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.)