Outbreak, Uprising and Super-Volcanoes: Avoiding the Apocalypse in Korea

A series of sirens snuck into our 22nd floor hotel room from the busy Seoul streets below preemptively waking Rachael and invading my quiet, morning reading time. It wasn’t too early, but today was our last day in Seoul and a travel day. We had seats on a 2pm, Busan-bound train from Seoul station, and agreed to have a lazy morning followed by a late lunch rather than trying to brave the cold for any additional tourist activities. The sounds weren’t uncommon – we were in Seoul after all, a city of nearly 10 million people, but when we opened the curtains to look at the city beneath us, there was an ominous gray tint to the world. A gloom that hid the late morning sun and the omnipresent view of the city’s surrounding mountains. There was also a feeling of collective commotion, even from the 23rd floor. Were there more cars jammed into the intersection below, or were there more people hustling to get into the Samseong train station? It was hard to tell, but the combination of crescendoing sounds, automotive and pedestrian tumult, and the smoky, horizon-hiding atmosphere blended to create an anxiety-inducing doomsday setting.

Despite the anxiety inducing apocalypse brewing, I realized we hadn’t eaten any bibimbap since being in Korea and I wasn’t going to let the four horsemen stop us from making our culinary rounds. We scoured KakaoMaps (Korea’s Google Map equivalent) and found a highly rated place serving a celebrated version of octopus bibimbap that piqued our interest, so we donned our red jackets to face the gloom and set out on the ten minute walk from the hotel. The clamor we saw from the hotel room intensified when we walked outside and smelled a smoky, acrid smell in the air. Our phones alerted us that the AQI had jumped into the triple digits...

With ominous sign after ominous sign pushing into our perspective, we walked into the restaurant at peak lunch hour where people were jostling to enter and exit the restaurant. The restaurant was a local “hole in the wall” and thus there was no English menu. In fact, there was no menu at all. Instead there was a small list of items printed on the wall. The second we sat down, the waiter indicated their lack of patience for us and brusquely pointed at the wall indicating that it was time to order. Feeling a rushed panic, I embarrassingly stood and walked to the mural menu, pointed to the item at the top of the list that I hoped was octopus bibimbap and held up two fingers indicating we both wanted the dish. She seemed satisfied with my choice, and then hurried away to deal with the rest of the restaurant. Rach looked at me from across the table with a classic “what the fuck did you sign me up for” look (see below).

The food came, I miraculously ordered correctly, and the octopus was incredible. It was tender, was heaped with tons of kimchi and gochujang, adding some heat and funk, and was served with a portion of crisped purple rice in a clay pot that would have put a smile on Bobby Flay’s face. Then to top off another meal miraculously gone right, the lunch crowd thinned, and in a moment of mercy our waitress came back and gave me a “you done good” pat on the back. Thus, absolving me for the delay we created and the resounding fear in my eyes.

With full stomachs, we got packed and headed for the train station, which greeted us with more derelict chaos. Our first sight inside was an elderly couple, clad entirely in germ protection: multiple face masks, goggles, rubber gloves and heavy hooded jackets. I became fixated on the couple, not because of their attire, but because one of the two was having a consumptive coughing fit that dropped her to her knees. A group of people rushed to help, and I panicked. Frozen. An alarm was going off in the back of my mind that connected the morning’s sirens, to smoke in the air, to pedestrian chaos to airborne pandemic reborn and I felt the need to push through the growing crowd and get to my seat on the train. Obviously, everything was fine, and the couple ended up sitting in the same train car as us, but in hindsight, I realized all my apocalyptic delusions were a result of our late night screening of the Korean zombie movie, Train to Busan, set in the exact location we were standing in, prior to our own train to Busan that day. The movie rocks even despite the nightmares it gave me.

Zombie invasion averted, we arrived in Busan and immediately sensed a different atmosphere from Seoul. It’s one of Korea’s southernmost cities and is a major port nestled between the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. The thermometer indicated it was a bit warmer relative to Seoul, probably 5-10 degrees, but the salty ocean breeze snuck through the city's streets and cut away any perceived warmth. We were staying in the Haeundae Beach area which boasted a big tourist scene packed to the gunwales with bars and restaurants, and unlike Seoul, there appeared to be an influx of visitors at this time – notably, younger folks from Korea who we learned were enjoying the end of their Lunar New Year school holiday, turns out college are college kids wherever they may be, these kids were thirsty.

