Smiles and Spices: journeys and encounters in east Asia: Come on a journey with me, #3

By Carrie Riseley

Come on a journey from the Great Wall all the way down to the Mekong Delta; from Korea right across to Mt Everest. See crumbling temples in the jungle; hear the crashing drums and cymbals of a dragon dance; taste the spices. Adventure through nine countries and many more ethnic and cultural identities.

 

With in-the-moment detail and lighthearted humour, join Carrie on a Beijing stopover; a Korean holiday; backpacking from Shanghai to Tibet and back and then down to Southeast Asia; and some hair-raising drives around Taiwan. Experience these diverse and contrasting places: from yaks to water buffalo and trishaws to tuk tuks; from bustling cities to peaceful mountains covered in terraces of rice paddies; from boiling mud pools to markets filled with colour and life (literally – sometimes the produce runs away!). Not to mention all the mad things you'll see on the back of Vietnamese motorbikes…

 

Review by bestselling author Jacqueline Lambert:

"The greatest stories often came out of the greatest challenges. Right from the start, the storytelling is beautiful. The author describes flying into Beijing, then takes you like a personal tour guide around South East Asia. You see everything instantly through her eyes and share the wonder. From the outset, I felt immersed.

Yet, this was not an easy trip. Frequently travelling solo, the author has to deal with very alien cultures, often with no language and absolutely no idea what's going on. Join her on a motorcycle chase after her bags in Cambodia, inadvertently caught up in a political demonstration in Thailand, and on some terrifying drives in a hire car through Taiwan.

This is the second memoir I've read from this author and once again, I loved her thoughtful reflections on cultural differences and her clear empathy for countries where living standards and freedoms differ greatly from the Western world. She also explores how an extended trip or long-term travel is not just about collecting truly unique experiences. It is a means to test and re-form your initial reactions and challenge your values and preconceptions.

If you want to discover the best sightseeing spot in China, an ancient Korean drinking game, and a mighty fine collection of toilets, you will do worse than join Carrie for some smiles and spices!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carrie's Travel Books
• Release date: May 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215109694

Book preview

Preface

I love travelling and have always kept a journal to record my experiences. After receiving some good feedback on my writing, I decided to edit some of my travel journals into books – so that you can journey with me. I hope you’ll have a great time, seeing what I saw and feeling what I felt.

The journals that went into this book come from four trips I’ve made to east Asia so far: a Beijing stopover; a Korean holiday; a long backpacking journey from Shanghai to Tibet and back and then down to Southeast Asia; and two weeks exploring Taiwan. They are very diverse and contrasting places: from yaks to water buffalo and trishaws to tuk tuks; from bustling cities to peaceful mountains covered in terraces of rice paddies; from boiling mud pools to markets filled with colour and life (literally – sometimes the produce runs away!). Not to mention all the mad things you’ll see on the back of Vietnamese motorbikes...

This book is a casual record written through my eyes only. I wrote what I saw and learned and have checked whatever facts I could, but I could never hope to manage – and nor have I ever aspired to – unassailable political, historical or cultural analysis of the places I visited. I simply enjoy exploring cultures and places. This book is written through the lens of a young Australian travelling through east Asia and Tibet in the 2010s. It is a snapshot of that place in that time as it was seen by me. I hope you’ll enjoy the journey.

Carrie Riseley

Hobart, Tasmania

October 2022

Dipping my toes in

My first trip to mainland east Asia was a stopover in Beijing when I was 21. I was a student booking the cheapest flight path I could find to get to Europe: Melbourne-Sydney-Beijing-Helsinki-London. I paid for a Chinese visa even though I only had 36 hours to spare, just so I could take a peek at the capital city of the world’s most populous nation. This is my travel journal.

The One Child Policy gets a mention – this is officially over now, but it wasn’t when I made this first trip.

...

28th of December, 9:25am China Standard Time:

I’d like to see what Hong Kong is like in comparison to Beijing. Because of the one country, two systems thing. Hong Kong is supposed to be rabidly capitalist while mainland China is, erm, also rabidly capitalist.

I know I’m a foreigner, which means every man or woman and their dog wants to try and sell me stuff at extortionate prices. My guidebook tells me that the Chinese view it as their patriotic duty to rip foreigners off. But it’s not just that, it’s that... communism is nowhere. To explain, I’ll have to tell the whole story. Most of it isn’t about communism – that’s just in one little bit about stone lions. But I’ll start from the beginning.

