Gluten-Free Runner

Korea was a whirlwind of adventure, family, and food- a ridiculous amount of food!  For 11 days, I had the opportunity to reunite with my extended family (most of whom I hadn’t seen in over 15 years), explore my mother country, and eat lots of mouth-watering Korean food.  It’s kind of crazy and sad to think that the last time I had seen my aunts, uncles, and cousins was when I was 10 years old.  To be honest, I can barely recollect any of these memories.  My brother, parents, and I are really close, but we don’t connect with our extended family too often, if at all.  In fact, I am the first of my direct family to make the trip back to Korea.  My parents have been back a couple of times due to family emergencies, but those visits have been short-lived and usually filled with sorrow.  My trip, on the other hand, was AMAZING and filled with joy!

We started off our long journey from SFO to Seoul with a direct flight on United Airlines.  The airplane food was pretty awful and I couldn’t eat much of it at all.  Good thing I had some hard-boiled eggs and snacks to hold me over!  Once we arrived in Seoul, we immediately took a bus to Gimpo Airport to fly from Seoul to Ulsan, Korea.  My first meal in Korea was bimbimbap (rice bowl concoction with veggies and meat) at Gimpo airport which was pretty delicious.

My uncle (dad’s side) and cousin live in Ulsan which is a smaller suburb an hour flight from Seoul.  They live in a really cool area with a riverside view and tons of smaller mom & pop shops and street food behind their building.  It’s a great combination of new and old world.  Their condo is new with all the amenities (virtual golf, gym, etc.), but with the old world that I envision when I think of Asia in general.

View from my uncle and aunt’s condo:

Street food- duk (Korean rice cakes).  Freshly made.  Yum…

Freshly made sweet potatoes.  I would love to walk outside of my apartment right now and buy some.

More street food- dukboki (rice cakes in Korean hot sauce).

Plums galore.

Gimbap (Korean rolls).

For me, the worst part of traveling is having to eat out for almost every meal.  While I enjoy trying new restaurants, I’m not the type of person who eats out for every meal.  I actually start to feel pretty gross when I eat out too often. When I was backpacking through Europe several years ago, I tried to buy food from grocery stores as much as possible, but it gets difficult to eat real meals when you don’t have a kitchen and are on the go.  Staying with family in Korea was nice because my relatives cooked homemade meals for us almost every night.  We went out to restaurants for a few meals and tried street food, but I was still able to eat some healthy, homemade meals too.

My relatives fed us like farmers fattening their stock!  The volume of food I ate was pretty ridiculous.  They kept commenting that we weren’t eating enough and didn’t like the food even after eating second and third helpings!  There were definitely some nights where I felt my stomach was going to explode.  No joke.  I ended up working out a little bit at the gym, but it was not enough to counteract all the food I was eating.

My cousin took us out for sashimi by the beach in Ulsan.  I usually stick with salmon, but tried to eat more adventurously in Korea.  I’m not even sure what kind of fish we ate.

After 3 nights in Ulsan, we were on the road again and off to Seoul.  However, storms and winds deterred our efforts to fly and our flight ended up getting cancelled.  Thankfully, my cousin was with us to help us out.  Even though I speak Korean, it’s nice to have a native around.  Luckily, there is a bullet train from Ulsan to Seoul that only takes 2 hours and 20 minutes.  Not too shabby.

Next up- Seoul!