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Daegu, Seongseo (Igok-dong) - Hwang-So 25 Hour Sauna

Hwang-so means "bull" or "ox" in English. When I moved to Sungseo, this was the first sauna I managed to find in my new area. Thank god, because I finally discovered how great it is to get a body scrub! As usual, some of the scrubbers are better than others, but I liked this place in general.

The wet area is basic, with a few different temperature tubs, cold bath, a couple sauna rooms, and a nice wooden bathtub. There's almost always a lot of children in this busy sauna (women's side anyway). Upstairs, the co-ed dry areas are pretty nice. There's a decently-sized free fitness center for use only by jjimjilbang-goers, a good Korean food restaurant, and one large central room with a TV. All of the hot or cool rooms are located just off the central area, and many of them have their own TVs, which makes them a bit loud. I would NOT recommend this place for day-time naps unless you're not bothered by noise.
Most of the rooms are pretty warm, but there is a large ante-room before the ice room where people lay to cool off and watch comedy shows. The sleeping areas are just at the end of the main area and are not protected from sound by any walls. They are super warm too, you won't need any blankets!

Overall, if you like being warm, this is a good place. Plus the location is good, and easy to find.

황소 25시구들방사우나
대구 달서구 이곡동 1244
Daegu, Dalseo Gu, Igok Dong 1244
Open 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week
053-583-4490

Wikimap of Hwang-So Sauna

Itaewon and Seoul Food

Korea is an interesting contrast of socially conservative yet technologically liberal viewpoints. On the one hand you'll have a rigid social hierarchy and the encouragement of submission to elders, and on the other hand you have Aegis-equipped destroyers and 90% of the population owning a mobile phone. But I guess a land of contrasts is always going to be more interesting than a land where everything makes perfect sense.

This is exit 6 in Gangnam, a focal point for post-midday meet-ups. Across the road you can see some dazzling vertical light poles. These are a new addition to the city and are interactive 'meeting aids'. You can tell someone to meet you at one (they're numbered), and they have all sorts of information about restaurants and things to do in the nearby area. Each one has its own phone number, so if you're going to be late, you can text message the pole and the message will appear on a screen so that your friend can see it. You can even get it to take your photo and it will email you the image.

This is the artificial CheongGyeCheon stream that runs through central Seoul. It was the brainchild of current president Lee Myung-Bak back when he was the mayor. Although there was a lot of opposition to its construction, after it was completed it became hugely popular with families on the weekends.

In this photo, all of the people in pink are doing synchronised aerobics to promote fitness. Koreans have an affinity for synchronised things in general, and dance-aerobics are performed together by supermarket workers at special times during the day. A few years ago, some guy called Sun Myung-Moon got thousands of couples all married together at exactly the same ceremony.

Recently World Vision held a community donation event near City Hall. People came and threw their coins into this pit throughout the day. When I was young, I always had dreams of swimming in money, but now I think it probably wouldn't be so enjoyable.

A couple of weeks ago, Seoul National University put on an international food event. International students were allowed to set up stalls and sell traditional foodstuffs to the university community. We had a browse for a while but only the Uyghur and Pakistani students seemed to have previous cooking experience. The French students made French toast, the New Zealanders made sausages and the Chinese made ramyeon.

I had a class at 1pm that day and the ticketing system was too complicated so we went to the Korean outpost, patrolled by a cadre of ajummas.

Here are the ajummas busy at work. An ajumma is a broad term that refers to any middle-aged married woman. In Korea I've heard them described as being as fierce as a lion, and having the femininity of a cement truck.
But from the ones I've met, I'd describe them more as hard-working, blunt and rough, but also caring and compassionate.

These are some staple Korean dishes that you can find everywhere. At the top left is sundae, which is an intestine sausage made from mung-bean noodles soaked in pork blood. It tastes a lot better than it sounds. The colour is a dark brown due to the oxidation of the iron in hemoglobin. It's a little similar to how a rusted nail will turn from red to brown. Below the sundae are mandu, ubiquitous Korean dumplings that are usually stuffed with meat and chives. On the right is a pajeon, a wheat pancake that is characteristically eaten undercooked, when compared to the texture of a western pancake. It was all fairly good.