Beijing is the only city I’ve ever flown into which is not visible from the air. The pilot kept saying we were descending, and I kept looking out the window, but I could see nothing. I felt like I’d flown into World War Two – there were no city lights whatsoever. Then I looked at the moon, and it was yellow. They told me this city was polluted, but... yikes.

When we landed, my first sight of Beijing was the ghostly outlines of planes and arrival gates amidst thick orange air. As we were taxi-ing along the tarmac, I couldn’t see anything clearly beyond the edge of the wing.

I’ve spent the last two nights staying right across the road from Beijing Train Station, and I never got to see the building clearly. When I emerged from Tian’anmen East subway station yesterday morning, I could barely see Tian’anmen Gate. Its large image of Chairman Mao’s face, only 100-200m away, was all blurry. And forget about the rest of Tian’anmen Square – it was a big white blur.

Chinese people told me that it’s not normally like this; that it was just bad weather. I believe them, because in pictures I’ve seen of Beijing it wasn’t like that. But an overcast day does not blanket an entire city in fog so thick you can’t see Mao properly for two days. This can’t be fog – fog disperses as the day gets warmer. Fog doesn’t permeate subway stations and train carriages. This is not fog. This is pollution. And all I can think of to explain why you can barely see anything on an overcast day is that the clouds must have pushed the smog lower.

It’s weird. And very worrying.

I went first to Lama Temple, a Tibetan temple that sounded interesting. The subway train was absolutely sardines. I’ve never been on a train that full before, and what made it worse was that everyone was wearing really thick jackets - mostly black puffer jackets, which are really slippery. It was like bobbing around in a sea of puffer jackets that buffeted you about in different directions as people got on and off the train.

Finally got to the Lama Temple stop, where I found my first hutong. Hutongs are narrow lanes in which the people of Beijing live. I think everybody used to live in hutongs, but now they’re being replaced by apartment buildings. I find the old hutongs very charming. There are rickshaws full of coal, little old ladies on bicycles, and smoke coming out of little holes in the walls because there are no chimneys... It’s a very different way of life, which is what I travel to see.

Lama Temple is very colourful. There are a few monks standing about, lots of people lighting incense, and almost as many statues as there are Japanese tourists, which is saying something. The pinnacle of these is a fantastic 18m high golden Buddha, who is standing (very rare) and holding a brightly coloured sash, which must be well over 18m long itself. The building it’s in is quite big, but very cramped with the Buddha in it. It has intricate and very colourful patterns painted on every inch of wall, ceiling, column and door.

There was also an exhibition of small Tibetan statues, which were arranged in four or five distinct groups. One was a wrathful one who appeared to be eating a human brain... Others were nicer, and the most interesting was a group starting with S whose name I wrote on my hand so I wouldn’t forget it, and I now realise that it has rubbed off!

They represent the many distractions and complexities of human life and symbolise how you can’t become a Buddha until you get those things under control. They have many many arms – at least 50 – and most of the arms are holding something which represents a complexity/distraction. It’s artistically done, so it’s aesthetically impressive. I gazed at them for a while, and eventually I got to the end of a line of statues, where there was a bigger statue. It was positioned on a different angle which showed, quite clearly, his tiny metallic testicles and a penis which was, quite clearly, inside a woman who appeared to be hanging around his neck!

Sex is, of course, life’s biggest distraction and complication, so it was very fitting, really, but I never expected to see a religious statue of people having sex. I looked back along the row of statues and realised that they all had a woman draped across them. The women were quite small, so I had previously taken them to be extra arms and legs!

Next I went to Tian’anmen Square. I couldn’t see much. It was still exciting though, because Tian’anmen Square is very famous and very very huge. There are wide roads going around the edge of it – it’s not all a pedestrian square.

A man came up to me and spent about five minutes desperately trying to sell me a Chairman Mao watch, and then, when that failed, another five minutes trying to sell me Mao’s Little Red Book. He was originally asking 200 yuan, and I only had about 35 in my wallet which I’d been hoping would last me all day (oh how wrong I was). I ended up buying the book for 20 just to make him go away. I really didn’t want to buy stuff on my first day that I will now have to lug around, but it will be interesting to read some Chinese propaganda. I’m interested to see what the Chinese are being told about Mao. They obviously have a lot of respect for him, because they spend hours queuing to see his embalmed body in the mausoleum on the other side of the square, and they make Mao watches with his arm as one of the hands of the clock, apparently unaware that at 2 o’clock that makes him look just like Hitler...

