To the Unknown Coffee Joint

Wouldn't you know it? I was so enthralled by the good espresso that I totally forgot to take a pic of the front of the shop!!! Arrrghh!

In case you're wandering around Suwon looking for the place, go look for this statue's butt:
It's on the left - if you click the pic, you can see a white-ish sign with a hand-powered burr grinder on it. Go get some coffee, you won't regret it! Pity they didn't provide receipts...
I did, however, manage to take a pic of Pepper's Americano - which, unlike the majority of coffee joints, did not come from a brew flask! Shame on Gloria Jeans at the Incheon Airport!!
Crema's gone because Pepper needed it to cool down a bit. And the stirrer was already there..

Walking around in Suwon In Search Of Food yielded some interesting sights, like this Titanic Restaurant:
and a few occurrences of weirdo naming of pubs:
Seeing as how Pepper and I gorged on Cow and Pig the night before, we decided to go simple - at a Ramen place. Of course, I mean having a simple meal, not being nuts at a Ramen place. Although we were a little overwhelmed at the end of the day with this bit of visual overload
made slightly worse by the apparent disorganization
The wall surfaces you can't see in this photo were covered with a gazillion yellow, green, red, pink and purple post-its, with scribblings in Korean and various cartoons. The picture previous to this shows a customer's rendering of some sort of an egg, for a basket of eggs in a basket, that was on each table. Don't know if those eggs were raw, boiled, or preserved. The cartoon does not look reassuring.

Anyway, on to dinner pics:
Free flow Kimchi! (the brown pot with the red tongs (that looks like an unlit candle)). Pepper's dinner is in the metal lunch pot. Her dinner only filled half of it, so she was forced to pour out some onto the kidney bowls. The round pot is
Spicy soup ramen (lamyeun) with an egg in it. Plain, but tasty and comforting (especially when it's 2 degrees Celcius out at night).

Day 1 in Korea

..of course, I actually arrived in Korea at about 5pm the 'first' day, but this day is the first complete day in Korea. So, Day 1 it is.

Pepper and I waited patiently for the 'hotel' shuttle service (it's actually a shuttle taxi operated by the Stay 7 serviced apartments, but... same thing) to appear. We got gestured into a saloon car, and were whisked off in several directions at once. Or so it seemed, anyway.

Our driver and the Marketing Manager/Human Global Positioning System / Impolite pointer of directions brought us around what seemed to be most of the districts in Suwon. We were wildly overcoming centrifugal force while navigating the maze of impatient Korean drivers on their way to being stuck in rush hour. I must comment that drivers in Suwon have levels of impatience surpassing Singapore and New York. Barely 10 nanoseconds pass between the nascent gleam of a green traffic light and the I'm-pressed-for-time-and-you're-a-slow-idiot-driver car honk.

After a lot of gesturing, laughing and u-turning, our Korean Driver/unGPS team finally decide they know where to go and promptly deliver us to a Samsung manufacturing plant. Oops! Wrong building. Attempt number 2 is mildly more successful. They deposit us (after 70 mins of a hot and wild horizontal roller-coaster ride) at the gates of the manufacturing complex and wave us vaguely toward a cluster of boring-looking buildings.

Pepper and I trudge off, confused, but relieved to be let off the Korean Mystery Journey Express. Amidst the monochromatic brown landscape of a pre-spring Korea, this stood out:
No, the building behind isn't the company building. It's a Renault factory.

It was a long walk up to the office, sun-drenched but the slowly rising temperature cooled my overheating pate. Imagine having to climb up this to get to the office. It had to be right at the top...
No wonder most of the office people were slim! (later, we found out that it was because of the cafeteria food).

The day passed quickly as we slogged through our alloted Herculean tasks.
Picture of note. Here's an example of the rubbish bin in the meeting room that was our work area: We got the friendly and helpful Executive Assistant to book us a more knowledgable cabbie, and he got us back to Stay 7 in a wonderous 25 minutes. Hooray for a functioning non-human GPS navigation system!

