Gwangju Restaurant Guide

As everyone who knows me understands, I love food. I get really excited about good food, and when I find something delicious I usually can’t help but eat it again and again. I also LOVE eating out. It was tough for me when I first moved to Gwangju in August 2008 because there weren’t a whole lot of restaurants that catered to western tastes. I’m not talking fast food here; there are plenty of Lotterias and Mickey Ds. I’m talking about a diversity of foods and flavors, as well as healthy and organic food. In just the couple of years I’ve lived here a ton of great restaurants have opened, plus I’ve discovered some great Korean places as well (of course). I hope this list helps any newbies to the Ju’ and even some old timers that want to spice up a night out.

First Nepal- Delicious Indian goodness. The food is great, the service is great, and I always want to go here. Definitely the best Indian spot in town, the staff is very friendly as well. It is a little on the spendy side, Dan and I usually spend around 25,000 won for a boozeless dinner.

Directions: Downtown, head down the street across from the Migliore, take the second right. Second floor, it’s on your left. Or head down the pedestrian street next to the YMCA, after about 150 yards you'll pass a mini-stop on the intersection on your right, then it's 20 yards ahead to your left.

Outdoor Galbi- I don’t know what the name of this restaurant really is, but it’s quite famous in the foreigner circles as having the best beef galbi in town. You get many delicious sides dishes (note the emphasis on delicious, no live octopus or strange gelatinous milky creature here) and the meat is fairly priced. Dan and I love it because if we’re not that hungry we get two portions and spend about 15,000, if we are really hungry we get three. Service is good, you can drink the night away there, enjoying K-pop tunes on the giant TV outside!

Directions: Down the same street as First Nepal 75 yards, big outdoor seating area, on the right.

Shabu Shabu- Originally Japanese, this is a soup that you cook at your table. After the big pot of spicy broth with mushrooms and greens cooks down, add thinly sliced beef. Dip that in wasabi and red sauce and eat. Fucking delicious. Seriously. You also get side dishes and udon noodles to add. The best part, when you are finished the server takes your pot and fries up some rice in it. So good. 10,000 a person.

Directions: Downtown, walk through the YMCA's corridor, between the tourist info office and the photo shop, and it's across the alley on your left. There's also a good Shabu Shabu place in Sangmu on the same street as City Hall about half a kilometer toward the bus station. It's on the left when coming from City Hall.

Alleyway- Opened recently by a permanent foreigner fixture in Gwangju, Michael Simning. This small restaurant offers some really good western food, including breakfast on the weekend. This is a must have whenever you are feeling a little homesick or just need some good conversation, even if it's someone else's. Reasonably priced, we usually spend about 20,000 with sodas. They do take-out as well.

Directions: Downtown, on the street with the Lotteria, (the first street toward the river from the amphitheater park) across from Zara’s, down a SMALL alley. Right next store you can find the foreigner market.

Lemon Table: This small, kitschy café offers some delicious burgers, onion rings, pasta and salads. Dan and I have only tried the chicken salad and a couple of the burgers, but we were very satisfied with everything we’ve had. Definitely choose this over Burger King if you need a burger! We usually spend about 23,000 here.

Directions: This one is slightly difficult to explain, it's on the corner of the amphitheater park furthest from the intersection. It's to the left of Gloria Jean's Coffee.

The Couple Set Place- I don’t know what the actual name of this downtown Italian restaurant is, but we love the “couple set” here! It includes your choice of salad, pizza, pasta and drinks, You also get soup and cheese bread to start. It is MORE than enough for two people, and the cheapest deal around (22,800). Stick to the regular pizza’s and pasta and you can’t go wrong. We like the chicken salad, I’ve never tried the other one offered. The décor is very unusual and interesting, including very comfortable couches and an indoor balcony.

Directions: Down the street from Zara’s, in the alley right next to UNIGLO clothing store. You will see a fat Italian chef statue outside, it’s on the second floor. There's another good couple set place in Chonnam that is similar. They supply construction paper and crayons on the tables. This one is down the first street parallel to the main Chondae hoomoon street. It also has a fat Italian chef outside showing the way, it's on the second floor as well.

Hoa Binh- This is a fairly new Vietnamese restaurant in Sangmu. Even though it’s a bit of a journey for us, we’ve been here pretty much every other week since we found out about it. The Pho noodle soup is excellent, and comparable to what we ate in Vietnam. We particularly like the chicken and flank steak soups. We usually get one large soup and one rice option, the spicy pork rice is SO good. It’s cheap too, free tea and it comes to about 18,000 for the both of us.