So I got rid of my first annoying street seller by buying a Little Red Book from him. Then, as I was walking across Tian’anmen Square, two young women greeted me in English. At first I was wary because I thought they were trying to sell me something too, but they weren’t, they were just two lovely people visiting from somewhere inland who wanted to practise their English. Soon we were chatting away happily. Their names are Ping and Yue, and they are sisters. They invited me to visit some hutongs with them. Well, did I ever want to visit hutongs, and with friendly Chinese guides who don’t want to take my money? What more could I ask for? I accepted, and we began heading away down the square.

Ping asked me about my family. I gave her the short version explanation and then asked her about hers. She said it contained herself, Yue, one brother and their mum and dad. Then she said something about Australians having big families. At first I was confused, but then I remembered a little thing called the Chinese One Child Policy. This thought puzzled me, and I asked Ping how she came to have two siblings. Oh, if you want more children, you just have to pay, she said. I think my parents paid 10,000 yuan for me.

What? Poor people face forced abortion or worse, but the rich just slip the government a little bribe? She said it would probably cost more now, because more people want to do it.

So poor people’s kids get aborted, murdered, abandoned or denied citizenship, rich people pay 10,000 yuan, and now that more people are rich they just pay more. The government makes money and oppresses some poor people. Well that’s great for the government, but wait a second, what was the original point of this policy again? Decrease the population of China because the country can’t support all the people? Oh well, I guess that idea went out the window a little bit.

I wonder if Ping knows about any of this. The thought struck me, as I was walking across Tian’anmen Square with the two of them, that they probably don’t know about the bloodshed that happened there in 1989. I met a Chinese student at my university who said that he hadn’t known about the Tian’anmen Square Massacre until he came to Australia. Knowledge of it is completely repressed in China – he said that anybody who wasn’t an adult who heard about it at the time doesn’t know about it. So Ping and Yue probably don’t know. I wonder what they would think about it.

Ping, Yue and I explored the hutongs. They’re so quaint and lovely. We were chatting about all sorts of things, and every now and again Ping would point something out. The first was a pair of stone lions that were placed outside one of the doors. They looked old and worn. I asked Ping if they were worn because people had been touching them for so long, thinking maybe you had to touch the head for good luck or something, but Ping informed me that that was not the case. She said that the lions were only placed outside rich people’s houses, and that when Mao came to power he had ordered them all destroyed.

After we’d walked along a couple of hutongs we came to a shopping street, which was a narrow laneway but not a hutong because, Ping informed me, it’s bad luck to have shops in hutongs. They were small, charming shops. We decided to have tea in a tea house, which was basically just a room with one table. There were three chairs on one side of the table. Our host – or tea lady, if you will, but I’m sure there’s a much more beautiful Chinese word for it – stood at the other side of the table in front of her tea-making implements. There was a bamboo board with slits in it; a traditional good luck frog; a laughing Buddha; various tiny cups and teapots; and twelve jars full of twelve different kinds of tea.

Firstly she gave us the jar of oolong tea to smell, and while we did she washed and warmed four cups by placing them on the board with the slits in it and pouring boiling water over them. The water went everywhere, which let me know why the slits were there. There’s a receptacle underneath the board for the water. She tipped unfinished cups of tea through the slits later.

I say cups, but they were more like thimbles. Tiny things, shaped like tiny round bowls. We drank three cups of each kind of tea. The oolong was amazing. I’ve drunk it before, and I like it, but it was never this good.

Next we tried jasmine tea. Ping said it’s good for the skin, and is a drink for ladies, whereas oolong is a drink for men. Because of its special aroma, it was served in different cups which were tall and thin, but we didn’t drink out of those cups. Our host put our original cups over the top of the long thin cups and upended them. She gave them to us, and showed us how to take the now empty thin cup and smell it, place it over one eye at a time, and roll it over our faces and hands. Then we drank the tea out of the wider cups. It didn’t taste as good as it smelled, but rolling the cup over my face felt fantastic!

Finally, we tried a fruit tea. In the jar, it looked like the kind of dried fruit you get in muesli, only better, and with quite a variety of fruit. I find fruit tea always smells fantastic but tastes disappointing. It just tastes like hot water. I can’t stand the stuff. But this one really tasted like fruit! It was delicious! It even had a hint of a creamy, yogurty taste too – I’ve no idea how they did it, but it was amazing.

