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Buddha's Birthday, two-thousand and eleven.

Alternative Angle

So far, in the three years that I've been doing this, I've shown many sides of Seoul. I've described it's history as I've come to know it. As I've walked through it's palaces, temples, and museums, you've walked with me. We've spent a great deal of time on the culinary facet of the city, from local to foreign to home-skillet. The various landscapes have been laid before you, from urban to natural. By now, you must know the transportation, noteworthy structures, and neighborhoods of the city as well as a native. We've even gone so far as to explore the cultural idiosyncrasies of Seoul, from absurd manners to the occasional lack thereof.

However, in three years of writing and photographing, I've never taken the time to show Seoul's other side: that of a modern, artistically blossoming capital with everything you need for high society, and not for my lack of experiencing this. It's time to rectify this oversight.

For months now I've been attending concerts and ballets at the expansive Seoul Arts Center, though "complex" may be a more appropriate word. SAC is a sprawling conglomeration of theatres and concert halls on the south side of the river, very near to the big-money neighbourhoods of Apgujeong and Gangnam. I've there been privilege to an excellent performance of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, and an even better Cervantes' Don Quixote. I've also heard Mozart flute concertos, Beethoven symphonies, and various choral performances by international groups. This is truly the core the performing arts scene, which consists of more than simply the touristy, Stomp-rip-off Nanta. (As a side note, the SAC also has the most extensive sheet music store I've ever seen anywhere.)


The fun doesn't stop at tuning forks and pirouettes though. In a city that has been showing increasing promise in the architectural department, I've never quite pinned down any conventional art that was made by Koreans in the past 100 years. Yesterday, I made the discovery. The Leeum Samsung Museum features not only one wing with all the historical celadon pottery and calligraphy that other museums sport, but it also has a large wing of both paintings and installations, mostly by Korean artists. A third whole wing is currently dedicated to Korean art that reflects history, which is a nice touch after having been through the two separately.


Korea has consistently provided me with all manner of opportunities, no matter what I'm looking for. I'm therefore always surprised by the foreigners I meet who claim that Seoul is "boring" or that there's "nothing to do." This city is truly dynamic.

The Shooter's

There are some ideas so inspired that they deserve a place in the history books. The shooter's sandwich is one such idea.

The long evolution of the sandwich has been a recurring topic throughout the ESL textbooks from which we teach. The students are tickled by the tale of a fat British man who couldn't be bothered to stop gambling long enough to use a fork and knife on his steak. John Montagu, the famed fourth Earl of Sandwich, chose simply to sit his meats and cheeses between two slabs of bread so that he could eat with one hand and gamble with the other. This improvisation has allowed humanity to eat and multitask for centuries, and we owe a great deal of delicious variations to the inspired Earl. Today's sandwich is a marked departure from what Montagu originally held at the card table, but then a friend of a friend discovered a recipe being touted on The Guardian's website as "head and shoulders above the rest"

The Edwardians in the early 1900's designed this sandwich for the hungry hunter who didn't want to skip his beef Wellington, thereby branding it for "the shooters." It is a manly enough plan for the title: hollow out a loaf of bread, fill it with steak, mushrooms, shallots, another steak, horseradish, and mustard, all of which is compressed down to avoid a sloppy mess. There weren't but a few moments in between my seeing this recipe and my decision to follow in the Edwardians' historic footsteps on a journey to make something closer to what Montagu himself might have eaten 300 years ago. The added twists, as usual, were the physical restrictions of a microscopic kitchen and the geographic restrictions of food availability on Asia's peninsulas.

For ingredient shopping, my partner E and I pulled out all the stops. Where could we get fresh yet abnormal produce like shallots, loaves of bread both expertly prepared and sans cream filling, and quality cuts of beef? Only one place seemed viable: Itaewon. The very same location as the authentic Thai and Arab cuisine from mere weeks ago, Itaewon is the best hope for not only foreign restaurants but also foreign ingredients. Though they were scattered around the district, we managed to gather all the necessary materials to make the sandwich.

Don't be alarmed if these images follow The Guardian with an accuracy akin to plagiarism. The recipe flowed so smoothly that it turned out to be a perfect replica of the website. One notable difference is the quantity of steak: whereas the source material called for 2 steaks, the loaf of bread we procured was from a limited selection and a great deal larger than the one from the recipe, so we doubled. That's right, you heard it. Our sandwich, once completed, was four steaks in a loaf of bread.

Click to view larger, use your keyboard to scroll through the photos.

