Unfortnately I didn’t take any photos today on my camera!! I took a couple on the big group camera but I don’t have access to them at the moment so you’re going to have to read this as a boring chunk of text!
Because most of the group had such a late night last night we decided not to start our meetings until 11:30. It was really warm out today so I had to wear something airy for all of our walking around! Thank goodness we did all that walking though, cause for lunch it was Chinese and that stuff seems as fattening as it gets! I had myself a little bit of Jjamppong that I split with Heidi as well as trying some of the Bok Choy and Mushroom stuff! Since I didn’t take any photos myself I’ll post pictures I found online of all the Chinese food I tried…
This is pickled radish, it’s called Danmuji. It’s one of the fairly common sides here in Korea and I’m a fan!
This is the Jjamppong, it’s a spicy sauce with noodles and seafood!
KIMCHI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is roughly what the Bok Choy Mushroom dish looked like. It has a really thick sauce that kind of glops off as you eat the Bok Choy…
I also tried a bit of a dish that was like this. It had crab meat and Tofu 🙂 I like Tofu :3
Alright, now that you all know what I had for lunch we can move on!
We met up with Min Choi who is one of the graphic design pair that Cheryl was set to interview! His wife couldn’t make it, but he was really helpful! He also spoke perfect English, like perfect. He talked a lot about tradition in Korea, and believed that at least in Graphic Design (and it seemed other fields as well) there was no KOREAN tradition. He thought that Korea had always been a nation of sharing, and had for so long been outside influenced that they didn’t really have a Korean identity. This is something mentioned by almost all of the artists that I’ve talked to so I’m taking extra special notice to this Korean Identity Crisis that seems to be going on! When asked about uniquely Korean design he said a few interesting things “You can not talk about Korean graphic design in any meaningful way” and “Hangul may be the only Korean part of Korean graphic design”. He seems to think that because graphic design is such a new field in Korea that there really isn’t any Korean-ness to it, and rather all graphic design is western or Japanese and has been adapted by the Koreans. When I asked him about all of the cutesy logos and design that we had taken notice of in Korea he praised the Japanese for having such a great aesthetic eye and then downplayed the Korean versions of cuteness. He was also a little harsh on the idea of tradition, and seemed to think that striving to bring back any sense of tradition was just “faking it”. For this reason he wasn’t a fan of the traditional graphic design rush in the 70’s nor is he a fan of letterpress. We all got the feeling that we shouldn’t put him in the same room with Nam ChunWoo Sunsaengnim because they were both so opinionated on exact opposite sides of the scale!!
We got done with our interview fairly early, and decided to take a trip to Namdaemun market just for the heck of it. It’s more of a traditional market and they sold a lot of Ginseng tea, fruit, and fabric. There were also a lot of folk art craft shops and cutesy little accessory shops but not really any boutiques or anything (which was good because I have bought a LOT of clothes). Although there were some really cute dresses I resisted, and the only thing that I bought was a really cute (and mildly ridiculous) bunny hair clip. Oh man, it’s awesome.
We had some street food for dinner and that was mostly fruit from one of the fruit stands (I had a kiwi, a hunk of melon and a hunk of pineapple), some Kimbap, and another Haemul Panjeon that I split with Lauren (Those things are humungous). Here are some more google images:
This is Kimbap, it’s like the Korean Sushi but I don’t think there is actually raw fish in it.
This is the lovely Haemul Panjeon. It’s yummy and greasy and full of seafood and scallions. Yum!
Um yeah… That’s about it. I also did laundry and wrote this blog post and the last one. So….Um….Yeah.
Hello Korea! 