When we left the tea house Yue needed to go to the toilet, and we found a public toilet just along the lane. Ping explained that none of the dwellings there have toilets in them, so public toilets are provided for everyone to use. When I exclaimed that that must be quite annoying when you have to go in the middle of the night, she said they use buckets. It was at this point that I saw an old woman crouching outside a shop washing clothes in a tub. The dwellings don’t have washing machines either or, it would seem, laundry sinks.

When we got to the toilet, Yue rushed in first, and Ping said she would hold my bag and wait outside. After giving her my bag I walked in, to see Yue and a middle-aged woman crouching down with only a 50cm-high partition between them, and no cubicle doors. Yue looked up at me, grinned, waved and continued peeing.

The cubicle on the other side of her was free, so I went over there, dropped my daks and did it. I soon realised that, just like at my accommodation, there was no toilet paper. Yue, beside me, vigorously wiggled her bottom to make the urine drip away, pulled her pants back on and walked out. Then Ping came in and did the same thing.

This experience was such a hoot that I took a photo of the toilet block from the outside as a keepsake. Ping and Yue must have thought I was really weird, because I couldn’t stop talking excitedly about it and explaining how different toilet habits are in Australia.

Then I was hungry, so I asked Ping and Yue where I might find some cheap food. They said I could get a Chinese pizza from a little take-away shop. Stall would be a more appropriate way to describe it: a preparation bench in a plastic box at the side of a building. It was more like a pancake than a pizza, and watching it being prepared I was reminded, in a strange juxtaposition, of watching a crepe being prepared for me at a food van in Paris. The way they prepared the pancake was exactly the same, but the add-on ingredients were different. This one had egg and spring onion put on one side of it, and then the lady flipped it over and put sauce on the other side. Then she put a rectangular bubbly, crunchy, fried thing on it and wrapped it up. It was yummy.

Ping and Yue had to leave then, because their hostel was providing a meal for them and they had to go and eat it. I walked back to Tian’anmen Square and took a few photos of gates and mausoleums, before deciding to have a look at the Forbidden City, even though it was too late to go in. On the way, another friendly Chinese woman started talking to me. Her name was Linda, and she just wanted to take me to her art exhibition and get me to buy her paintings, but she was very nice about it. The exhibition was of university students’ work, of which she was one. The art was stunning. A great variety of styles, from nudes to traditional scroll paintings with cranes etc. Linda’s paintings were scroll paintings. She showed me a set depicting the span of a person’s life, symbolised by the four seasons. Spring time is birth and childhood; summer is youth; autumn is your working life, symbolised by a bountiful harvest. Winter is, ironically, what we call the autumn years, which are cold and slow and peaceful. Each painting had cranes and houseboats in it. Linda explained that cranes mate for life, so they always appear in the paintings in pairs, symbolising a dependable spouse. The houseboat symbolises a good home. In the summer picture three little cranes appear on the boat with the couple, symbolising a happy family. (The One Child Policy doesn’t fit into art.)

I ended up buying two of Linda’s paintings, because they were really good and cheap, and she said that the money goes towards scholarships for art students. I was later told that this might have been a scam... and that the tea ceremony might have been too. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Linda was clearly trying to sell me something from the start, but she did it in a nice way and her paintings were genuinely good. Ping and Yue were lovely young people who really showed me around. They were kind to me and taught me things, both before and after I spent money. Ping bought me some tea, too, though I did pay for most of it – voluntarily, as I’d had such a fantastic time. A scam is deceitful, but this was a really nice experience. If it was a product, it was a quality one. I had a fantastic time with two lovely young ladies, and a great cultural experience in the hutongs, the tea house and the toilets (!). And drank the best tea I have ever tasted.

But apparently there are people in China who lure foreign visitors to tea houses and art galleries and then present them with a massive bill. That is a very cultured scam...

After buying Linda’s art, I went to have a closer look at Chairman Mao’s face on Tian’anmen Gate. I then went under the gate to behold the massive entrance gate, probably the size of all of Buckingham Palace, to the Forbidden City. Another friendly Chinese lady talked to me. She didn’t want to sell me something, but then I hit the trishaw drivers. After five minutes of hassling I gave in, because the guy cut his price in half and I did kind of want a trishaw ride. But then at the end he did the sneaky thing of saying, Oh, look at the time, it’s been TWO hours, not one! and charging me double.

