Sokcho Sunday Lunch

A seaside lunch in Sokcho:

Sokcho Ocean

A few relaxing pics from part of the oceanfront in Sokcho, Gangwondo (the quiet, northern part).

A Friend's Death

After suffering a seizure last year, being diagnosed with a brain tumor, and undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, my best friend died today, March 27th, 2015.

He was a great person, and I will miss him.

I will travel for the funeral tomorrow, and to support his wife, also a great person.

More about him later.

For now, I grieve . . .

Pasta

I made some pasta with salmon, garlic,  and kale, and later added some pesto sauce:

Good, though the salmon was a bit dry since I boiled it.

Korean Eating Shows (Mukbang)

I have read about this before:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/03/24/392430233/koreans-have-an-insatiable-appetite-for-watching-strangers-binge-eat

Warm Saturday

Yesterday was warm--the first warm Saturday--so many people were out in the city parks:

Shabu Shabu

For lunch I went with a friend to a 'shabu shabu' restaurant.  This is where you cook vegetables and meat in a pot at the table.  At the end of the meal you toss some 'kalguksu' (handmade wheat flour noodles) into the broth to cook.

This restaurant was a bit different in that you could decide on an 'unlimited' option, and keep refilling your side dishes and veggies and meat. (We chose that option, at $18 a person.)

We had more food than we could eat, though we both gave it a valiant effort.  We could have refilled the meat trays, but I knew from the beginning that wasn't going to happen.

Our menu option also included a dish of 'bossam', or boiled pork.

This restaurant is in Pyeongchon:

Pork Cutlet Restaurant

Here are a few pictures from a pork cutlet (돈가스) restaurant in Sanbon:

Pork cutlet with one fish cutlet (생선가스) + udon noodles

Fish cutlets + udon noodles

'King' pork cutlet

The food at the restaurant was good (and very filling); the place was full of people, which is always a good sign.  I plan to eat there again sometime!

Korean Chicken Soup

Samgyetang (삼계탕) is a ginseng chicken soup that is considered to be a healthy food.  It includes a whole chicken in a pot, here 1 small chicken per person; not a lot of meat, but quite tasty:

It is eaten with chopsticks and a spoon (with a bowl on the table to put the bones in as you work your way through the chicken, which requires some inventive chopstick use).

These chickens were stuffed with rice.

The peppers you see were not spicy at all.

On the right is radish kimchi, while on the left is the more traditional cabbage kimchi.

Vegetables

A side dish mix that I sometimes buy:

From top left: bellflower root (toraji), fern-bracken (gosari), spinach (sigeumchi), and radish (asian) kimchi.

Girls-Only Class

I teach two classes that only have girls; I asked one of the classes (4th grade) to write four reasons on the whiteboard about why only having girls is a good thing.

Here's what they wrote:

(The red writing is mine)