Pepper and I felt a vague desire to try something ethnic, so we wandered around the area near our apartments for a likely establishment. We avoided overly-dingy looking shops, and the far-too-common Japanese restaurants and fake Western joints. We finally ended up at a Korean BBQ place with an untranslated menu, and no chairs. We were offered "Cow!" and "Pig!" and shown to a large, low table, where we able to use foot/sock odours to whet our appetites. One interesting side dish we had was Raw Crab, preserved in honey/chili sauce. It was cold, sweet and lovely, if not cloying. The Cow was delicious! No pics though - too smokey and oily. Go to any Korean BBQ place, and the food might look the same. Just the freshness of the Cow that varies.

After stumbling away from the restaurant and massaging all the kinks out of our sorry joints, Pepper and I decided to assuage our caffeine withdrawal at a place that advertised fresh coffee.
Man, the coffee was the best I'd tasted! Expertly pulled shots, with loving care lavished on each cup served!

More, next post!

Conjuror of Congees Kimchi

Poor Me.

Having barely recovered from North American Jet-Lag, I headed straight into a sinus infection, then...WHAM! (no, not George Michael and the other guy)..
Office Martinet decides that Pepper and I need to help out some Korean tech writer. So with barely two day's notice, here I am...
OOps! Wrong pic. That's Bucky (black) and Otterboy chowing down on fresh kibble.

Let's try that again. "..here I am".. Ah! Nice 'living room' in Stay 7 Suwon, in Suwon, Korea. Other than empty shelving and and a desk area strikingly similar in its spartan starkness, this is it.
I have a nice little kitchenette, with another desk. But at least this apartment has non-stick cookware. but no knives of any sort. For my alert readers, yes, the pictures are bigger. This is purely for my other readers who have complained that the earlier pics were too small, and they didn't realise that clicking on a pic gives you a niiiiice biiiiiiig pic.

My first night was uneventful, just a little weird - went to the Outback Steakhouse. Huge Language barrier. Fortunately, they had a young-Bruce-Lee like person who spoke a smattering of English, enough to take our order, and give Pepper a doggy bag for a huge plate of pasta she couldn't finish.

The next morning, before being carted off to work (that's a story for tomorrow), Pepper and I initiated our Coffee Quest (yes, the serviced apartment serves breakfast, but their coffee is like dirty water).
Finally found a coffee joint that opened at 7.30 am... but all open and lit, but no one around. We could have gone behind the counter and made our own coffees, but we were too civilised.

One fresh-faced Korean Maiden eventually strolled in, and set about S-l-o-w-l-y setting up shop. While we were standing in front of the counter, waiting for to apologize for showing up late, and to take our orders for coffee. No Such Luck.

After half an hour of watching her putter around behind the counter doing ritualistic coffee things (she was obviously a trained minion, but not a devotee), nothing happened. She continued ignoring us, and continued heating up mysterious containers of steaming liquid, and washing dishcloths in the basin. We left in disgust. No eye contact, nothing. So Thank You Tuck's Espresso, for wasting our time, and congratulations on losing our custom!

More on better joints, next post!

More updates coming

It'll be slower, since there are potentially less alarming or interesting things happening to me.. but you'll never know.

More to come, especially when I iron out my stupid Internet connection at home. Starhub sucks!

The Cloisters

Sorry for taking so long to post this one - 30+ hour travel from Ohio to Singapore is truly a snoozing matter.

So, The Cloisters. What is a Cloister anyways? Something in close proximity (Khalwat)? Something buried deep in a cupboard? Now that the mists have parted, on with my travelogue.
The Cloisters Museum was my last scheduled stop in New York. Decided to use up my Metro transit card and took a long traffic-fouled bus journey from 51st street to 191st. Doesn't sound too far, but with New York's traffic, it was almost a 2 hour journey.
Along the way, I was trundled past the Cathedral of St John the Divine, a Gothic cathedral STILL in construction.
Front-ish view
Back-ish view After a false alightment at Fort Tryon park (yes, Tryon, it's not a typo)
I finally came to the battlements of this wonderful Medieval museum.
The museum was blissfully empty for a while, but a high-school excursion and a tour group with a shrill tour guide put an end to my bliss. I was running from tapestry to chapel to cloister, in a futile attempt to escape the ravening horde. This graven image soon became my constant companion: (praying for succor - think about it)

Barbarian hordes aside, I found delightful views, such as a graven coat of arms of the Porcelot family, very apt for this Chinese Zodiac year. A deserted (for the winter) outdoor cafe area The museum even had a gallery of roundels depicting modern day workplace scenarios: Who knew those crafty medieval artisans also practiced prestidigitation? (take that George!)