Anthony came up for a visit a little while ago and we hung out in Itaewon. This suburb in central Seoul is fast becoming my favourite place to visit. It has a high concentration of foreign residents, with all of the benefits that multicultural communities enjoy.

And in my books, the number one benefit of multiculturalism is the variety of food choice. Anthony and I found a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican taco place on one of the side streets and decided to stop for a snack. I had a single soft shell beef tobacco, that you can see in the photo. It came with home-made Tabasco sauce and was fantastic. I gave it a 9 out of 10.

And yes, if you look closely, you can see that there's a real lime floating in the Corona.

One thing you quickly notice in Korea is that what Koreans consider an appetising picture is often entertaining. The home shopping advertisements on late night tv here will sometimes show a family intensely enjoying a meal cooked by some nifty device. My favourite ad was one that had a crab-cooking machine, and there were close-ups of the crab being slowly eviscerated and pulled to pieces to show the succulence of the meat.

Oh and there was this other funny ad that featured a water purifier. After a lengthy 'scientific' discussion on how good the filter was, the presenter poured himself a drink and tasted it. You should have seen the look on his face. You'd never think that filtered water could make someone so ecstatic.

One place that had caught my attention a lot was this burger joint called Smokey Saloon. Every time I walked passed it, there was always a line up of people, which is a sure sign that they're doing something right. After a bit of dilly-dallying around (Anthony and I are both slow deciders), we agreed to eat lunch here.

There are only a few tables inside, but if you order take-away (or 'take-out' as the Americans say), you get express service and they even ring you when your order is ready.

This burger is called an Ambulance. I think it's named that way because you're likely to get a heart attack after you eat one. We sat down on some steps to investigate. On the bottom is a large hash brown, and there's also crispy red bacon, cheddar cheese and an egg. The meat patty was very large and the flavour was spot-on for what a hamburger patty should taste like, meaty, juicy and smokey. The buns were soft and slightly crunchy from being lightly fried in butter. I think the dressings were a mixture of a light barbecue sauce, tangy mayonnaise and tomato sauce. My verdict was that it was quite possibly the best burger I have ever eaten, although it loses marks for composition due to its unwieldy design.
Anthony was less impressed. But Anthony is what I like to call a 'burger-minimalist', one who only likes bread and meat with no condiments. No mayonnaise, no egg, no vegetables. Cheese or sesame seeds on the bun are likely to get a raised eyebrow or even two raised eyebrows. Hopefully he'll learn to appreciate the burger-renaissance that occurred after the 1920s and one day be using condiments like tangerine honey mustard or rosemary balsamic vinegar.

Our professor took us out to a restaurant at the Grand Intercontinental Hotel on a Friday. In the first level basement of the building is a buffet restaurant with everything from roast duck to tuna belly.

On the left is a cream fountain and on the right is a chocolate one. You dip your fruit on a stick in them, kind of like a fondue. The chocolate one reminds me of a topping you can get in Australia called Ice Magic. It's a runny chocolate that goes on your ice cream and in a few seconds you can remove it as a crunchy shell. It never failed to amaze me.

You know you're somewhere fancy when they have scampi on the menu. These miniature crawfish taste like a cross between lobster and shrimp. Half the fun is getting the meat out of them.

Here's Hu-Mei from Sejong University who came to join us. She developed an instant affinity for the scampi and ate around 15 of the little critters in under an hour. Although it was her first time to try them, she quickly worked out how to use her teeth to crack the shells in all the right places. She'll probably turn up in fairytales that scampi parents tell to their scampi children if they don't do their homework.

After that we went to a second round of drinking beer. Sitting around and getting tipsy with a camera can be pretty fun. Here's our first photo that was fairly modest. On the left is Chen-Jing, then Yong-Sung (one of the nice seniors in the lab) and then me. These photos are all from Chen-Jing's camera.