The ride was alright. We went through more hutongs, the first of which was boring because it was a new, rich hutong. Very expensive, very expensive, said my trishaw driver. When we went up a hill I saw one residence from above, and it was so luxurious it had a courtyard. A far cry from the tiny crumbling outdoor passageways with grimy old bicycles in them that I’d seen earlier. These residences had flashy cars parked outside, there were no public toilets and, irony of ironies, I saw several stone lions, much bigger and more elaborate than the ones that were destroyed.

This is what I mean when I say that communism is nowhere. It’s completely gone, and the status quo has reverted back to the way it was. I wonder what Mao would think of that? Well he was a dictator anyway, but the trouble now is that China is a dictatorship without an ideology.

We also climbed a royal court-made hill at dusk to look out over the Forbidden City... which was, ahem, invisible in the smog. The best thing about the tour was riding through the old hutongs at nightfall, just when all the people were coming home from work. It was fantastic to see people going about their daily lives: walking home; riding home; talking to neighbours in the lane; taking a bunch of empty old plastic bottles somewhere on the back of a trishaw...

The next morning, it was back to the airport. When we took off, it was proven. Above the smog, the sky was blue! There were no clouds. I couldn’t see the ground properly, but I could see the wing properly the whole way up. We didn’t go through any clouds...

KOREA

Frozen waterfalls

I visited Korea a few years later whilst I was living in Japan. Sitting between China and Japan, I expected it to be heavily influenced by either or both, but I found that it wasn’t, really. There were some similarities of course, but I was surprised by the number of differences. Perhaps the starkest was in the nature of the people. In mainland China, people can be fairly loud and pushy. In Japan, people are quiet and reserved. In Korea, more than anything else, people are kind.

...

27th of December, 10:15 pm:

What a day! I’m exhausted! I spent all day with Dani and her friends. Dani is the reason I came to Korea. When you’re living in Japan and you’re not sure what to do with your winter holidays and your friend says, Hey, I’m teaching English in Korea, then of course you go to Korea! Well, you do if you’re me, anyway. Clearly not many other people do because she’s never had anyone stay with her before, which is why she’s completely disorganised and has no bedding. So I can’t stay with her tonight, but she seemed to feel really bad about that so I’m not mad at her. Especially since she and her friends helped me find the place I’m in now, which is a guest house run by a Korean family. The lady doesn’t speak much English, but she is really nice. She just came into my room to talk to me and say goodnight and ask me to stay again!

I met Dani in the late morning. We hadn’t seen each other for two years – she was on exchange at my university two years ago. She’s from Canada. She’s been in Korea for eighteen months and loves it. She only started learning Korean when she got here, but she can read perfectly because Hangul is a very simple writing system. Her friends, despite their basic Korean skills, were really surprised when I told them I struggle to read Japanese. They can all read Korean fine – Dani said you can learn it in a day!

Dani and I went to Gyeongbokgung palace, one of five royal palaces in Seoul, and the main one from about the 14th to 16th centuries. Then Japan invaded and destroyed most of it. It’s being restored now, and looks gorgeous – as it would have looked back in the 14th century, because the (amazing) paintwork is still fresh.

When we left the subway station, it had just started to snow. Beautiful soft flakes filled the air, and the ground quickly became white. Because it was freshly fallen, it was so soft to walk on. I could feel the softness through my shoes. As I walked, if I dragged my feet a little bit, the snowflakes would shoot out in front of them! Or if I walked normally, it would make squeaky, crunchy sounds. This is something that we Australians are not used to at all, and I found it magical.

Asian palaces, unlike European ones, are mostly outdoors. Asian winters are as harsh as European winters, but summers are harsher, so the buildings are designed to be opened up from all sides. While European palaces focus their beauty on what you can see inside, Asian palaces focus on what you can see outside. This isn’t to say that what’s inside isn’t beautiful too – the paintwork at Gyeongbokgung is stunning. The one room we could look into had a striking painting of a dragon, and the walls were decorated with intricate patterns in very bright colours – mostly a bright but soft and calming green.

And all this in snow... We were walking around for at least an hour, as the snow on the ground got thicker and thicker and we got whiter and whiter. Dani had forgotten her beanie (that’s tuque in Canadian), and her hair froze!

I saw my first ever frozen pond. I couldn’t even tell it was a pond, because it was covered in snow. There was one part which wasn’t frozen because it was heated to protect the fish! They were all swimming around in one corner.

