BBS Documentary

I've been watching a lot of movies from the Internet Archive. If you like old films and/or B-movies it's a treasure trove of goodies. The Archive also hosts tons of audio and textual material as well, it's a great resource for teachers, history buffs, classic movie fans, just about anyone really. Some of them are good, some are absolute crap and some are a strange mix of both. For anyone who needs to track down the content of a defunct website, their Wayback Machine offers an archive of old websites.

I've watched dozens of films from the archive and I recently started exploring the documentary films. There's a great documentary series: BBS: The Documentary (2005) about the history of the BBS. This is not the kind of thing that will interest you non-geeks but the technophiles out there might want to watch some of this, especially you older technophiles. *cough*Juergen*cough*DaveV*cough*

Here are my annontated Archive.org bookmarks.

Pork belly

...is probably the most popular non-fish meat in Korea. The favourite by far is barbecued pork belly. I can remember my grandfather eating this sometimes for breakfast or lunch. Big thick strips of unsalted, uncured bacon pan fried with salt and pepper.

I bought a kilo of precut frozen pork belly for 13500 won (currently about CDN$11) at the local HomePlus (a Korean subsidiary of Tesco, the Euro grocery giant). I eat this stuff a fair bit and although bulgogi (literally "fire meat") is more commonly known outside of Korea, this seems more popular here. It's simply tossed on a little griddle over a gas flame or on a metal grill over charcoal, cooked until it's done and then wrapped in lettuce or perilla leaves brushed with ssamjang ("ssam" is the Korean word used for vegetables used for wrapping, "jang" means sauce), a chunky soy bean paste mixed with a little chili and other seasonings (yum!)


If you go out for samgyeopsal ("three line pork" == pork belly) you typically pay about $20 for two people and you get a meal that includes the pork, veggies, sauces and an assortment of banchan (small side dishes.) It's a good deal and for a few bucks extra you can have bowls of rice and a bowl of doenjangjiggae (bean paste stew.)

At right is a shot of a meal of dwejigalbi (pork ribs) and samgyeopsal that my buddy Keith and I had a while back. You can see the assortment of stuff that you get with the meal. This place had little tabletop charcoal bowls for grilling. The thing sticking down from the top is a suction pipe that pulls the smoke and fumes from the barbecue out of the restaurant.

Fish

Koreans eat a lot of seafood. Pretty much everything you eat in a coastal area will include some kind of fish. In the fish markets here I've recognised mackerel, Pacific cod, Atlantic lobster, king and snow crab from Russia, "flower" crab, mussels and quite a few other species. I've eaten quite a few different things here, too, sea urchin roe, live octopus (chopped up but still trying to cling to the plate it was served on), sea squirts and countless plates of heui (pron. "hway"), Korean sashimi, sliced raw fish. Heui is usually more "proletarian" in presentation than Japanese sliced fish. It is often served just sliced on a plate with some bowls of chogochujang (vinegared hot pepper sauce) or, sometimes, soy and wasabi into which the fish is dipped before wrapping it in lettuce or perilla leaves and eating it. I'm not fond of sliced fish made with whitefish, but I like salmon and a couple of other red-fleshed fish.

I've cooked shellfish here a few times, mostly mussels and cockles, but I hadn't cooked any "fish" fish. My decision to try cooking fish was brought on by the ridiculously expensive prices of meat. I went to the supermarket but most of the fish are sold cleaned, head and tail on. Filleted fish can be had in the freezer section but I was looking for some culinary adventure. I didn't recognize much among the fish that were on ice, so I called Se-yeong and she dropped by the supermarket to show which fish were suitable for pan-frying. I settled on a package of Korean salted mackerel. The fish is salted but not cured and Se-yeong said it's salty so I should soak it in water a bit before I use it. She also suggested I fry it and serve it with a little soy. I wasn't sure what to do with it, Korean-style would be to fry it with the head and tail on and serve it that way, similar to Chinese cooking. I decided I'd fillet the fish and browsed over to YouTube, where I found a brief video on filleting mackerel. In all my years of cooking and fishing, I've never actually filleted a fish and it seems a little wasteful, some of the meat is lost along with the bones. I also watched a brief video on "pin boning" salmon. I tried this out on the fish but I think that next time I'll just fry the whole fish and eat around the bones: 40 million Koreans can't be wrong.

After soaking the fillets in water for a while I sliced a few slashes in the skin side of each fillet, dusted them with black pepper and flour and fried them in a little oil. Then I decided to ruin them adventurously by making a sauce with garlic, green onion, brown sugar, apple vinegar and soy.

At right is a terrible, unappetizing-looking close-up of the fillets in my lunchbox (I hate flash photography, it always makes things look unreal and ugly.) They actually turned out pretty tasty and made a nice hearty lunch along with a bowl of rice. I thought they'd be saltier but then I'd say my Newfoundland-bred palate has a much higher threshold for "salty" than most Koreans. The filleting made the fish easier to fit in the pan during cooking and more portable for a lunchbox. It took about as long as in the video (a few seconds) so I think I'll try it again next time.