But alas, my trip down memory lane was over and I had to endure another traffic-fouled-double-hour seat warming exercise back into the city, only to have to rush to catch my airport shuttle bus. [sigh].

The Morning After
Yes, this was my plane, scheduled to take me from Ohio to Detroit. I kid you not, it truly went pthptpthpthpthpthpthtppththththththppthth all the way, except for when it was trying to land, and the entire cabin started imitating a paper cone subwoofer.

Well, 30 hours later, I landed in wet old Singapore, where everything looked foreign. Adjustment time... I miss Ohio [sob] and the weather there. I was glad to be away from roomie's stinky food though. When I checked the fridge to make sure I hadn't left anything behind, I smelt something suspicious from the packet of raw meat from his half of the fridge. Urk.

It was a walk in the park

but I need some fuel, don't I?
Had breakfast at Burger Heaven (yeesh!) while waiting for MoMA to open up. My first and last corned beef hash...

MoMA was interesting, but a little too abstract for me. So I thought I'd try the Guggenheim. Bright idea eh? Turns out it was a dud, because the entire grade school population was there too.
Decided to abandon the attempt, and had a light lunch on a bench near Central Park. I ate about half of it before I took a pic. It wasn't that light...
I decided to abandon the nearby plethora of museums and trek the Park!
Here's the semi-ubiquitous (hi Jeanette!) icon of the park..
Click the pic to zoom in... trust me.

Central Park is really spectacular, even in the last throes of winter. Even in melting ice, it's beautiful, a reservoir of serenity in a city pulsing with impatience and hypertension.
A saw a few die-hard joggers, sweat rolling ineffectually through plucked eyebrows, expectorant pluming in the cold, hard air.

I deliberately strode and stumbled counter to the recommended counter-clockwise direction of movement in the park. Why? I was already footsore, and I needed to get southwards.
Nice lake.
This morning, I saw my first central park squirrel.
Apparently, he didn't like me interrupting his meal, cuz he tried to brain me with a nut a minute later. Sat down for while to re-tie my shoelaces for the 15th time, and then hobbled (but in a New York fashion) to the Museum of Natural History, to get an IMAX Cosmic Collisions movie, narrated by the other Ole Blue Eyes, Robert Redford. Not enough foot power for an extended tour, but the museum is a definite re-visit for next time!

Tomorrow, the Cloisters!

Fluff is better

Man.

Company was good. It was dramatic, it was funny, it was Sondheim.
There was no band or orchestra or pre-recorded track. They were great!

Mamma Mia! is, by comparison, a sitcom. BUT, The music! It was all re-recorded, but it retained all the little musical gems that any ABBA fan remembers. Lots of old great hits, but put into new context. Kudos to the music arranger, the writer and the cast! It was soooo funny! Visual and physical gags galore! Some of the costumes were so kitschy, they were perfect howlers.

[Sigh] Why can't we have this kind of quality in Singapore?

On a completely unrelated topic, I had dinner at the Montparnasse, chosen from their Pre-Theatre menu, which was a Prix Fixe.

Duck Terrine appetizer (those are two pieces of crunchy toast, not deep fried sow's ears)
Coq Au Vin with mashed potato and chopped salt pork (chicken was dry, but gravy was nicely smokey - it was interesting, but far from the best coq au vin I've had - I'm using the Parisienne version as a benchmark)

And for dessert, Creme Brulee and a Doppio Espresso (why do American waiters always confirm that this is a Double EXpresso?). No pics because the pic I took was ugly.

Phew! Time to rest me poor abused feet. More walking to maybe the Guggenheim, Moma, or the Cloisters...

Oh, if you see footage of the Protest Against the Iraq war in New York, look for me in the background. I'm one of the few thousand people wearing black.
Like the St Patrick's day parade, and maybe footage of ConEd examining some manholes around 55th St. Yes, I walked everywhere today.