these really good home made chips, that you can see in the metal holder. They tasted like bacon flavoured Kettle chips, but were much better. We asked for seconds.

Our hotel, the Casa Real, was fairly good. It also had a small casino that seemed as if it was added as an afterthought. If you don't want to pay large sums for the 5 star hotels, it's a place worth considering.

I bought Hong's dad a 1976 cognac from duty-free. Hong is our friend in Australia whose house we stayed at and his parents have always been good to me. So anyway, when I bought the cognac, they gave us this bottle of XO for free. Heather wanted to see what it tasted like, so we opened it. And you're not allowed to travel with open bottles on planes anymore, so we drank the whole thing.

We boarded the ferry on Sunday back to Hong Kong. Heather bought this nice inflatable travel pillow, which was quite comfortable. But if you fly Cathay Pacific, they have these really well designed seats now, which have their own adjustable 'head holder'. I managed to get a few hours sleep on the trip to Australia.

When we arrived back in Hong Kong, we dropped off our laundry at the same place we were using when we were staying there. They said they'd have it ready in a few hours, which they did. And they did three days worth of laundry for US$4. Amazing service and value. The shop is a franchise called Sunshine Laundry, and they're all around Hong Kong, but the one we like is over the road from the Stanford Hotel. The lady was really nice.

I think it's the first time I've ever had a favourite laundromat.

As I was saying earlier, the food in Hong Kong is generally better than what you find in Macau. These stir fried green beans were simple but delicious.

We went to the airport to catch the midnight flight to Australia. Hong Kong International Airport is easy to use and designed well. Good airports are a great asset to the cities they serve.

But with so much fine print to read through, we chose not to be issued with an Octopus. Still not quite sure what it is.

And then after a week in Hong Kong and Macau, it was time for the second part of our honeymoon. I hadn't been back to Australia since I came to Korea in 2006, so I was really looking forward to getting back and catching up with people.

I tied the pink ribbon on my suitcase so that it's easier to spot on the baggage pickup carousel. Luggage all looks pretty similar, so its handy to make yours look more conspicuous. On the way to Korea, I didn't have a ribbon, so I used a shoelace. It's a trick I picked up from my Dad.

Next post we're going to Adelaide. See you soon!