Two months later and I'm still fantasizing about this maeun-tang, or spicy fish soup. 

Cod and a few clams in a Korean chili paste-laced broth and topped with shiso leaves: this is a poor woman's seafood heaven. I ate a version of this soup practically every day in Seoul, the best one from a restaurant on the second floor of Seoul's Noryangjin Fish Market. For spice fiends, it's hard to resist a bubbling hot, fiery red soup that comes with its own burner.

While Noryangjin is lesser known than Tokyo's famed Tsukiji fish market, it rivals Tsukiji in sheer size. You can bet most of Seoul's restaurants source their fish from this wholesale arena. My photos can't do justice to the sprawling market, the rows and rows of exotica in my landlubber's eyes.

(So although these photos are a couple months old, now that I finally retrieved them from the USB card reader screw-up I couldn't resist sharing them. Due to painfully slow internet, I only uploaded a few here; the rest can be viewed in my Flickr set.)

We went in the mid-afternoon and were spared the crowds. These crabs were mere minutes of steaming away from being supper. 

"This is the first time I have traveled to another country and communicated with something other than the local language or English," mused Jacob. Finally we could order food in Korea, without pointing to a picture or fumbling through our phrasebook. Knowing Mandarin sure does help if you're overseas, even if it's just at the local Chinese restaurant.

The instance reminded me of visiting Montreal's Chinatown in college, and ordering dinner for a large group in Cantonese because the waitor didn't know much English or French. Or when my family lived in Puerto Rico and frequented the dim sum restaurants of San Juan; once inside, you would never have guessed that we were in a Spanish-speaking territory of an English-speaking country.

The owner of this tiny restaurant near the Korean War memorial was a very jolly third-generation Korean-Chinese whose family was originally from Shandong province. She spoke Mandarin in sing-songy Korean accent, which contributed to her jovial demeanor. She blushed when we asked to take a photo.

"You don't need a menu. I'll just tell you what we have. There's only five things," she said brightly. Which was a relief, and odd, since most Chinese restaurants have edited menus of no less than 100 items.

It's fitting that a country so obsessed with kimchi would have a museum devoted to it. On one of our last days in Seoul Jacob and I took the subway to the COEX Mall, which housed the Kimchi Field Museum in the basement.

The place was rather small, but included a small tasting room and the standard "history of" and "how to make" displays. Over a hundred plastic models of various kinds of kimchi took up a third of the museum. I would probably have expected the shrimp, cod gills, and ginseng kimchi. But pickled pumpkin? Persimmon? Pheasant? The museum was indeed an eye-opener. 

Mall food in Asia tends to be of higher quality than its counterpart in the west, so it wasn't surprising we found Korean restaurant inside COEX that served a nice bubbling beansprout rice stew...

...along with the requisite 5 or 6 side dishes.

One of the most memorable things I ate last week was in Hongdae, the funky district around Hongik University. We found a pod-like little glass box of a restaurant amidst higher concrete buildings. You are free to draw all over the tables, and are given pens to do so.

(Bibim naengmyun)

My week-long trip to Seoul turned me from a recreational dabbler of Korean food to a full-on addict. Now that I'm home and about 10 pounds heavier, I can't stop thinking about bibimbap, dakgalbi (pan-fried chicken), bibim naengmyun (cold noodles with Korean chilli paste), among others.

The first thing I ate after landing in Seoul was dolsot bibimbap, presented in a hot stone pot so the rice on the sides become crispy and the raw egg on top cooks as you mix everything. This was at a traditional Korean restaurant in Insadong where the seats are cushions on an ondol wooden floor. A nice experience, but certainly not the most comfortable.

I instantly fell in love with the spicy seafood bean paste stew, which I apparently forgot to photograph in my state of rapture.

(Dolsot bibimbap)

(Side rant: As my luck would have it, when I started uploading photos after returning home, my card reader started acting funky and ejected in the middle of the upload. Unfortunately, the mishap caused about 100 photos, including everything from my last day at Noryangjin Fish Market, to disappear. This is what I get for buying cheap card readers in China.)