Tigers and Cranes

Inchon is a bustling city on the western coast of Korea, about 45 minutes(if you drive like the maniac taxi drivers) west of Seoul. Historically, Inchon was made famous by General Douglas McArthur’s amphibious landing during the Korean War that allowed the UN and South Korean Forces to bust out of the Busan siege.

It’s a port city, with a HUGE tidal differences, and during low tide, one can see miles of mud-flat beaches that seem to stretch forever. But don’t dilly-dally. The sea water will be back soon enough.

Inchon is also the site of the new international airport, and most foreign visitors, if you aren’t flying in from Japan(some Japan originating flights end up in former international airport in Gimpo) will land here. The new airport is vast, clean, and well maintained (voted the best airport in the world 2005), except for couple of things: surly employees manning the convenience stores, and the lack of rail transport into Seoul.

What’s that all about?

How are you going to build the country’s biggest international airport and not have a rail system to carry passengers into the capitol city? Granted, they are feverishly working on the rail system, to be opened sometime 2010 (link to Gimpo Airport is now open). For now, a traveler has to make do with limousine buses and the mass confusion they sow. Depending on your final destination into Seoul, you’ll need to know which bus stop outside the airport to line up at. Some porters will be helpful and tell you which stop is the most appropriate, but sometimes they’ll just kind of look at you with a bemused look on their faces while puffing on a cigarette.

To hell with that, i say. If you are in a hurry, or just don’t want to deal with the limousine buses and all the stops they make before they make it to your destination, take advantage of one of the greatest things about Korean ground transportation: taxis.

It usually costs about 40-50 bucks to hire a cab to and from the airport, but if you are in a party of two or more, it’s imminently worth it, as you can issue commands to the taxi driver to hell with the local traffic laws and get this Hyundai moving! I did this once, when I missed my bus to the airport and had only about an hour and a half before my flight took off. I basically negotiated with the taxi ajussi that was just hanging around causing mischief in front of a nice hotel. The valet at the hotel was angry that the taxi driver was waiting around to pick up passengers in front of the hotel, but hey, it’s a free country, and he was parked at the curb in front of the hotel. After cursing the hotel valet (which i appreciated, as the guy was a jerk), he loaded up my bags.

“How fast can you take me to the airport?”
“Well, with the morning traffic, maybe an hour…” The taxi man says.
“Can you do it in 45 minutes? I gotta get the hell out of this country!”
“Well, I can try,”

With that, I hopped in the cab, and told him to put the spurs to ‘er. And man, this guys is an artist, weaving in and out of Seoul morning traffic, gunning his Hyundai motor when space in front of him cleared up, dodging huge construction trucks and countless slow poke limo buses; fiddling with the radio, cursing and shaking his fist at other drivers, all while anti-speeding beeper that was installed in his car chimed alarmingly. It was the most thrilling car ride I’ve ever had.

About half way to our destination, it occured to me to ask him a kind of important question.

“I don’t have any money”
“What?”
“I only have Japanese Yen… is that okay?”
“THIS IS SPAR… I mean, THIS IS KOREA! …How much do you have?”
“5000 yen…?” I reply meekily.
“With the conversion rate, and the tolls that _I_ have to pay, that’s not gonna be enough!”
“I know. Sorry. I have some coins…”

He rolls his eyes, mutters something, and shakes his fist some more, and sighs.
“Okay”.

He got us to the airport in 40 minutes, with enough time for me to have a leisurely smoke before i leave the country.

The lesson is this: In Korea, many things are negotiable, and if you are respectful, and seem really desperate(or even stupid), some nice ajussis will cut you some slack.

And in fact, why would you walk anywhere in Korea? With taxi fare almost 1/10 of Japan, taxis will be your best friend when you’ve been wandering all day and dread the thought of taking the subway back home.

I’m not really sure where this “custom” originated, but at many sushi restaurants outside of Japan you can see diners pouring out a liberal amount of soysauce( called “murasaki” meaning “purple” in sushi parlance) on to their small dish and mixing a heavy dollop of “wasabi” and creating a mutant greenish sauce in which a piece of sushi is dunked in.

