Tshikken part II, the grocery store, and finding cash

On July 4th, I returned to the Chicken999 with Laura and her coworker Miki, a former naval engineering officer.  Maybe the two of them had some sentimental American reason for wanting fried chicken ("tshikken") and beer ("beer-u") on the Fourth, but my reasons were purely the chicken and beer.  We ordered two plates of chicken this time, which amounts to two birds, and Laura and Miki both agreed the chicken had not been over-hyped and was as great as I'd said it was.  They also wondered aloud at several points how I'd managed to eat a whole chicken myself on the previous visit.  In the first place, the chicken is so good, you just make room for it, or die in the attempt.  But second, it was easier to just eat the whole thing than either try to explain the need for a takeout box, or leave some of it behind and risk insulting the cook.  In a place like Korea, where everyone speaks a little English but few are conversational, and you yourself have no facility in the local language, you sometimes do things the difficult way because trying to ask or explain would be even more difficult, or wasted effort anyway.  I suppose I could carry around a notebook and play Pictionary, since I'm a decent artist, but that seems cumbersome.

The next day, yesterday, Laura and I set out to find the Lotte Super, a supermarket (owned by the same mega-corporation or "chaebol" that owns Lotteria, the burger joint), rumored to be half a kilometre down Simin-ro (the hotel sits at the corner of Simin-ro and Oncheon-daero).  I had actually walked past this place on my first walkabout, but I didn't know how to walk back to the hotel along Simin-ro, just back along the convoluted back streets and alleys by which I'd come.  So this was a good find, both practically and in terms of learning the geography.  I was also able to show Laura where the local post office is, across the street from the Lotte Super.

The Lotte Super was kind of depressing.  It looked a bit like a cross between an '80s supermarket back home and some government-run outfit like GUM in Moscow.  Harsh fluorescent lighting, sterile colors, and little variety.  It was laid out intuitively, however, with produce to the one side, butcher's counter in the back, dairy and refrigerator cases on the other side, and dry goods and processed foods in the center.  The smell of the place was that of raw seafood.  Koreans are omnivores, and they particularly like to eat anything from the sea, fresh, dried, or pickled.  This tends to lace the air with a fishy odor anywhere there's food being prepared or sold.  Even dishes that are mostly terrestrial animal or vegetarian are likely to have some small amount of seafood added, even if it's just oyster juice or a dusting of flaked dry fish.

Processed foods were what we were after, since we have only a tiny bit of space in the mini-bar fridge to store refrigerated things, and no cooking facilities apart from an electric kettle.  Still, we often get hungry between meals, or are tired and don't want to go out, so we needed snacks for the room.  We particularly wanted granola bars.  These we couldn't get; the closest thing we could find was a protein bar gussied up as a candy bar, and there were four of them in a box for 5,400 won, so we didn't buy more than the box.  These are "Dr. You's Energy Bar—That's Great!"  Packaged food is usually labeled in English as well as Korean, though I have my doubts as to whether this is to be actually helpful or just to make a product look sophisticated.  We found more of those Kikiriki chicken drumstick crisps Laura likes, as well as a box of instant noodles, which are viewed much more as a staple here than as the junk food we think of them as back home, and very convenient given our limited capabilities for food preparation.  We found some other snack things that are peanuts rolled in slightly sweetened crispy rice, and we also picked up some mango juice boxes and a 300 ml bottle of blackberry wine, which turned out to be horrid.  The Koreans are famous drinkers, and dainty girls will drink strapping GIs under the table with a tiny burp and giggle, but their alcohol is indifferent at best.  The alcohol of choice, soju, is odorless and flavorless and serves a practical purpose of making you drunk quickly.  They have succeeded in replicating American-style commercial lager (Cass brand is served everywhere on tap, and is comparable to Budweiser at home), but their wine is atrocious, and even the soju and makgeolli is often doctored with aspartame to make it sweet without adding additional fermentable sugars.  So while the Koreans drink incredible amounts of alcohol, not a lot of it is very good.  (And this, mind you, from a guy who occasionally ferments prune juice under his sink.)