Directions: On the main street, next to E-Mart, look for the Seven Monkey’s Coffee. It is in the same building, second floor, beneath Todai seafood buffet.

中华村 (Joong hua chon)- Chinese food in Yong Bong- This is also a new addition to our eating out routine. Recently opened on the Yong Bong Dong side of Chonam University, the owner spent many years in China and has brought all he learned with him to satisfy our Chinese food cravings (I went through the shakes myself). This isn’t exactly like the all fried Chinese take-out you get back home, but I think it’s better. Definitely ask for the set menu. We LOVE the kungpao chicken and fried noodle set, it comes with some awesome steamed rolls also. This place is cheap (usually around 20,000, but if you want to bare bones it you can get a set to fill two people for 8-13,000), and we always leave absolutely stuffed.

Directions: Next to Hoban Apt, three long blocks from the Seattle Coffee in Yong Bong Dong. It's tricky to get here actually, so here's a map.

Chinese Food in the bus terminal- Again, I don’t know the name of this place, but it is easy to find, right next to the TGI Friday’s in the bus terminal. The menu is all in Korean, and the staff isn’t friendly, but the food is good and reasonably priced. If worst comes to worst, you can point at things in the display window. If you are in the bus terminal, I would recommend this restaurant, or the sushi place next store for cheap, quick delicious food.

Grissini Italian Trattoria- I very recently tried this restaurant and I am so sad I haven’t discovered it before now (we're sad but our budget is happy). The food here is AMAZING. True to Italy, the portions here are small but serious quality. My friends and I shared two homemade pasta dishes, a salmon dish and a steak with veggies. We also had the most delicious bruschetta I’ve ever eaten. Everything was cooked impeccably, the service was perfect and the atmosphere was peaceful and comforting. If you want to really impress your date, or just have a delicious meal with friends for a special occasion, this is the only option! For the four of us, five dishes and a bottle of wine, the total was 157,000. Not cheap, but well worth it.

Directions: In Samgmu, near the LotteMart, across the street from VIPS, on the first floor, next to a coffee shop.

If you haven’t tried some of these places, please do! I’m sure there are many other delicious places as well, I didn’t mention TGI Friday’s, Outback or VIPS because well, they are pretty much the same back home, minus the kimchi. If you know of any more great places let me know, we love trying new restaurants.

Amanda. (Some parenthetical expressions supplied by Dan).

Dmz OMG

Considering our pending departure from Korea, Dan and I decided it might be our last chance to make a trip to the DMZ. We signed up for a USO tour (94,000 won) and traveled to Seoul late Friday night so we could be ready to go EARLY Saturday morning (7:15 am!). The USO was super easy to find and most people had beaten us there, about 45 people were waiting in lobby when we got there. Our clothing and passport were checked, no shorts and no printed tee-shirts or tank tops allowed! Only foreigners are allowed to visit, apparently Koreans could feel such an overwhelming desire to see their families in North Korea that they are a just too tempted to run straight across the border and defect to the wonderful dictatorship to the north. Either that or they might open fire on the North Korean guards. I’m not sure.

Anyway, as always when I am around a group of people that speak English, I cannot help but just sit and listen to everyone’s conversation the whole time. The people next to us were incredibly hung-over, the group behind us was from Australia, and there was an adorable family who had adopted a Korean girl who had come back to show her where she was born. And I didn’t actually speak to any of these people. This eavesdropping problem is annoying as hell, and I sure hope it fades when I get back to the states.

So we went to the border, which is actually just little flags. No fence. No wall. Nothing. Well, except for snipers and land mines. We got to go in one of the buildings that is directly on the border and actually stand on the North Korean side. So yep, we went to North Korea. I thought the DMZ was one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve seen in Korea. Tons of foliage and wildlife. A sharp contrast to the majority of South Korea.

An army dude conducted the border part of the tour. He wasn’t too informed about the history of the two countries. He was also chock full of propaganda, referring to North Korea as communist every single time he mentioned the country, which I thought was pretty off base. Yeah, I think it’s more of a totalitarian dictatorship/ sovereign death-cult, but you know, same same in the the United States government’s eyes. Axis of evil, hate us for our freedoms and all that.

