Foreigner Foodies - Day 1 - Seoul food

Saturday morning. 8am. I had less than 4 hours sleep, and was taking an elevator to the third floor of an unremarkable building in Dobong-gu. I could have climbed the stairs but my head was fuzzy and my legs unresponsive. I felt a desperate need for coffee. I was looking for the offices of a production company working with Arirang TV, a local English-language TV station.

           Three days before, Wednesday, one of my co-teachers, on the way to class, had made me a proposition. His brother, he had said, is a producer for Arirang TV, who was going to be making a food and travel TV show featuring foreigners travelling around Korea and traditional foods from each area, and they’re looking for one more foreigner, would I like to be on it?

           I needed some more details: when would it be? How long would it take? Would the school be ok with me (possibly in their eyes) taking another job? Most importantly, would it be like those Korean reality shows all over TV with overblown comedians made to perform ridiculous tasks so their inane reactions could be caricatured and replayed with sound effects and dramatic subtitling? I was assured that it was not, that I could speak English, that it would take 6 days, two of which during the first week of school vacation. To these terms I agreed, so long as my school was in agreement. My coteacher spoke to my VP, who readily agreed; I received a phone call from a lovely woman, 성진이, on the production staff, who confirmed my participation, and then sent me an email with all the details: meeting times, shooting schedules, etc.

           I was also told that I should bring my computer to blog, or a diary to fill in, as this would be part of the show. I worked out also that the show was not for Arirang, a minor cable network, but KBS, one of the three major Korean broadcasting stations, with a potential viewership of everyone. Still, that made it more exciting.

           My attitude as I arrived at the office on the first day was one of anticipation and nervousness. I didn’t know what to expect, but my resolution had been to merely roll with whatever happened. I was fairly confident of my ability to elocute and convey an opinion, I was extremely comfortable talking about food, and I’d done a lot of travelling in Korea, so I knew I could draw on that experience.

           When I reached the office there was no activity. Lights were on inside (I could see through the glass door) but there was no movement. The door slid open at the push of a button, and I spotted some legs beneath a desk. 안영하세요? The legs began to move, and a half-asleep Korean woman raised her head from the desk on which she had clearly spent the night. Confused, I didn’t know what to ask, and it quickly became clear she didn’t know why I was there. Leaving, I called 진이. It turned out there had been a message, I had not received it, and as a result I was two hours early. In the office, at every desk, people were beginning to manifest from the bundles of clothing lying across every chair. The room slowly came alive, like a kicked bee-hive, moving through gelatin.

           I went to sit in a coffee shop over the road, downed several average-but-cheap coffees, and read my book – a meditation in itself. About an hour later 진이 joined me, having rushed in to work to keep me company. A lovely lady, she used to be a flight attendant for Emirates airlines, but now works both at a university and for various production companies as a translator.

           When we went back across the road to the office everything was a lot more lively. Three of the four other foreigners had already arrived, and the fourth followed soon after me. Already waiting were David, Cynthia (Cindy), and Leigh, the last being Nobuko. All told we made two Americans (David and Cynthia), a Canadian (Leigh), a Japanese woman (Nobuko), and one South African (yours truly). Besides Cindy and myself, all the others seemed to have some television experience. David had been on a previous episode of this same series, in which he participated in a cooking competition; Leigh is a photographer who has written an article for the Korea Herald and subsequently been inundated with requests for TV appearances; Nobuko is a freelance reporter/announcer who has reported news, sports, etc on Japanese network TV.

           The news that we would be appearing on the far more mainstream KBS rather than Arirang TV raised an important question: was this an English-language show? The answer was no, which was concerning to me, though I was assured that I should just speak as much Korean as I was comfortable with.

           The style of the show would be faux-documentary; a weird subgenre that seems to exist (so far as I know) only on Korean television. Basically, every day or place would have a pre-scripted scenario that we would act through. The overarching idea was that we were five good friend getting together to explore Korea and find the traditional foods of each area. On that first day we were looking for the traditional food of Seoul – we started out by sitting around a conference table in the production offices discussing where we’re from, our favorite Korean foods and what we thought might be the local foods of Seoul.

           We were actually instructed to bring out our computers and smartphones and do some research to that end, though with the ultimate goal of deciding to go to 인사동 (Insadong), a heavily touristed street in 서울, to ask the locals and passers-by their opinion on the matter. This led to some fairly long intervals in which we sat around in silence, cameras rolling, browsing the Internet. I can only imagine that this section will be vastly edited when it comes to the final TV show. The cameras did get some super-close-ups of smartphone and laptop screens displaying various websites.

           Our instruction was then to take public transport to Insadong, with the cameras chasing us, so more research had to be done to find the best route, though I cut that rather shorter by simply knowing the subway route, having been to Insadong on several occasions. Then came the big, dramatic, 갑시다! (Let’s go!) moment, which required several takes to reach the level of enthusiasm the producer was looking for (a level distinguished by cheers, fistpumps, and rapidly drawn-back chairs).