Now, I’m no sushi snob… in fact, I can hardly tell a difference between a cheap 100 yen kaiten zushi(one of them color coded conveyor belt places)and 1000 yen chu toro. But on the other hand, I’m sure as the sushi chef goes to work on his daily masterpiece nigiri sushi, making sure to apply a thin coat of wasabi paste in between the fish and rice that he believes achieves the perfect balance in taste, no doubt he sheds a silent tear as the patron dunks the whole shebang into a vat of soysauce and wasabi.

Speaking of wasabi, the kind you get in America and elswhere outside of Japan (and maybe Korea) isn’t even true wasabi at all. This may surprise some of you, especially those of you who believe they grow naturally in small plastic tubes labeled “S&B”. Some call wasabi “Japanese horse radish”, but like napa, brocolli, and my personal favorite brussel sprouts, wasabi are actually of cabbage family, in which the root of the plant is used for culinary purposes.

In better udon and soba shops in Japan, wasabi is served as a whole root, with a small hand held grater to finely grind the root into the noodle sauce. It’s hard work, sitting there grating and grating, all the while eyeing the delicious plate of soba or udon, but your hard work is ultimately rewarded since the real wasabi, or “本山葵” [hon wasabi] lends a fragrance and taste that no tube borne fake ass wasabi can attempt to emulate. As an added bonus, many places have little plastic bags with which you can take your left over root home.

In Korea, wasabi called “gochu neng-i” [고추냉이] also grows in secluded spots next to clean, running streams. Here, apparently, though, folks also harvest the stems and the leaves and make kimchi. And of course, the root is used as well.

I stumbled across this interesting Japanese webapge through a tip from one of my readers. It’s kind of cool, in that it ranks what’s popular in Japan right now, apparently, anything from music to food to other sundry items. I immediately headed for popular drinks because I am a thirsty fiend, and I want to know what other thirsty Japanese fools are drinking. Here, in order:

1. 果実の贅沢　つぶたっぷり温州みかん

This is a “Cannel”( a bottle made from a can. I trademarked that word, so if you use it, please send money) of orange juice from Sapporo. I really really dig this stuff, since the juice has a gajillion little orange sacs that burst in your mouth. That sounds a little dirty, but I assure you, it’s a mighty fine stuff. And not only does it taste real good-like, but it’s obvious we all know orange juice is supposed to be good for you. Therefore, you can not only enjoy drinking something with little sacs that pop in your mouth, but be confident that it’s doing your vitamin-C lacking body some good too. Oh, and metal bottles rule for a clumsy oaf like me.

2. Gokuri　オリジナルグレープフルーツ

This is another “cannel” product, and similar to our above sapporo “onsu” orange juice, it’s made with some percentage of grapefruit juice by Suntory, Sapporo’s archrival. Definitely an inferior product compared to the Sapporo’s exploding sac orange juice. It is pretty refreshing, though, and we all ought to drink more of something called “gokuri”. And a little known trivia about grapefruits: It’s called grapefruit because despite being somewhat larger than your standard grape (by, oh, a factor of about 100), they grow in a bunch, sort of like grapes growing in a bunch, so some farmer dude called it that. Me, personally, would have called it “kinda like orange but sourer fruit”. or “Klobsf”.

3. 桃の天然水

This stuff is sweet water, that taste like peach, no more, no less. Literally meaning “Peach’s Natural Water”, it’s actually pretty good. I have no idea what percentage of it is peach juice, but if you sort of hold the water in your mouth and breath through your nostrils, you get a pretty good facsilmile of peach flavor. Make sure you don’t snort it through your nose while you try this.

4. Qoo とってもオレンジ

I think it’s a blue cat that markets this drink, and I can’t resist something called “Qoo”. What exactly is it? It’s kinda like orangy water, kind of like Tang. In a word, pretty gross. But I really do like the mascot, and you can get this stuff in Mc Donald’s in Japan with your teriyaki burger. So there’s that.

5. 充実野菜

“Perfect Vegetable” juice from Ito En, makers of green tea. I had metric gallons of this stuff while I was sick, suffereing from influenza last year. I figured something this awful tasting HAD to be good for an illin’ fool like me. All it did was turn me sickly orange, as if I had jaundice.

from Ranking Ranqueen

speaking of the dead, i feel pretty drained after returning from marathon 7-days a week, 12 hour work days out in the sticks. And to think, i didn’t even have internet access for a while.

