Asia Trip 2011 - Part 2

Sunday, October 16
We took a day trip to another city at the southern tip of Korea, Busan (about 280 miles away from Seoul). I had taken a trip to Busan back in 2002, when I studied abroad for the summer in Seoul. Back then, we took a bus, and the bus ride took like 5 or 6 hours.

Nowadays, there is a high-speed KTX train, and we were able to get on a non-stop train from Seoul to Busan which took just about 2 hours.

The train stations in Korea are super nice.

We went with our friends Susan and Carlos (two KTX bears above haha), and also Carlos' brother Clayton and his fiancee Nora (who we met for the first time that day).

Our first stop in Busan was a fish market... it was very crowded with all sorts of live (and freshly dead) fish and other seafood for sale. We ate at a restaurant that served us a few different types of fish, pan fried. Pretty delicious...

After lunch, we took the subway to one of Busan's beaches.

There were a lot of cute cafes and restaurants along the waterfront. Notice "Lamer Cafe" below. We think it was supposed to be "La Mer Cafe"... the space makes a big difference haha.

We ate another meal at one of the many seafood restaurants. Busan is famous for really good sashimi, but the sashimi we got wasn't that great... maybe we ordered the wrong thing or didn't pick the best restaurant, but it was just eh.

We took the train back home after our late lunch/early dinner, and capped off the night with some street food :)

Monday, October 17
Eric and I had lunch and tea/dessert with three of my aunts (my dad's cousins) and my second cousin Heejae. We had some good conversations catching up, and of course gossiping about our family haha.

The neighborhood where we ate is called Insa-dong, and its a cute/trendy area with more of the older traditional style buildings/architecture. Lots of small alleyways filled with cafes and restaurants, and also some shops.

Later that night, we met up with all of our friends for dinner. We have several friends doing Asia trips around the same time as us, and we all overlapped in Seoul for a few days.

Dinner that night was amazing... Korean bbq place that gives you a lot of different types of dduk (rice cake) to wrap the meat in. They also put kimchi at the bottom of the grill, so the fat from the meat drips down into the kimchi, and the kimchi cooks in the meat fat. yumm haha... (btw I think Eric and I have each gained at least 5 pounds so far during this trip.)

Good times... more to come...

Asia Trip 2011 - Part 1

For those of you who didn't know, Eric and I are currently in the midst of our big trip of the year -- Korea (Oct 14th through 20th) and Taiwan (Oct 20th through 30th).

Seoul is a HUGE area... more of what we would consider a county in the US (or kind of like "the LA area"), and there are over 10 million people who live in Seoul proper, with another 10 million people in the surrounding suburbs. According to wikitravel, "by some measures it is the second largest urban agglomeration on the planet, after Greater Tokyo."

We landed in Seoul on Friday, October 14th and got to our hotel, which was super nice and very centrally located... that is one nice thing about traveling a lot for work, is utilizing all those miles and hotel points for vacation! We got settled in, and then went walking around Myung-dong, a trendy shopping area right by our hotel:

Lots of people out on the streets...

Lots of yummy street food (spicy rice cakes, fish cakes cooked in broth, various other snacks) everywhere:

The subway system is pretty awesome... super clean, very extensive and organized, frequent trains, and super cheap at less than 90 cents (USD) per ride. 

On Saturday, it started pouring rain. We stayed out of the rain by checking out a huge traditional food market area, and also by going shopping for clothes inside ginormous malls.

There were tons of stands that sold various food products at the market area:

So many red peppers!

Lots of different spicy side dishes:

One of the many ginormous shopping malls, with tons of clothes/accessory shops inside. We literally spent like 3 or 4 hours inside this one building, and there were several more the same size or bigger right on the same street:

Eric had a hard time fitting into Asian men sized clothes. This jacket was the largest size they had (XL) and too tight! Also, I thought the baby/kids clothes below were hilarious haha [pics below taken on phone]

On Saturday night, we met up with our friends Susan and Carlos (and Carlos' friend) and ate some delicious spicy chicken, cooked at your own table with veggies, rice cakes and noodles.

 

Another Seoul night scene in a different area:

Okay... more to come! We're currently in Taipei, our first night in Taiwan...

Slumber Parties

As much as Eric and I sometimes wish we still lived in the city (to a point where we even considered renting a room in SF so we could crash there anytime we wanted instead of driving/training back home to San Mateo), we definitely appreciate having a HOUSE.

This past weekend, we really took advantage of our space when we had out-of-town friends visiting, and we had a big slumber party with four couples and a baby :). It was definitely a chill weekend -- lots of catching up and hanging out in our sunny backyard, drinking beer/wine and playing cornhole. You can't get too crazy with a 16-month-old in tow, but we all enjoyed the relaxing weekend.

Part of our slumber party crew:

The cutest houseguest we've had so far:

haha that yogurt pic cracks me up.

Back to blogging about the kitchen and more on granite and backsplash next! Exciting, I know ;)

Before and After

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, we unfortunately don't have many "before" photos of the kitchen for various reasons (lost our digital camera at Bay to Breakers, lost my iphone with photos on them, etc...)

But here are some photos that Eric had taken of our house/kitchen on the day we first saw our house, at the Open House event. Side note: the house was staged to be sold, so the decorations in the "before" photos are not ours!

The BIGGEST and most obvious change we made with the remodel was to tear down a wall that previously stood between the dining room and the kitchen. The kitchen had a door entryway, and if you closed the door, you would be completely enclosed in the kitchen. Here is a bad-angled shot of the doorway into the kitchen, with the wall enclosing it:

We tore down the wall and made it into a counter/bar top. We also closed up the window you see in the above (and below) photo. I would normally hate to decrease natural light into a building, but since we were opening up the kitchen to the dining room (which has a big sliding glass door), we didn't really need the extra light, and DID need the extra wall space.

The two photos below face the same wall, so you can see where the window was removed (our new fridge now covers that area).

Beyond those two structural changes, we changed/replaced EVERYTHING else. Our original kitchen was clean and usable, but seemed like it was almost the original kitchen the house was built with in the 1950's.

We changed out the laminate(?) countertops with granite. The floor was some sort of plastic-y thing that looked like it was glued on, and we replaced that with oak hardwood floors that matched the rest of our house. New custom cabinets. Stainless steel appliances (which Eric briefly blogged about here). New sink, faucet, etc.

One of my favorite decisions that we made was regarding the backsplash (quartzite stone tiles that our contractor cut into smaller strips, with a glass mosaic accent). I'll blog more about that later.

 

Knocking down the wall opens up the whole house so much more. And the counter/bar top also gives us a place to stand/hang out/converse while others (usually me haha) cook in the kitchen :).

Our first guests to have dinner with us in our new kitchen:

I <3 my family :D

Finished!

Two photos for now... more detailed commentary to follow.

Isn't it awesome? :)