Eating and drinking in Seoul

We are slowly but surely trying to make our way through all the various restaurants in Itaewon. We decided, when we arrived in Seoul and we saw the variety of places to eat, that we would attempt to try a different restaurant each time we ate out. Of course, we haven't stuck to this because we now have a few favourites and we also find ourselves eating at the Seoul Club quite often (there's a mandatory amount that you have to spend on food and bevarage each quarter). Our favourite restaurant in Itaewon is La Cigale (French restaurant). We love, love, love the mussel pots. We also like Le Saint Ex (also French), we ate there for the first time on our wedding anniversary and it's really good. The other night we tried Zelen which serves delicious Bulgarian food. Their red bean salad came highly recommended from a friend of mine. I thought 'who the hell orders red bean salad' but she was right it was excellent. We also tried Ali Baba a Middle Eastern restaurant which I've been wanting to try for ages. It was a huge disappointment. Totally overpriced for the amount of food you get and the food certaily wasn't good enough to justify the price. They also wouldn't serve us alcohol because of 'Ramadan', which is understandable but just as our cokes arrived at the table we saw them whip out a bottle of wine and serve two glasses of wine to some other people in the restaurant??? Odd, especially when Brad had asked the waiter about 'wine by the glass'. We won't be patronising that restaurant again, we'd rather spend the same amount of money at the French restaurants which are definitely worth the price.

Strawberry Bubble Tea at the Seoul Club - it's my new favourite drink. It's made with Tapioca

Waiting for food at Kraze Burger

Kraze Burger

La Saint Ex

Police

We had another little run in with the Korean police last week. Carla had been working at Lenny's house ( her partner teacher), and I arrived home quite late, so we hadn't cooked anything and decided to go up into Itaewon and grab some dinner at the pub which Lenny's fiance partly owns. I walked up and Carla drove on the scooter from Lenny's and picked me up half way. I then drove us into Itaewon and while waiting at the traffic light, a police car stopped and told us to pull over on the side of the road. They asked me for my license, I had my SA drivers licence, but my international licence was in the car back at the house.

The police station was about 20m away, so we (I) was told to accompany the police back to the station. The one police officer was nice and relaxed but the other was really aggressive. Anyway, I followed them to the station and was told to wait while they completed forms. We told them that we had the licence and could quickly go and get it.

They then brought out a prepared statement and told me to sign it, to which I refused. I told them that the statement was in Korean and I could not understand it, and the paragraph that had been written in English said that I had been told that I was free to leave at any time and accompanied the police voluntarily. I said that that was incorrect, as we had not been told any such information and I would not sign the document.

A few people came and translated the Korean passages for us, but I said it was still incorrect and I would not sign.

Carla had in the meantime run back home to get the international drivers licences.

Eventually Carla came back (sweating as a run in this humidity is terrible) and as it was late, and most of the people wanted to go home, and I was not willing to sign the document, they let me go.

It was a little disappointing, it seemed that one guy had a bad day, and wanted to take it out on a foreigner. I think they thought I was American military, because most of the police attitudes changed when they realised we were from South Africa.

As in every country, there are the elements that welcome people into their country and those that really think there is a new invasion and will do everything to make your life more difficult.

But all ended well, except we didn't get to go for dinner, as by then it was quite late, so MacDonalds it was.

Wedding Anniversary

Our anniversary was on the 8th August, we cannot believe that a year has gone by already. I had to go to work, but managed to take the afternoon off as Carla was still on holiday. I hadn't told Carla I was going to take the afternoon off, so she had booked a time at the SA embassy to arrange to have her passport and ID changed. So we ended up spending a couple of hours at the embassy.

We went up to Itaewon on the scooter later that evening to a nice restaurant called Saint Ex. It is a French restaurant that has been around at least 7 years, which is a long time here as turnover of places is very fast.

It was really nice, we sat outside and had our food and wine.

Neither of us has bought gifts yet, we still haven't quite decided what we want

Holiday in SA

I thought I would add some more pictures of our holiday, especially of the Kruger.

Early Morning in the Kruger

Our evening night drive

African sunset

Zebra's in the mist

Early morning

Duicker

Kruger National Park and Ballito

We're back in Seoul after a really good time in SA. We really enjoyed our time in the Kruger National Park and we were sorry to leave. We had lots of good sightings but unfortunately we didn't see any leopard this time. We did see some odd elephant behaviour though. On one of our drives we were watching two elephants eating just off the side of the road,when they suddenly both turned and started running with their tails sticking straight out. It seemed like they'd picked up a distress call from another elephant but we're not too sure. Then, on another drive, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by a huge heard of elephants and three huge elephants were right in the middle of the road. We stopped (because we had no choice) , the three elephants were putting their trunks over eachothers heads and each would leave their trunk on the other for a few minutes. It was if they were having a conference and this was their way of communicating. We also saw a huge pride of lions, lots of buffalo, rhino and all the other usual animals. We were also lucky enough to see a giraffe drinking and we saw two Marshall Eagles, the one was trying to catch a Steenbok.

Bushbuck begging for breakfast at Letaba Camp
We spent some time in Balltio and we saw the damage that those huge waves, a while back, did to the beachfront.

Breakfast at Waterberry in Ballito

The Durban Yatch Club

You know your in Africa when...

Dog Shoes

One of the teacher's brought her dog to school one day. Brad and I always laugh at the dog shoes that seem to be so popular here. This dog seemed quite happy in its shoes.