So now, catching up with what’s going on in the world, and i see there are some disturbing trends in out favorite island country, Japan. How shall i describe this? As best as i can tell, it’s dead body removing robot.

What the deuce? Is the act of removing a lifeless body so odious a task now that one needs a pincer-ed robot to drag it around unceremoniously? Is there no decency left in the world?

Perhaps it’s for removal of bodies that are results of contagion or dangerous, in which case, this invention is about time in its arrival. Still, it looks mighty creepy…

From Unique Daily

It’s been unusually warm in the states, and although it may not seem like it, it’s warmer than usual in Korea and Japan this year too. That may mean earlier than usual blooming of sakura, aka cherry blossom. In America, many cherry blossoms have already done their blossoming thing, hardly noticed by anyone. I noticed, of course. Walking back from a Border’s with a medium coffe, no cream, i noticed all sorts of familiar petals on the ground, and lo! Sakura! white ones, at that. I stared at them, cuz, you know, they’re pretty and junk, and passersby looked at me as if i was daft.

In Japan, during the sakura viewing season, the whole country seems to go into a sakura frenzy, people usually talking about where and when they’re going to a sakura viewing at a park or whanot. i’m especially amused by weather forecasters detailing where in Japan saukra are blossoming.

They take this stuff seriously.

And it’s hard to not get caught up in the excitement, actually. And, i have to admit, although they’re just flowers on a tree, they are quite pretty, especially when gathered along a street and in groves of hundreds.

I recall being in Korea at about that time last year too, and incredibly, sakura, or bud-kkot, as it’s called in Korean, were in full bloom as well. I was astonished at sheer number and beauty of Korean cherry blossoms, and i pointed out all the pretty trees to my driver, whom just shrugged and said, “big deal, they do that every year.”

To Koreans, it seems, cherry blossoms are just bunch of short lived flowers. You can certainly tell the differences in two cultures there.

A little while ago, i posted about “matcha kit kat”, the green tea infused kit kat. That’s pretty cool, you know, but just as cool might be this sakura flavored kit kats. dig it, mang!

Yea, indeed i suck at this blogging thing. You may wonder where the deuce postings have been recently. True, i am still living out in the sticks, with my beer supply running dangerously low, and grueling work, but i did manage to post something last night. it was a really good post too, about robots and czech beer and such. But i have no idea where it went. Oh, well.

We all know by now that vending machines are plentiful in Japan. Everyone, especially those new to Japan comments on this, as if vending machines don’t exists elsewhere in the world. But, i suppose, it’s the sheer variety of goods you can buy that excites some people. I’m sure there’s even a Japanese blog dedicated to this subject.

Even so, this one took me by surprise. Do you all like yakiniku, AKA Korean BBQ Japanese style? I know I do, and what’s really different about Japanese style grilled meat is the sauce, called “tare”. it’s simply a dipping sauce, usually sweet, that you dip your cooked meat and shove down your gullet.

Thanks to a friend of mine who’s tipped me of this unique vending machine, I learned about a butcher shop in Kobe that has installed a tare sauce vending machine, and only tare sauce. Apparently, they have a pretty good sauce going at the shop, and they bottle the stuff, and sell it from the vending machine. This machine does pretty good business, selling about 3000 bottles a year.

From IZA (in Japanese)

Well, things are still looking pretty grim here. I am settling into a nice rhythm working all day in the boonies and coming back to my hotel to crack open a can or two of hite beer and watching satellite tv. My internet connection is still pretty spotty, but i can bang out a few words still, as you can see.

Speaking of Hite beer, in case you aren’t down with wonderful world of korean beer, it breaks down like this. There are three major brands of beer, kinda like how Japan has four major breweries (Asahi, Sapporo, Kirin, Suntory). Most popular seems to be the aforementioned Hite, pronounced, i believe, like “lite”, OB (for Oriental Beer. What’s this political incorrectness? “oriental”?!), and Cass, which is not prounced like “ass”, but like “Christmas”.

Eh?