           I should comment that I am not particularly opposed to this style of television-making, in which there is no drama but melodrama, and every emotion is almost painfully overwrought, though I certainly don’t enjoy it myself. I was happy to go along with it, and I found it enjoyable to engage in this type of overemphasis in an ironic manner. It was from this first 갑시다! that an escalating process of overdramatic gestures and expressions was born on that first day, fed no doubt by our collective nervousness at a new situation and environment.

We prepare to head out. From left to right: Me, 진이, Nobuko, David, and Cindy. Leigh behind the camera

           Getting to Insadong was a simple matter, though the subway was crowded and we with our camera crew attracted a lot of attention and took up a lot of space in the car. Some other poor foreigners, by sheer bad luck, found themselves trapped next to us in the train car for several stations and, in our need to fill the stretching void between points of conversation, were subjected to our prying, awkward questions. If they end up on TV it will be without their consent, and they left in something of a discomfited hurry.

Dashing through the subway.

           It had been determined that everyone needed a… hobby, I guess, or some distinguishing feature. I was given a camcorder that would ostensibly be my toy for the purposes of the show. When we arrived in Insadong we set up at the entrance with me being filmed filming the other foreigners’ reactions and Nobuko “reporting” where we were and how we felt. Then we had a brief discussion with the pre-determined outcome that we would split up, Nobuko and myself interviewing the local restaurant owners, and the other three asking people on the street. The goal was to get someone to give the answer 솔능탕 (solleungtang) to the question “what is the traditional food of Seoul?”

           The reason I was paired with Nobuko is that her Korean is excellent, to the point of fluency, while mine was nowhere near up to the task of interviewing curmudgeonly old restaurant owners. Most of them, upon discovering that we didn’t intend to patronize their establishments, were very reluctant to talk to us. When we did manage to find someone to interview, I found myself listening very closely to the rapid Korean conversation, anticipating the appropriate place to nod and smile appreciatively. I became very good at that.

           It turned out solleungtang was not so common in Insadong as perhaps the production team thought. We finally found a restaurant that served it, and I got to point at the menu item and ask 이고 뭐요? (What is this?). It should be noted that it was bitterly cold, somewhere around -5, but with an incessant wind that crept its way into my clothes and swelled my fingers to sausages. We were in that weather for well over an hour, and by the time we were interviewing a woman from the tourist information booth, who found the whole situation very amusing, I was very keen to be inside somewhere warm.

The other group interviewing a local couple, as the producer looks on from behind cameramen.

An elderly gentleman wondering what all the fuss is about.

There were plenty of foreigners in Insadong too. This one seems nervous.

           We were an hour late for our reservation at the solleungtang restaurant. It was at least warm inside. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to go back into the kitchen and watch the chef slice up the meat and demonstrate the cooking. Solleungtang is a traditional soup made from all the leftover pieces of an ox or cow. Back in the day cows and oxen were so valuable that they were only slaughtered on particularly special occasions. Whenever that occurred the locals ensured that no part of the beast was wasted, and so solleungtang is traditionally made from boiled ox bones, with various cuts of meat – cheek, tongue, brain, flank – cooked into it in thin slivers.

We got to watch him slice it all up. He put on that hat especially for us, I think.

Those squishy banana-shaped bits on the piece he's holding with his left hand? Tonsils, apparently.

           Setting up cameras for the meal took a long time, and when it finally arrived we were famished. Every dish was meticulously photographed and recorded steaming and bubbling away. We were all to eat together and converse among ourselves, and give little soundbites about the food. A lot of emphasis was placed on our “reaction shots”, the look that passes across your face, accompanied by a salivatory gesture and murmur, indicating just how delicious the food was. After the meal we each took turns to look directly into the camera and give our personal opinions of the food.

The final meal. Clockwise from the white soup: Solleungtang; Various extra meat cuts; Savoury tiny fish oil (?); 깍두기 (radish kimchi); 김지 (Kimchi); More fishy oil sauce. The white broth is made more spicy and flavourful with the addition of green onions (파), pepper powder (고추가루), and occasionally kimchi.

           It was at sometime during this meal that I started to feel the pressure. Pressure to compete, pressure to come up with the next clever superlative, and pressure to be entertaining on camera. I haven’t discussed it with other of the cast, but I suspect that at least one or two of them were feeling similarly. Throughout the meal, and cresting at the final interview this sensation set me more and more on edge; a hard current of tension that left me, when the day was finally done, emotionally worn and strongly disconcerted. I felt a strong tension between my own sincerity and the desire to be entertaining. The melodramatic actions, faked greetings, and transparently scripted scenarios disturbed me not at all, as I was able to engage with these in an ironic manner. Yet, in the competitive urge to throw out progressively more gushing descriptions of a food that, while good, certainly wasn’t deserving of the kind of praise we heaped upon it (like the salt it badly needed), I recognized a quality I deplore in myself and others, and which was deeply unsettling.

Being interviewed.

           It took me most of the hour-long trip home to work through these emotions, but as I approached home I found myself coming to a resolution: That I would not allow myself to engage in any way competitively with my fellow cast members, that I would remain emotionally withdrawn from the process of creating the show, and that I would not allow myself to be drawn into anything that could threaten my composure. With this resolution in mind I arrived at home in a far more content state of mind. The following day we had to meet only at 12:30, and so I settled in for a long sleep: it was late and I was emotionally and physically worn.