The last unmentioned challenge this sandwich posed was one of compression. There came a point when it was on my countertop under a 3 foot stack of books and I was pressed (no pun intended) to stabilize the tower. I asked myself the eloquent question: "What else weighs things?" The final solution was the bookshelf, and it ended up providing a two-fold benefit. The shelf itself added a significant amount of even weight on the sandwich while simultaneously allowing for the safe addition of almost twice as many books without balance becoming an issue. To keep the shelf itself from toppling, we tried securing it with the remaining twine, but it was shredding everywhere that we pulled it taut. A questionable link of belts made for a comical yet functional finish.


Would I make this sandwich again? For sure. In hindsight it definitely needed some garlic in the mushroom-shallot mixture, as well as about twice as much Dijon. Additionally, we probably could have benefited from a little steak trimming, as the gristle proved difficult to gnaw off without compromising the integrity of the structure. The sandwich may have been on the expensive end (about $11 per wedge), but it was so dense that three people enjoyed as many meals off of it. I tip my hat gratefully to E for a fruitful kitchen partnership, Itaewon for having my back when it comes to food, The Guardian for the superb recipe, and of course none other than John Montagu himself for creating a vein of culinary history that I am proud to reenact.

Delivery

All of us have been roped into things we didn't want to do under the binding covenant of friendship, not the least of which is the ride to the airport or the crash on the couch. The most dreaded of these favors, however, is the moving into a new apartment building. The worst part is that solid wood chest of drawers or heavy duty washing machine that can't possibly fit into an elevator, and no friend has ever moved into a new place on the first floor. Looking out of my window this morning, I witnessed a new answer to this problem. My fourth floor neighbors across the alley had just ordered a new refrigerator, the type of appliance that breaks backs in the stairwell. Perhaps a precarious solution, the delivery men used a sort of lifting machine. The refrigerator was placed horizontally (isn't that un-kosher?) on a platform and elevated to the fourth floor window. The plot thickened when our innovative deliverers realized that the box would not fit in the window. They decided to slide the fridge out of the box and into the apartment as it remained suspended on the platform. Everything worked out for the best I hope, since I was already late for work when I took these (I'm testing some new script out for photo viewing.  Click to see larger, arrows to scroll, let me know if there are any problems with it please.)

Convenience Store Fresh

Last week I found myself in a predicament: hungry with no food in the house, grocery store closed. The elegantly simple solution to this problem is of course a bag of potato chips from the nearest 24-hour convenience store. While perusing the shelves in my sweatpants and hat, I felt a mild disgust with the whole situation: everything the same greasy package of calories, the lonely corpse of a banana on the shelf even less appealing. Fortunately, the Korean convenience store provides some other options. Pulling together ingredients exclusively from the minimart, I was able to make kimchi and tuna fried rice, complete with egg and dried seaweed topping. A well-stocked convenience store open at all hours is one of the many reasons I love this country.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

You Can't Fight Fate

I'm not one to put much stock in signs and omens, but I do get psyched out sometimes when someone else does.  It seemed that nothing was going right with Vladivostok no matter how much money I threw at it.  If it wasn't visa problems, it was ticket issues.  After a Friday night of fitful sleep, filled with nightmares of fire-fighter-axe-bearing Russians barrelling out of the dark woods swinging wildly at my friends, I awoke about an hour late.  Although everything was already packed and by the door, I got to the airport check-in counter 20 minutes before take-off. That's 10 minutes too late.

Disheartened, I spent some time plotting how to get to Vladivostok anyway. I had already invested a fortune in paperwork and several hours in learning Cyrillic. It was only after my work friend pointed out that maybe I wasn't supposed to go to Russia that I started to change my mind about buying the Sunday morning one-way.

It was then that I decided this weekend would not go to waste. Perhaps Vladi was not in the cards, but that didn't mean I had to spend four days with pizza, Dexter, and self-pity. So here I am: on an island off Korea's west coast.  Anmyeondo seems a popular enough summer destination, but not many are coming down in February. These beaches would be the best I've seen in Korea given the right weather conditions. The seafood is phenomenal, and right now I have it all to myself.  After arriving and checking into the ghetto palace hotel, I took a dusk beach walk and ate clam noodle soup out of a circus tent. In the morning I started to trek south along the coast. I would have photographed the sunrise if it were not too overcast to be seen.

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I wrote that on a memo pad from an abandoned house at the end of an ATV trail just beyond the paint ball field, and even then my hopes were high.  It had been my goal to reach the southern tip of the island. First the weather was so dreary that the grey of the sky could not be distinguished from the grey of the ocean. Then  overcast opened up into an all day rainstorm. I had thought it was fated that I avoid Russia this weekend. In actuality, it was ordained that my weekend just suck. You know what? That's OK sometimes. Hello pizza, Dexter, and relaxation.