My personal favorite tends to be Cass, since it has absolutely no beery taste… it’s like drinking yellow mineral water that also gets you drunk! There are times when you just don’t want any flavor in your beer, and Cass delivers in spades. Hite is pretty flavorless too, but it’s hideous when not chilled to super-conducting temperatures. I know this, because i drank one the other night when i found a can rolling around in my car.

Cass Beer

OB is the oldest of them all, therefore it makes sense that it’s drunk by ajussis… old korean dudes, when they aren’t swilling the “Toad Soju”. A bit of trivia… OB used to own a professional baseball team in korea, named “OB Bears”. I dunno why OB doesn’t sponsor a team no more, but now the bears are financed by some goofy company named “DooSan”. Huh huh huh. “Doo”.

I’ve been stuck in a real boondocks, and i find it nearly impossible to write coherent entries since i am away from my computer as well as having maybe like 5 minutes of free time each day. So, until i can get back home , some choice articles from the past, in case you’ve missed them!

Here’s one about Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji Fish Market!

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if there is one place in tokyo where you could easily hurt yourself, it would be tsukiji fish market. (築地魚市)

it’s no secret that japanese and fish are quite fond of one another. fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, fish for dinner, fish for kids’ snack, and fish as side dish while you’re out drinking… yep, it’s japan’s favorite source of protein, and possibly, their secret to longevity.

tsukiji market in tokyo bay supplies a large chunk of this city’s fish supply, and is especially important to all the sushi shops, as most of their tuna and other fishy ilk come from here every morning. this is the place where famous fish auctioning takes place, where fisherman display their catches as restauranteurs and fishmongers bid.

the scene can get quite chaotic, and it used to be that general public and indeed tourists could stand and watch the process, but as they often interefered with the business of fish dealing by getting in the way of auctioning process, there’s been a move to restrict these spectators.

when i arrived at tsukiji, it was already late, as by 8 am, the business is pretty much done. but even at 9 am, there is still a hive of activity taking place in the market, as deliveries and clean up crew are still about, and narrow streets are jammed with… well, with these things.

what are these three wheeled things called?

i have no idea what these wheeled contraptions are called, but they are literally everywhere, careening this way and that, with the operators of the vehicles deftly avoiding frontal crashes with other vehicles, pedestrians, cats, and shop displays.

the operator of these carts stand on these things (there is no chair), and they rotate the huge horizontal handle to steer the entire front assembly which includes not only the front wheel but also the engine and i presume, the transmission. the speed is controlled by pushing down on a tilting rim that is above the steering wheel, and to brake, there is a foot pedal. it looks like a lot of fun to drive.

i nearly got bumped off from this mortal world by several of these three wheeled beasts, and i suggest if you visit tsukiji, be alert and watch where you’re going.

the drivers are obviously true working folks of tokyo, and it looks as though many of them have been at this for many years, with a quite a few of them tooling around, with a cigarette hanging out of corner of their mouth, squinting in the light of the rising morning sun.

for a tourist, it’s a great place to browse many fresh produce such as these fresh wasabi.

fresh wasabi

if you think real wasabi comes in little plastic tubes, well, you simply have to taste real wasabi from this odd looking… what is this, a root? the taste is similar to wasabi that can be had almost anywhere, but it’s a little earthier, and more flavorful, with none of that “i just blew up my sinus” sting that comes from the stuff you get in tubes or powder. and, these things are quite expensive. beyond produce stands, there are many shops and stands that sell anything from t-shirts, knives, household goods, and other sundry items.

as well, there are tiny hole in the wall restaurants that sell fresh seafood, and for breakfast, i enjoyed a bowl of uni (sea urchin) and toro (tuna) donburi, served with hot tea and miso. while i certainly had better tasting seafood don elsewhere (hakodate in hokkaido, for example), tsukiji market restaurants do serve up fairly righteous meals.

i recommend that you rise early to visit the tsukiji fish market, as i’ve said, most of the action dies down by the time the sun is up. the best way to get there probably is by taking the hibiya line to the tsukiji station. from the station, follow the map of the area. most likely, there are other early risers who are headed your way. following them should lead you to the market, and the “お魚天国” (osakana tengoku- fish heaven).