Trip to the Oriental Medicine Market at Chongnyangni

I thought I'd check out one of the Oriental medicine markets in Seoul, since I have to teach Oriental medicine major students next semester. There are literally hundreds of unidentifiable herbs here at these stalls - love it! Hope my students can explain all the different uses of each plant/root/stalk/stem/flower/berry...whatever.

Fishmonger prepares dried fish ready for swimming through the air

My favorite market 'ajumma' serves pumpkin soup with rice cakes - warms ya up real fast on a cold morning

Digital art

Storm descends on sea
I recently had a long drawn out argument with my mother over the benefits of digital art compared with traditional art forms. Of course, she was all for handmade art that was tactile and could be created on a huge scale, and often in three dimensions. Her paintings tend to be at least one square meter in size and consist of chunky, impasto layers built up onto the canvas.
My arguments in favor of digital art didn't exactly hold when the benefits of my mother's approach to art were taken into consideration. But I love being able to create weird and wonderful collages from existing photos, that can be rearranged in ways that go way beyond the confines of what the human hand alone can manage to create...and no clean up, no being driven over the edge by smelly turps or poisonous paints seeping into the skin, nor the wasting of precious materials when something goes wrong.
Maybe the ultimate way around the traditional media versus computer-generated debate, would be to somehow integrate both the digitally created and hand-produced in one creation, maybe toying around with ideas first on the computer before recreating certain parts of it in another traditional art media form that can utilize three dimensions and occupy real space, rather than being limited to a flat, two-dimensional printout.

Making Photoshop collages are great fun

The joy of eating from twenty side dishes all at once.

Time to dig in and enjoy!
It was Gichol's birthday last weekend, and to celebrate we took him to a traditional Korean yongyangdolsotbibimbap (yes, definitely a mouthful, pun intended) restaurant. This dish could loosely translate as nutritional mixed rice and veg. in a hot pot, but is much tastier than it sounds,thanks to the amazing variety of side dishes that come with the main earthenware pot full of black rice, ginseng, jujube, and mushrooms.
Australians would storm a restaurant like this en masse if it were located right in the heart of the Sydney foodie scene back home. The careful balance of sweet, sour, salty, spicy, bland or astringent, coming from all those assembled side dishes makes this local specialty a must for travellers to Korea. Unfortunately, it seems that only dishes like kalbi and bulgogi have made it onto the international stage at this time - certainly an opportunity for enterprising Koreans awaits.

Matthew in a vegetarian lover's paradise