Next, we met up with Dani’s friends Thuy from Sydney, Rick from Canada, Shawn from Colorado and Jay, a Korean local. We had lunch, which was my first Korean meal: fried rice with okonomiyaki toppings. It came with a clear broth and help-yourself pickles: one was yellow sliced daikon radish pickles and the other was chunks of daikon in a kimchi sauce. I thought kimchi was just cabbages and sometimes cucumbers pickled in a chilli sauce – I was wrong. Both the vegetables and the sauce are changeable: it can be just about anything. And Koreans sure do eat it a lot. I’m looking forward to eating more of it.

Then we went to the Korean National Museum, just the older history part. It's all a bit of a blur because I was really tired, but there were three kingdoms and then they were united by the Shilla in the 7th century, but were later divided again. Jay explained that Korea’s territory changed a lot at different times – it used to stretch into what is now China and even part of Mongolia and Siberia. There were wars which caused it to contract, and at one point China took land right down into the peninsula, but Korea took some of it back later.

We had dinner at an Italian restaurant. Even Italian food is served with pickles in Korea, except that they’re American-style dill pickles – they were really nice! The staff kept bringing us more, because side dishes are bottomless in Korea. Awesome. Eating pickles all the time can’t be good for your teeth, though...

The next morning, the first thing I had to do was change my money. After turning in my 82,000 yen, all of a sudden I became a millionaire. You think prices in yen are hard to figure out? In won you have to remove three zeros to get the dollar equivalent!

So I’m in the bank and the lady is counting out my money, and she takes out a huge wad of cash from a drawer – you know how banks keep money in pre-counted bundles. I thought she would take my money out of that bundle, but then she took out more money! That bundle was all mine – it was a million won! In 1000 won notes. It was an inch thick!

I’m not a millionaire anymore, though, because I spent lots of money today. I went to a market. It was a market and a half – it was huge! It’s not just one market, though: it’s about four in one area. Some parts of it are more like shops, but they still look like market stalls because they spill into the street – which they have to do because they’re tiny: about 3m by 2m. The market covers several city blocks; it’s a rabbit warren of laneways going in all directions. It’s dirty, it’s cramped, but my god it’s organised. There are sections. In each section, each of those tiny shops sells one thing. Material, kitchen goods, sinks, ladders, dried fish, mats, futons, pickles... Each shop is specialised and each section is specialised, so that all the shops selling any one thing are grouped together. It means you can wander for hours and not find what you’re looking for, but if you know where to find what you’re looking for, you’ll have an awful lot of choice.

I initially entered a produce section in an enclosed arcade, with spices and dried fish hanging on strings, and a bit of kimchi. Then I got to an eatery section. I bought a savoury pancake, some battered zucchini and something else which might have been meat. I’m a vegetarian (well, pescatarian technically), but I may have to put up with accidentally eating meat occasionally because when you can’t read or speak, it’s hard to avoid. You don’t discover it until it’s on your plate, and I don’t want to waste things or be rude to the person serving me by not eating them. This didn’t taste like meat, but it didn’t taste like vegetable either. Could have been fake meat?

The pancake was good because it went really well with the kimchi it came with. It was onions, garlic and chillies pickled in a soy-based sauce, and the manner of eating the pancake was to soak it in the pickle sauce. I was glad there was a man already there eating it when I sat down, so I was able to figure that out!

The weird thing was, though, that all the food stalls around this one were selling exactly the same thing. It was all pancakes and battered things – and all the same kinds of pancakes and battered things! When I left that section, I came to a large boiled sausages section. It was filled with steam, and every stall there was selling chunks of enormous boiled sausages. Even the eateries at this market are compartmentalised!

Next I entered a pickles section, which I at first thought contained regular chilli kimchi. On closer inspection it revealed itself to be pickled crab, pickled small crabs (in their shells), and pickled fish. The next section was the bedding section! There’s no rhyme or reason to the location of the sections.

This was all in an enclosed arcade, but then I went back outside to find a rabbit warren of shops on tiny laneways. More bedding, kitchenware, eco-bags... all the different thicknesses of rubber bands you could possibly imagine... along with many goods transport motorbikes zipping around, and lots of brown slush on the roads.

I had a shopping list of my own. I didn’t forget to bring anything to Korea, but I didn’t anticipate needing some things (like sunglasses – snow reflects a lot of light). Nor did I anticipate the uselessness of some of the things I’d brought. For example, the crappy shoes I’d bought in a hurry in August when I realised how maddening shoelaces are in Japan because you have to take your shoes off all the time. These shoes do up with Velcro, were the only shoes that fitted me in my local shoe shop and also