A note about the limited selection.  After 35 years of Japanese occupation, World War II, and then the Korean War, South Korea was dead last in world economies, human development, and so forth.  Today, 60 years later, it's among the best economies in the world, with a high standard of living.  This is considered the "second Asian miracle" (the first miracle being the rebuilding of Japan into a similarly world-class economy).  Part of how this was done is that Koreans were mercilessly drilled to buy only Korean-made goods, and even then, imports were tariffed beyond affordability.  So they only had a choice of Korean goods, and often this was limited to one or two brands of any item.  And even now, with Western brands flowing in without the former choking tariffs (and the Koreans do love Western brands and the sense of luxury and wealth they convey), there is no expectation that they should have anything near the choices we Americans are given in our supermarkets.  In fact, given how often I am occasionally frustrated by how many choices I have to sift through at Wegmans, I think they would find it overwhelming and unpleasant.  Koreans are rarely faced with indecision in the cereal aisle.

[2021 edit: this is just Asan.  In Cheonan, the Lotte hypermarket has almost anything you could want, and the quality is quite nice.]

One thing that is excellent at the Lotte Super was the produce, both for its quality and price (a dollar for half a kilo of scallions? three dollars for a daikon the size of a melon?), but alas, we have no use for it in our hotel room.

Later, I put Laura down for a nap and went back out in search of an ATM that takes international cards, as we were running low on cash and Korea is still very much cash-based for small purchases and fares.  Most machines here only accept domestic cards and don't interface with Western networks like Cirrus or Plus), so you have to find an ATM that is specifically labeled a "global" ATM.  I first started out at the hotel desk, and the clerk (a cute mousy girl who has never once told me anything helpful or accurate) told me to try the Sun-Mart next door, though Laura had already looked.  So I went back in, on the off-chance it was hiding in a corner, and no, there still wasn't an ATM, local or global.  Then I crossed Oncheon-daero to go under the railroad tracks and walk 300 or 400 metres to the terminal, where it was rumored there was an ATM that accepted Western cards.  I spotted there at Citibank ATM, and rumor also held that all Citibank terminals took Western cards.  No such luck.  So my next plan of attack was to inquire at the tourist center marked on my map as somewhere attached to the rail station.  When I found it, it was a pretty much a booth, and the girl inside required me to write my request on a slip of paper, as Koreans are often better at understanding written English than spoken.  Ah, she said, just head right on Oncheon-daero and there's a KB bank.  So this I did, and after three or four blocks I didn't see a bank of any kind, anywhere.  Rather, there were no longer crosswalks and fewer and fewer storefronts.  So I headed back, and on one corner of Oncheon-daero and Chungmu-ro (the intersection near where the information booth was), there was a Wooribank.  Now, as I was already dimly aware that woori means "ours," I assumed it was a strictly Korean outfit.  Not so.  Also, in contrast to the usual habit of Korean ATMs to stop working late at night, these—a whole bank of five or six ATMs) purported to be operational 24/7, 365.  So I successfully fed it our Corning FCU card, and it asked me how many 50,000-won notes I wanted.  Since I wanted 300,000 overall, I asked for five and rest in 10,000-won notes (South Korea doesn't have a 20,000-won note).  Instead, it gave me one 50,000-won note and the rest in tens.  To give you some idea of what that's like, think of a $50 bundle of one dollar bills, and cramming that in your wallet.  Still, I was happy to finally have any success at all, so I shuffled home.

Today we switched rooms, as our former room was close to the banqueting hall, which tended to be noisy when Laura was trying to sleep.  It is a much nicer room, with actual functioning A/C, of which I'm sure Laura will post photos to Facebook, as she already posted photos of our lunch today at the Starbucks-esque cafe across the street.  In a scant couple hours, as Laura heads off to the plant again, I will be catching a cab to the rail station in Cheonan, and from there taking the bullet train to Busan.  After a bit of a wait around the train station there, I'll take a cab over to the ferry terminal and hop on a boat for the island of Tsushima, near Nagasaki, in the land of my near-birth, Japan.  Stay tuned.