As we drank progressively more, our photos became increasingly creative. There's nothing like a 3 litre pitcher of beer to bring out the hidden artist in all of us.

This is us with seaweed in our teeth. I believe we were aiming to represent 'country-folk'.

And here's us with parsley in our hair. At this point we were experimenting with more abstract representations of the universe. All in all, it was an enjoyable night out.

I actually have enough photos for another blog post right now, but I'll chop the post here so its more digestible. Hopefully I'll have time to post them up in the coming week.

See you soon!

Goodbye, BS Bank

The last time that BS Bank gave me trouble, they were still going by the far less apt Pusan Bank. An over the top hissy fit, which began and ended with me calling the bank racist, eventually resulted in me getting what I wanted. I swore that the next time PS Bank tried to screw me would be the last time. I didn't swear that I wouldn't have another hissy fit.

A couple of weeks ago, I made my monthly BS Bank visit to pay some bills and wire more than half of my salary home. Were the latter not a possibility, I wouldn't be here. While teaching English in Korea isn't going to bring in the riches, it pays off enough student debt that I can justify still being here when I'm knee deep in yet another I Hate Korea week.

I usually deal with the same teller at BS Bank, and he always asks for the same information: passport, bank book, and details of the account I'm wiring money to. Just in case he happens to fall into a barrel of BS that day, I always make sure to have further proof of my identity, statements from previous transactions, and every single pay stub that my current job has ever given me. He doesn't really need any of this stuff to wire my money home and had never asked before, but BS happens.

On this day, he looked over my account information on my screen and then suspiciously back at me. "You send money home every month." It wasn't clear whether he was stating a fact or inquiring, so I responded as if it were a question. "Yes. That's sort of the point." I've never been good with stupid questions. Or really obvious statements. Which one was it?

Overwhelmed by my charm, the teller tried to tell me that he was going to need to see pay stubs. I handed him the stack of them before he could come up with the words. He eyed them suspiciously, looked back at the screen, and glared at me. "Do you have anything else?", he asked. Deja vu! "Why would I need something else? Pay stub. Deposit. You might notice that the amounts match", I sneered. He wasn't satisfied. "You're going to need.... a certificate.... from work", he told me. Because apparently having official pay slips from the company which not only matches the one on your VISA, but also conveniently coincides with the only deposits ever made into your bank account, isn't quite proof enough that you're not trying to wire drug money out of the country.

"There wasn't a problem here in February, March, or April", I stated. Because I understand that statements are not questions. "Every month. You need... certificate. Yes". Was he asking me a question again? "Yeah... no. That's total BS", I told the teller. The teller looked confused. I wasn't done. "See, I'm just going to find a bank with less discriminatory policies. Close my account. Now." So, he did.

As it turns out, there was no hissy fit to be had this time. Largely because I was so sleepy, but I'd like to think that I've matured enough to realize that there is little use in wasting energy fighting battles that you can't win. Also, I've been sober for what seems like a ridiculously long time. Is it June yet? I said little more than what needed to be said and I was out of there. It was nap time.

My reward for refusing to tolerate BS was to drag my ass across the street with $2,500 in my purse. I don't love doing that nearly as much as I thought I would, so I dumped it all off at the Korea Exchange Bank. KEB opened my account and wired my money home in one sitting, all without asking a single stupid question.



Before anybody wonders why I'm toolishly abbreviating "Busan" and "Pusan" as BS and PS, know that it's not because I think I'm being clever, but that it's what the company would want:


That the brain trust at Pusan Bank think that the logical step after changing from a P to a B is to introduce a BS logo, is terribly amusing. If I'm honest, I might be willing to admit that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how this logo came to be, and that I only assume that this is yet another glaring example of this institution's retardation because my past relations with the company have been sour and I hate them a whole bunch. And if I'm super lucky, somebody really boring will share this really boring explanation with us in the comments section of this post. But mostly, I'm just going to enjoy the chuckle that I get everytime that I walk by this sign.

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