Rach and I decided to seek out a Busan classic dish called eomukguk, a brothy fish cake stew. We found a restaurant that had good reviews, had people inside and was sporting a playlist filled mostly with early 2000’s hip-hop. Customers were seated in groups of 2 or 4 and scattered throughout the restaurant sharing bubbling hot pots and the usual mix of beer and soju we’d grown accustomed to seeing at Korean restaurants. After we sat, contrary to previous Korean dining experiences, it took us a while to get the waiter’s attention. He was in his early 20s and maintained a laissez faire attitude and a relatively slow, but consistent pace as he wandered around the restaurant doling out fresh beers and never-ending bottles of soju to the slowly growing crowd. We ordered one hot pot of eomukguk, two Cass beers and a bottle of unflavored soju which we promptly mixed together into a delicious and potent Korean boilermaker. These drinks go down easily unlike their American counterparts, especially as we sought to keep up with the uproar of the crowd and music around us.

After the second round of drinks and about half of our stew, I felt a weight land on my shoulder from behind me. I looked back to see that a young woman had drunkenly reeled back in her seat, to the hilarity of her group of friends, and landed with most of her weight propped up by me and my chair. I scooped this woman up and got her back into her seat with the help of one of her giggling friends who thanked me graciously, and played it very cool like "this happens all the time." At that moment I looked around the restaurant and saw complete devolution. Chaos was reigning. The kids had taken over, and a Children of the Corn setting emerged.

The leader of this coup eventually stepped forth, an inebriated Malachi, who was previously dining alone and audibly lamenting his own drunkenness, and, Rachael and I hypothesized, the pangs of a recent heartbreak. My back was turned, but Rachael described the scene to avoid garnering his wasted attention. He raised a large beer bottle to the room of patrons, who were ignorant to his existence, and in Korean, called for a toast. In doing so, he dropped his half empty beer bottle and watched it shatter at his feet. He then showed a moment of uncharacteristic agility, grabbed napkins off his neighbors table and dove head first into the spillage in an attempt to rectify his mistake and clean up the soakage along with the broken glass. Before the staff could make it to him, he wailed as a shard of glass sliced through his hand. Amazingly, he got up with help from the staff who brought him to the bathroom to bandage him with a paper towel, and then quickly sat him back down at his seat with a fresh bottle of beer – maybe thinking the best way to end his reign of terror was to allow him to self-medicate himself to sleep at his table?

Simultaneously, the table immediately behind us, where the girl had fallen out of her chair, ordered another round of beers and two more bottles of soju, which were quickly brought to their table and opened, and it was at this moment that Rachael realized we were in harm’s way in our current state and had one of two paths forward. Option 1 - we somehow manage to escape the carnage and find a place where we weren’t the oldest and somehow soberest individuals in the building, or we pursue option 2 and takeover the drunken reins from Malachi, who was now asleep at the table, and become the leaders of this riotous group of kids, who were now intermingling between tables. In one instance, two leaned over a pot of bubbling stew, lit by a butane burner, to kiss. We chose option 1, threw some cash at the waiter and got the hell out. Apparently we are too old to rage like we used to. Hell of a party though.'

By this point, we had survived a near zombie apocalypse and a riotous uprising of potentially murderous children. We considered ourselves invincible, and sought to knowingly put ourselves to the final test – an encounter with an active super-volcano on Jeju island. We flew to the island from Busan, and caught sight of Korea’s largest peak from the plane, Hallasan. I love the way Korean mountains are named. In English, the most obvious translation of the mountain would be Mount Halla, but in Korea there’s extra reverence given, and the honorific “San” is added to the end of the name. The mountain is spoken about much like a grandparent or a revered teacher. It’s amazing, and the respect and love for the mountain became even more apparent as we learned the volcano is actively reshaping the island and its surrounding area today.

