Korea runs on Dunkin's

We went to Daejeon last week, which is the nearest "big" city to us. Even though it's big to us, it's still only the 6th-largest in Korea- in other words, nothing compared to Seoul or Busan. But those cities are adventures for another day. Anyway, one of the things that strikes me about Daejeon and Korea in general is the plethora of American brands. Behind the subway station in the picture above, you can see that Korea runs on Dunkin's too! There seems to be a Baskin Robbins on every other corner, 24-hour KFCs all over the place, and we've also spotted Krispy Kreme, Papa John's, Pizza Hut, Popeye's, Subway, McDonald's, and of course Starbucks. I've seen so many more American brands here than any other country I've been to (well besides Canada and the U.S. duh!). The ones I've been to here-- McDonald's, Subway, Baskin Robbins, KFC-- all seem to have the American standard products and some Korean twists as well. Like McDonald's. You can get a Big Mac or McNuggets and fries, and the fries mercifully taste the same here, or you can get a bulgogi burger. It's delicious, trust me! McDonald's even has 1,000 won sundaes, which is so awesome to us because we have made many a $1-sundae run, especially in the summer in SC. They have McFlurries, too, but here they have a green tea flavor. I have yet to try it, but I'm certain I will. If you know me you know how much I love green tea-flavored treats!

Here's a typical Korean lunch from a food court when you don't opt for the American brands. I have some sort of bibimbap going on there with pickled side dishes and a soup that didn't look to bad but smelled like feet. Karl wouldn't even touch it, so I took a pass. The main dish and pickles/kimchi were great though. Karl got a Japanese-style lunch: Omurice and tonkatsu, with salad and soup. However, the omurice had kimchi fried rice inside rather than the ketchup or plain kind you get in Japan.

One thing that is specific to Daejeon from what we've seen, although this is probably the case in other big cities too, is these bike rentals. All the bikes are the same and parked at little stations like this. Nearby there is an electronic kiosk where you enter your information and voila! you have a bike for the day. Not that it would be anywhere near that simple if we actually wanted to figure out how to do it, but it's nice that the option is there.

I found myself kind of wishing we lived in Daejeon. There is so much more to do, and the people just let you live there. By that I mean that we didn't get gawked at, and I don't think one single obnoxious person heckled us with "HELLO HELLO." I would estimate that 30% of the people I pass here where we live do one of the two, and often both. So many people here treat non-Koreans like mascots instead of people, and I'm sick of it. I might be able to understand if this was the 1960s and they had genuinely never seen a non-Asian before, but that's absolutely not the case. But I guess this is one of the things I have to put up with if I want to get the nice paychecks and live rent-free here.

Anyway, we did decide to explore more of our own city, starting with one of the biggest city parks in the country, Wolmyeong Park. It's really more of a network of trails criss-crossing some large hills on the north side of town, but it's covered in forest and you do feel as though you're in the wilderness rather than the city. I really enjoyed it. The only thing I didn't care for was the little convenience store/noodle shops that were along the trail every so often that each had music playing and a crowd of older people sipping soju. They're convenient if you didn't bring water, like us, but I think the park would be nicer without them.

We took some pictures in the park, but they didn't come out well because it was super hazy that day. There are some places that supposedly offer scenic overlooks of the city and the harbor, but you'd never know it this time of year. There's a haze that hangs over the city every single day, sometimes clearing up in the early evening, and sometimes lasting until dark. I remember southern Japan being like that too in the summer.

We also inadvertently found a Japanese Buddhist temple in town near the park that provided some decent pictures. It's really a beautiful place! It looks like they hold services there frequently. When we were there, there was a group of Japanese tourists there with their kids. The temple representative spoke English, so he explained in English what they were looking at and one of the ladies would ask him some questions in English and then explain to the others in Japanese. For a moment I wanted to jump in, but it looked like they were managing just fine without me. I'll save my mad interpreting skills for another day :P

At the entrance to the temple were these two little turtle statues covered in rocks. Aren't they cute? We couldn't resist snapping a few pictures of them.

And one more thing we've discovered in the past week is that Tama likes Super Mario World! We downloaded it on our Wii a while back and are still working on those final difficult levels. Tama thinks he can help us. I'm not so sure.