Katie and Grandma Ann arrived late Christmas Eve and stayed with us about a week. They were troopers Christmas morning even though they must have been exhausted!
Of course we had to have galbi while they were here. The round silver thing you see in front of Katie is actually a grill. You cook marinated pork, wrap it in lettuce, add anything else you want from the table (raw garlic, different sauces, salad, onion, etc. and pop it in your mouth. Tasty! And all things considered, a pretty healthy meal.
These are boiled silkworms. Katie was brave enough to try one! (I tried one 10 years ago and figured that was enough for the next hundred years.)
One day the ladies went out to a traditional tea house. My favorite one that Karen and I went to when she was visiting for Ben's birth, was closed. Still, this one was very nice. I had the date tea - but only because they didn't have the ginger tea.
Tea was served with cookies from a tin, some sort of bread/pastry, and dried persimmon. I've seen the dried persimmons being sold in the street a lot and had always been afraid to try the them because of the white powder that looked like mold. (In a country where most vegetables are fermented that doesn't seem so out of the ordinary, does it?) As it turns out, that was powdered sugar to keep the persimmon pieces from sticking together - and it was quite good.
Katie had jasmine tea and Grandma Ann had... hot plum tea? I can't remember because we had trouble deciding - they lady kept saying they couldn't make the one kind hot, and they didn't have another kind. Of course those were exactly the ones we wanted. In the end she decided Grandma Ann's choice could be hot after all. The tea was comforting on another frigid day and we had the entire place to ourselves.
After tea Katie and I took a cab to the jimjilbang where we explored their various rooms. Each room was a different temperature and made with different materials that benefited your health in some way. Or so the story goes...
This is outside of the third room we went in. Click on the picture and you'll see where we entered the room - we went in the black thing just beyond the green mat - the one that very appropriately resembles an oven. One of the signs on the outside posted the temperature range, and it was not that far from from 100 degrees... Celsius. We stayed in for maybe one or two minutes and then got out before we roasted. In another room (with a lower temperature) there were stacks of eggs in cartons. They were being cooked.
After that we had to cool down in the freezer room. We also used a little foot massage machine. First we had to wrap our feet in the plastic bags they provided and figure out how to turn it on though. We had just given up when a helpful guy showed us how to swipe our key to get it to work.
I'm not sure what the walls were made of in this room, but the hexagonal shapes in the walls made me feel like we were in a beehive - except that everyone was just laying around and talking quietly. It was very relaxing.
It's quite common to come with your family or friends and just hang out for the day. It only costs about $7 to get in. In addition to the bath house and saunas there is a snack bar, a room for watching movies, a sleeping room and a room with internet and computers. There is even a singing room complete with disco ball and mics. A lot of these things cost extra, but just swipe the key to your locker and it goes on your tab.
This room had huge logs for sitting on, and a bank of massage chairs by the windows.
There were also these little sleeping pods. We didn't actually sleep there but I wanted to see what it was like to get in and out. I believe the orange sign above my head says only one person is allowed per pod. No doubling up!
The weather was freezing while Grandma and Katie were here so we tried not to venture outside for any longer than we had to. The winters here are cold, and the summers are extremely hot and humid, but spring - when the cherry blossoms are blooming - and fall - when the leaves are turning colors - are gorgeous. So who wants to visit in spring or fall?