I admittedly didn’t know Jeju existed until I told my mom we were planning to go to Korea, and she immediately pulled out a copy of The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See and insisted both Rachael and I read it immediately. It’s a story of the history of the island with an emphasis on the haenyeo, or women divers who drove the economy by way of free diving for abalone and other culinary treasures. It started out of necessity as half the population was drawn into the Korean War in the ‘50s, but it’s continued to this day and we got a chance to see these women in action.

The majority of our time on Jeju was spent in ascent or descent exploring Hallasan’s impact on the ecosystem. It’s a much more outdoorsy place than any we’d visited so far, and a lot of the things we wanted to see were spread out across different areas of the island. We were advised to rent a car for this leg of the trip, but we ignorantly forgot to get international drivers’ licenses prior to leaving the US, so we did the next best thing and booked a guide to help us navigate the craters, magma tunnels and volcanic tuff cones beckoning us. We explored the island inside and out, but the biggest highlight was Seongsan Ilchulbong, a volcanic “tuff cone” created by underwater pockets of magma that emerge and meet cold ocean water to create a steep protrusion of verdant land directly out of the ocean. It’s magnificent. It sits right on the water, and feels entirely out of place, like it was teleported from one of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland.

At the base of Seonsan Ilchulbong, there’s a twice daily show featuring the haenyeo that gives a bit of the history of their craft, what they do, and how dangerous it is to free dive in these waters with nothing but a set of goggles and a knife for prying abalone off the jagged rocks beneath the surface. The show is quick, and offers some cool insight into the life of a haenyeo, but was nowhere near as informative and entertaining as my mom’s book. After we watched the show, we embarked on the real highlight, the 200m ascent to the top of the cliff. The climb was steep, but there were stairs cut into the rocks the whole way up, and when we were feeling winded, we found surges of energy from watching the 80+ year old men and women making the same climb. At the summit, we got rewarded with stunning views overlooking the east side of the island which has been very clearly terraformed by countless underwater volcanic eruptions that have made life possible for so many different species (abalone among them!).

Lastly, we celebrated the climb by visiting a local restaurant whose abalone is supplied by the haenyeo! The dish we ordered was a bright red, brothy abalone stew served with a variety of different seafood banchan. The most unique was one we saw previously at the Gwangjang market in Seoul, but didn’t get the chance to try. It’s called ganjang-gejang (raw crab marinated in soy sauce). It had a preserved, funky taste from the soy sauce and a rich sweetness from the fermented crab meat, and was a great foil to the spicy and chewy abalone meat that was heaping from our broth pots. Unfortunately for me, a week or so after this meal, I met a Korean man in Cambodia who told me virgins to this dish should proceed cautiously and limit the amount they eat because raw crab is unfamiliar to the body and likely to get you sick. Ignorant to this advice at the time, I sucked every last morsel out of both mine and Rachael’s servings and set the clock on my own timebomb. On the plus side, I’d had abalone in the past, both on the west coast and the east coast of the US, and the texture was incredibly chewy despite being tenderized into the shape of a pancake by a toothy metal hammer. Here in Jeju however, it couldn’t have been more delicate. It was served whole, plucked right out of the shell, and we devoured them. They melted in our mouths amid the braised veggies and spicy red broth. I couldn't have conceived a better lunch, especially when washed down with a bottle of soju. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, this was my last cogent memory of Jeju.

After nearly two months in Asia, countless Andrew Zimmern “Bizarre Food” style dishes, and the aforementioned close calls with a burgeoning zombie apocalypse and Children of the Corn restaurant take-over, I couldn’t believe it was a handful of soy marinated crabs that took me down.. I’ll spare the details, but for the next two days I ate nothing but white rice and longed for little else besides regular movements from within myself.

Gam-sa-ham-ni-da Korea, and [djzon!] to an amazing trip! I loved every second of our time in the country, and frankly wish we had spent more time here. It's been a few weeks since we've been in Korea, but I'm already thinking about coming back. I miss the amazing food, the so-maek which I'll be drinking from now until I come back, and of course all the amazing people that made these two weeks unforgettable. I can't wait to bring my family and friends here to ignite their love affairs.