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As a kid, I remember The Stumbling Parents had a couple of small cast iron grills called "HIBACI's". This drawing I scavanged from the web is as close as I can find to those long ago grills (unless The Stumbing Brother still has them collecting dust somewhere in his basement):



You couldn't cook a lot of food fast, but they were very portable. Which is just what my neighbor G and I were looking for the other evening. We have a grand plan of grilling some meat outside on the roof-top garden outside my door. And such an Hibachi would be easy to store for apartment dwellers.

Well, with a little assistance from my Korean language teacher, I have located and ordered the Korean equivalent of an Hibachi. In Korean they call this a Hwa-roh. They arrived this afternoon:



They even came with a pair of gloves (which probably won't fit my big hands). The ones I've seen over the years in America were from cast iron. This Korean one is made from clay - at least it looks and feels like a clay pot. All I need now is charcoal and a cool breeze....

[I'll have to ask one of my English teacher friends why I want to say "an Hibachi" versus "a Hwa-roh"...]

I met a foreigner a couple weeks at at the sandwich shop where I sometimes eat breakfast. Turns out he is on a team staying here in Seoul, contracting to a large Korean company. Their office is just around the corner from my apartment. We made an appointment to meet at Trevor's bar Beer O'Clock last night. Honestly in the afternoon I was feeling so tired I almost wished I didn't have an appointment. In hindsight, I'm glad I went.

Usually I can count on meeting someone new at Trevor's bar, but last night was especially interesting. First, the gentlemen from my neighborhood arrived. One fellow came from Arizona, and turns out he had worked with a company that I had worked with as a contractor back in the 80's, and he knew the fellow I worked with! Another man was from Boston, and the third man was from Poland. We had an interesting time, shared some good stories about living in Korea and international travel.

After they left, I met a guy who started a software company here in Seoul, writing educational game software for cell phones. Really interesting situation, and I hope he and his partners succeed. But he does have a backup job as an English teacher. Finally I met an American guy who was in the radio broadcast industry for many years until recently. He lived a couple years in the countryside of Korea, and was exposed to a different lifestyle than here in Seoul.

Then finally, just when I was about to leave, I got a surprise phone call from our old friend and former housekeeper SY. She was just leaving the baseball game, and wondered if by chance I was at Trevor's bar (which is just across the street from the baseball stadium). She's heard me mention this place, but has never been there. Well, she dropped by, had a beer, and met Trevor.

So, it was a fun evening, filled with many new and interesting faces and stories. I'm glad I went after all.

Dishes, that is, not a course number. This week's Joongang Daily reported that Agriculture Ministry will unify the English names of 102 Korean dishes. Since I know everyone has been waiting for this, I wrote to the reporter, and was sent a list of these 102 foods and their new names.

I apologize for the poor formatting. I had hoped to get a link to the government's website, instead all I got was an MS Word file. I was going to format it myself into a simple HTML table, but I ran into problems. Normal text filtering and processing utilities (grep, sed, head, tail, sort, etc...) don't work well with Korean (unicode) text. At least the simple versions I have on my PC don't. I was able to convert "text to table" in Word, then after a little simple editing, save it as an HTML file. But it's ugly. Sorry.

I was too busy formatting, and haven't studied the list closely. A couple of things did jump out at me, however. Changing "Fermented Soy Bean Paste Soup" to just "Soy Bean Paste Soup" is a step in the right direction. I also noted that The Stumbling Mother's favorite Korean dish, "salted pollack intestines", didn't make the list.

BTW, I did search for this list on the Korean Agriculture Ministry's English Language website. Unlike some English language websites of Korean organizations, this one seemed reasonably up-to-date (Latest news was 2 Sep, less than 1 month old). While I didn't see the list of 102 foods, there were some interesting pages on a few main Korean foods (look under the "Seasoning & Style of Korean Food" tab).

Speaking of Korean foods, I've always relied on this webpage for a fairly comprehensive list of Korean dishes and a description of each. Many of the entries have accompanying photos, and there is an attempt to guage the spiciness of each dish. I don't think there are 100 dishes, but well over 50 it looks like (I'm too lazy to count them).

Realed to the Taxi Theory of mine, I have developed the Elevator Corollary. Whenever The Stumbler arrives at the elevator on the 6th floor, wanting to go down to the main street level, there will always be someone on the elevator going UP to the very top of the building, say the 25th or 26th floor.

There's an ongoing shakeup of my Korean satellite TV these days. CH received a call this week, saying they were going to quit providing the HD channel. That in itself isn't such a great loss. They didn't have a lot of good programming on that channel. On the other hand, there are a LOT of satellite channels that are transmitting original HD progams in standard definition, so you think they would have plenty of HD programming material to make it an interesting channel. Well, their reported plan also includes adding two movie channels which I think were previously billed as extras, and also adding more childrens' channels. Ok, I guess I can live with that.

That is what they told CH. In practice, they've added the two movie channels (the reason for this post), the HD channel is still being transmitted, but unannounced to us, they have removed the National Geographic and most importantly The Discovery Channel! I don't know what I'm going to do about that. I watch Discovery very often. CH said he would call and see about it, he was surprised they removed it, too, since (a) they didn't mention that in their detailed report of changes, and (b) Discover Channel is VERY popular with Koreans, too.

So what is the point of this? And what does it have to do with Bobby Darin?



Well, I was watching one of these new movie channels last week while cooking dinner, and they were showing a movie Beyond The Sea. It's a movie based on the life of Bobby Darin, and it was fascinating. He was a really interesting character. So now these days I'm listening to his music, having discovered him only 40 years too late...

The last time I went to the bar, I absolutely could NOT believe what I saw on the bar tender's hand. She had a metal letter "D" attached to her fingernail by a small chain which passed through a hole in her fingernail! I was told this was a new kind of "accessory" girls are wearing these days!



I asked her if it was any problem. I'm imagining a lady getting her "accessory" caught in the elevator door, closing a drawer, or just accidentally snagging something when moving your hand around. Yikes! It gives me the shivers just thinking about someone having a fingernail ripped off by one of these accessories. What the Korean ladies do "in the name of fashion" is sometimes crazy. I'll have to ask Young Stumbler #1 if she's seen this trend among her friends back home...

The week leading up to Chusok, the Korean "Thanksgiving", many people, families and companies give Chusok presents. In the stores there are huge displays of various Chusok gift sets you can buy. These gifts can be many different items, honey, meat, SPAM, olive oil, etc. Or, if you are like my Canadian friend G, you might get fish. His boss gave him a package of special Jeju Island Mackerel. Unfortunately for G (fortunately for me), he is alergic to fish! As a result, he was able to re-gift these fish to ME!!!! It was a very timely gift. Whether at home, where I frequently cook Salmon steaks which I buy frozen at Costco, or at restaurants where they are served as a side dish, I've been enjoying fish more and more these days. Also, this gave me a chance to use the "grill" feature of my combination oven (that would be the "broil" setting for my American friends). If I understand it right, the combi-oven uses a special halogen light bulb and a fan when operating as a convection oven, the magnetron when in the microwave mode, and it has a set of conventioanal oven heating elements for the grill (broil) setting.



The mackerel fish grilled esily and was delicious. I didn't use any sauce, just plain fish. I served it with hash browned potatoes and zuchinni slices which are dipped in egg and flour then pan fried (this is a common Korean dish). The resulting plate was not very colorful, but it tasted great. Thanks G !!!!!!!