Se-yeong's Bike

I've met quite a few people since I came to Korea but one of my best friends is Jeon Se-yeong, a young lady I met during my first few weeks here. I was drinking in a late-night club with my buddy Keith and I started drunk-talking to a girl at the bar about relationships. It eventually came up that we have the same birthday. Ever since then we've been hanging out a bit, usually we just go out for dinner or movies, she's a great dinner companion and we've had a lot of fun exploring weird corners of Busan.

A couple of weeks ago we were walking around her hometown, Yangsan, a small city just north of Busan. It came up that she had never learned to ride a bicycle. I thought it was a little odd but then I guess lots of people might never learn some things we take for granted, like riding a bike or swimming. She said she'd like to be able to go to work without walking or taking the bus, so I suggested she try a bike.

We were out in the east side of Busan, an area called Sasang, last weekend. Sasang is a bit of an industrial area and there are lots of non-Korean Asians living there. Korea imports a lot of labour for what they call "3D"b jobs. Dirty, dangerous and (I can't remember the third D). I wanted to check out the Asian market, a loose collection of shops and restaurants selling Indian, Pakistani and other SE Asian food and goods.

We ended up in a big department store and they had a cute bike on sale, so we went back on Sunday and picked it up. I helped her get it onto the subway, which extends into Yangsan (as an elevated train, though, it's a nice ride and has some nice scenery). She figured it out pretty quickly on the way to the subway station and then she rode it most of the way to her house. I thought maybe since as adults have a more developed sense of balance we could dispense with training wheels and that turned out to be true. She sent me a text message last night that she had skinned her arm a little bit, but nothing serious. As a weird addendum, I had actually dreamed the night before that she had fallen and skinned her arm, and that I gave her a toolkit with bandaids in it. Just weird.

Fired and Hired

It's been a while since my last post, surprise! Back in February my boss announced that she had found a new teacher after all, when I told her that the job I had wanted back in January was gone she said, "Well, I've had too many complains (sic) about you, so, you're fired." and she ran out of the room. Probably afraid I'd let loose on her, which I did not. In fact, I actually busted into a small grin.

So I was in Korea, mostly broke and jobless. She did give me one month's notice and even gave me a letter of release and a letter of transfer for my visa so I could change jobs easily. The day after the "firing" she and I had a heart to heart talk about everything and she said that she was actually worried about me because I was looking pretty unhealthy and depressed. This was the reason that I gave her for wanting the other job in the first place but I don't think she believed me at the time.

The job at the Y was okay, but it was disorganised and the schedule was really taking a toll on me. I basically got up went to work at 6am, went home at 9am, took a nap had some lunch, went back to work at 3pm until 7pm, went home had supper and watched some TV or puttered around a bit, went to bed and started all over again. It was too far from anyone I knew and there weren't really any places a single foreigner could go if they didn't speak Korean. I kind of liked the neighbourhood, but I had little opportunity to really learn Korean and so there wasn't much to do outside of work.

I spent the last two weeks of March and the first week of April living in a "love motel" at my new employer's expense. It cost $250 for three weeks, but it had a bathtub and the room was almost as big as my old apartment, the neighbourhood was really quiet, in the middle of the city on a subway line. It was also bright and airy. Not a bad deal for the money. My old apartment had bars on the windows, it was on the ground floor and the only window looked into a narrow alley at a wall with barbed wire at the top, it was kind of like a jail.

I started teaching again at a new school on the 7th of April, I had to fill in for a couple of weeks at a different branch of the school than I signed up for but I didn't mind too much, as long as it didn't turn out to be a permanent assignment as the subway ride there took about 45 minutes. At this place I have encountered several new and pleasing experiences as far as workplace things go: they have a curriculum and all of the students have their own books, I don't have to choose a book from a motley assortment and photocopy them anymore; I work with another foreign teacher, this is a plus because I have someone I can commiserate, bitch, moan and laugh at "crazy" stuff with. I spend 8 hours at work at the new place, but my teaching hours are about 200 minutes per day. Lesson preparation is relatively easy because the curriculum is set and the Korean teachers tell me what they're doing in class. My new apartment is in a "foreigner friendly" neighbourhood near Busan National University: cinemas, bars, supermarkets, and all the "street meat" you can eat. The apartment has a small indoor balcony which houses the little galley style kitchen and a washing machine. The school also provided all the basic furnishings.

In short, this is the job I should have had the first time around. I liked the people at the Y, my boss, my co-workers and the kids, but the job was really kinda terrible. I should have quit when they changed a lot of things after I got here.

Oh yeah, I had lost a ton of weight these past few months. As most of you reading this will know, my extra-lean frame doesn't carry much spare weight, so I looked like I was working in a concentration camp. In fact, the inability to change jobs, socialize or do a lot of things like that actually made me feel as though I were in that situation.

I've gained a bunch of weight back in the past few weeks. Se-yeong even commented on it when we were having coffee a couple of weeks after I was "fired". At this rate I expect to gain about 10 kilograms by the end of May.

So a change really is as good as a rest. Maybe even better in my case. More later.

monk