We had an adorable Korean woman for the rest of tour that included going down the tunnels dug by North Koreans to invade Seoul and discovered in the 1980’s and 90’s. We also went to a train station that will supposedly connect South Korea with the Trans Siberian railway. When the two Koreas are reunited. Yep, not holding my breath for that, but it would be pretty cool to ride a train from Seoul to London. All in all, it was kind of interesting but not too stimulating. Kinda like Korea.

How the World Cup solved my moderation problem

I’ve fallen down on the job as a blogger lately… I’m sorry! But I’m back on the boat now. One of the reasons I haven’t written anything lately is that I really wanted to see if my experiment with drinking in moderation would work out. So far, it has. I think so many months off really helped me put some distance and perspective on the whole situation, and now I’m back and better than ever! So how did the World Cup do this for me? Well, in South Korea this world Cup has been a big deal. So of course Dan and my friends want to go watch it at the bar. And I want to go too! So I decided to drink one drink every half (that’s 45 minutes). This works perfectly, my body has plenty of time to metabolize and I get just a bit of a buzz. So we’ve had quite a few successful nights out, just having a few drinks and going home early (you know, 3am). Overall, I think I’m just getting back to my normal self!

In other lifestyle news, we’ve also been eating a lot less meat and generally being healthier which has also helped my motivation to not drink so much. Who wants to ruin a great diet with excess calories in alcohol? I’ve also been taking a Pilates class twice a week and it is AWESOME! I completely forgot how great a difficult workout feels afterward. I can’t wait to have more time to workout! I really crave endorphins, whether it’s from a hard workout or a night out in the club, so when I get that feeling in a healthy way it helps keep me on the right track.

I think this time in life (late twenties) is difficult because I’ve already achieved so much of what I set out to do in my teens (graduate college, travel, get a steady job) and it feels like I should have everything figured out by now. But the truth is I’m still learning and growing, setting new goals and figuring everything out. I just consider myself SO lucky to be in the position I’m in, to be able to have such a good time (even too much of a good time!) with such fun people, not to mention the ability to travel and live “the dream” as they say. Life is a little scary, going back to the states is pretty much the most daunting thing EVER, in my opinion, but it’s all about change.

A year and a half.

Two years ago I don't think I could have possibly been more exited by a politician than I was by Barack Obama. Two years later my feelings have changed, but not in the way that you might think. I don't regret voting for him; it was the right decision. Barack Obama is, and continues to be, the best president of my lifetime. When he was campaigning he struck me as a politician that was eminently reasonable, who looked upon the world as I or any reasonable person would. If the wars are bankrupting us, let's stop the wars, if corporate collusion in the political process has made advancement impossible than lets stop lobbying and collusion. It's undeniable that despite the nitpickers who might bristle at the Daschle or Sestak scandals or how he undermined his campaign promise to ban lobbyists, he has a speck in his own eye while the previous administrations had planks you could dive off of. He also struck me as someone intelligent enough and moral enough to make the right decision even when it might be unpopular.

He has made significant gains that make his presidency a success. We have been trying to enact health care reform for a generation despite insane protests, absurd fabrications, absurd fabrications which are fortunately rebutted by an actual economist, and adolescent shortsightedness. The legislation is weak (people need health care now not in 2014), but is a great stride forward putting an end to notorious insurer abuses and introducing subsidies for people priced out of being able to go to the doctor. We are leaving Iraq, more slowly than expected, but I haven't stopped holding my breath. He's been trying to close Guantanamo Bay, but it's proving more difficult than anticipated so I'll cut the guy some slack. The stimulus package was a success and the unemployment situation is improving. And hey, if anything comes of this, I might have much less reason to inveigh so strongly against my home country.

Let it be known that I am disappointed. I'm disappointed in Barack Obama to be sure. Not much, but he has let me down significantly enough to disappoint me. His decisions on civil liberties have not sat well with me or Glenn Greenwald. And his reticence to prosecute or even admit the Naziesque (I know you're not supposed to use this in argument, but this is right out of the Axis WWII playbook) behavior of the previous administration. If Greenwald's vitriol seems harsher on Obama than the actual perpetrators it's because Obama should know better and do something about it and anyway what do you say to people who experiment on prisoners. His extension of the war in Afghanistan is disappointing, but in the end understandable, and I forgive him for it. I was even ready to forgive him for letting the Bush administration's crimes go unpunished at first, but what has come out is so bad that we can't just let them keep walking around free.

