Foreigner Foodies - Day 6: Fresh chicken!

Day 6: The last day; we are exhausted. I’ve had minimal sleep, though fortunately we managed to sleep through the 7:10 injunction. After evacuating all our goods from the pension and loading them into the bus we made a bleary-eyed trip to the local 삼겹살 (samgyeopsal) restaurant where we had also eaten dinner the night before. Breakfast was a very subdued affair.

After breakfast we were back on the bus and headed back into Jeollanam-do proper. For our final meal we were promised 닭장국 (chicken-sauce-soup) at a local village. Even more excitingly, we were promised a scavenger hunt of sorts, and there was talk of exploring the village on ATVs, though that turned out to be cruel, idle rumour.

Though we found a motor-scooter. 

The village we found ourselves in was far more pleasant than the previous one, though no less of a deserted backwater. It sat at the head of an extremely shallow valley, with about two dozen houses spreading uphill behind the community hall and a clear view to the estuary way in the distance.

We met with the elders, and were filmed receiving our scavenger hunt instructions. We divided into our pre-determined teams, myself with Nobuko, Cynthia with Cherish and poor David left to his own devices. We were each given two food items to find and sent off into the village to try and find some. We were looking for 김치 and 떡 (Kimchi and rice cake). The first house we came to no one responded to our calls and, pressed for time we moved on to the second.

Back in the 60s a psychological experiment was conducted, that has since been repeatedly recreated, wherein a subject would be put in a position where he/she would be tasked with asking another person questions and punishing wrong answers by administering an escalating series of electrical shocks. The aim of the experiment was to show how people can be persuaded to set aside their conventional morality so long as someone in a perceived position of authority is giving the instructions. At the second house I found myself in a similar (though far, far milder) position.

As we approached the house we could hear the low dialogue of a television on inside, and yet our hallos went unanswered for long minutes. The cameraman exhorted us to greater efforts and Nobuko knocked on the door. Eventually we heard the sounds of movement and a slow shuffling approached the door. Eventually it was drawn back to reveal an ancient, withered, white-haired old man, still dressed in his bed-clothes. He was entirely confused, but we were soon inside his home, waking his wife from their shared mattress before the television, and digging through his kimchi freezer for some good kimchi.

They may have been confused, but they were still hospitable, and we walked away with two tubs of kimchi as well as two overripe, sickly-soft persimmons (감). It seemed we were off-script though, and so we handed the kimchi tubs over to the crew, and were directed to the “correct” house, where kimchi was ladled up to us out of great stone vats. We collected a heavy crate full of long, thin 떡 and headed back to meet up with the others.

Waiting for us was Cindy and Cherish, looking worn and shell-shocked. Theirs to find had been a chicken, and they had clearly found the experience more than expected. Cindy was streaked with chicken-dung scraped off the sides of the coop, and Cherish held a great red chicken by the wings. I can’t wait to see that scene in the show. David joined us later with several green onions and some bean paste, and we were ready to cook.

The meal we eventually ate was attended by the five of us, and some 10-odd locals. We were packed tight around the table, and the food was again cold by the time we got to eat it, but tasty it was. By the time we finished eating the day was running late, and we still had several scenes left to shoot, and so we split up.

By this point I was very tired, and excited to get home, rest, and draw the experience to a close. So I had great difficulty looking interested in the town’s well, now an unremarkable concrete weir, or pretending that the water flowing from it tasted any better than regular water. Our last stop was to visit with an elderly man who had been keeping a diary for over 50 years. It certainly was interesting to meet the man, and to look back over the years and find the weather for the day I was born, though it soon turned out that his entries covered little more than the weather, and I was soon wondering what this had to do with a show about foreigners experiencing traditional food.

The sun had set before we finally said our goodbyes, gave our final interviews, and boarded the bus for Seoul. We stopped in Gwangju to drop off David, Pyeongtaek for Cynthia, and finally Gangnam for the rest of us. I eventually made it home on Wednesday night after 12:30, drained but glad that the subway runs late on weekdays.