The Obama administration has put me off living in the US. It's not their policies that have done this, but the reaction to their existence and their policies by the general populous and the media. The echo chamber with which the media shapes public opinion by confirming the conclusions they draw with the fact that they've drawn the conclusions, the straw men, and the argumentum ad populum which they use after they've misrepresented the facts to the populous and created a distorted opinion burns me with anger when I observe it. The infinitesimally short memory of the population and their inability to critically think about the issues presented to them which is then reinforced by the media who employ commentators who are either as ignorant as the populous just cockily so, or charlatans who reinforce an absurd narrative for personal gain. I cannot deal with it. Here are Obama's poll numbers. Here it shows that 66% of Americans think that the heath care bill which costs $0 over ten years and will supply coverage to 40 million uninsured Americans will cost too much. Wow, that's interesting America, is there a collective cavity in your skulls or are you just so soaked with disinformation you can't form a coherent opinion anymore. Obama is being blamed left and right for the oil spill in the gulf. The media has done such a hatchet job on him and the issues in the gulf that his response to the spill has gone from this to this in less than a month. It's called argumentum ad nauseam and the right uses it shamelessly. Most people make an absurd claim and when everyone looks at them like they have five heads they stop. The sophists on the right have learned to persist in parroting themselves until their lame talking points infiltrate the members of our society less disposed to independent reasoning. "Obama's Katrina" "Obama's Katrina" "Obama's Katrina" well sure, ok, except that it was built under Clinton and Bush and it's spill was the result of the corruption of the MMS under the Bush administration and the loosening of the regulatory framework kickstarted by the golden boy of golden boys, Reagan. Maybe Obama should have cleaned them up before this happened but he had plenty on his hands with a foundering economy and comprehensive health reform to push through despite another gerrymandered public response.

The stimulus package has driven the job growth evident in a previous graph, but the right blocked that at every turn. And now all the public wants are jobs. Unemployment is the number one issue as the job market turned to sludge, no new positions and thousands of new job seekers. The reasons for the economic crisis are complex. It's hard to point to an epicenter, but if you had to you'd have to point to the banking and investment industries that over-leveraged themselves with minimal oversight and labyrinthine debt contracts. Without that private investment and the credit markets drying up it became difficult to obtain loans for new businesses and businesses that were getting by on credit had to go under. People became unemployed, stopped spending, and more people became unemployed. The democrats and Obama have created jobs and stopped the job loss spiral that ended the Bush administration. And this is what the senatorial midterm map looks like. Are you fucking kidding me. This is a big fucking boat to turn around and the progress that has been made since 2009 as a direct result of the administrations policies is not insignificant. So, I'm sorry if the job market doesn't look wonderful just yet, but now you want to hand the reins back to the people that destroyed the job market hoping that they'll create jobs with their ideas that lowering taxes and cutting spending does that (it doesn't). It's so bad that Rand Paul is significantly ahead in Kentucky. Ok, well that's Kentucky, but the insane Pat Toomey is actually leading Joe Sestak in most PA polls. Another Santorum, I'm really holding my breath for that election.

If that isn't enough the federal deficit looms like a bludgeon in every discourse with the right who weren't so worried about it when it was funding wars instead of jobs (which is what everyone wants). Run away spending! We need jobs! Where are the jobs! Oh, my god Washington politicians are spending so much and are so out of touch with Americans! The spending is what is creating jobs. If it hasn't quite caught up with the population yet, perhaps you should talk to the people who weakened the legislation, oh right you support that guy because he wants to cut spending. The cognitive dissonance is massive. The deficits that the Obama administration is running and will run will put people back to work and will not be larger than Bush's deficits (except for the stimulus years). The debt will be at a very manageable 67% of GDP, less than during WWII, and government revenue will increase as employment increases. If spending was slashed, employment would falter and revenues would diminish, increasing deficits in spite of spending cuts.

Overall, I fear that the US will put the right back in the driver seat in 2012 because at the end of the day no good deed goes unpunished. And Obama will go the way of Jimmy Carter, good ideas undone by a populous informed by disingenuous media and bereft of critical thinking skills. When Obama ran, I felt hope. I hoped that the right things would be appreciated as the right things by the people around me. I hoped that the US's situation was not hopeless, that we could get rid of the corruption and the corporate collusion, the wrongheadedness, and the misinformation. I hoped we could make rational choices to advantage us in our future, alternative energies, universal health care, environmental protection, wealth redistribution, eliminating usury, but it's apparent that those choices are going to be opposed tooth and nail by a charlatan pundit class and an impressionable population and eventually overturned or watered down as the empire sinks into decline. Well, it was worth a shot.