Friday, December 4, 2009

The Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul


The museum suggests that you can take a picture here,
in case you don't already have any photos from your trip to Korea of traditional Korean women feeding you kimchi.


On my last day in Korea I hustled over to the Kimchi Field Museum, the thought of which I had been salivating over for days.


It's a pretty big place, all things considered, and they even have a library where you can study books and movies about kimchi and other traditional Korean foods.


Koreans love red pepper, but also garlic, leeks, green onion and anything else that is guaranteed to make their breath stink and their gums tingle.


The Kimchi Field Museum is located, as it appears food museums generally are in Asia, inside a mall. The largest underground mall in Asia, in fact, COEX.


I am not sure if I understood the point of this, it was this giant thing on the wall showing very small pictures of different types of kimchi. I'm sure someone was like, "Damn, everything in this museum is so old-fashioned. We need something high-tech, something futuristic! Let's make a big white kimchi hole!"


"You think that's high-tech? Check this out. This is science."


The museum brought together two of my great loves: kimchi and plastic food.




This was a display on how healthy kimchi is. They were trying to make the point that it's great for losing weight, but I thought this image also accurately acknowledged kimchi's gas-creating properties. She can't keep her skirt down!


Worldwide pickled vegetables


Kimchi tasting. I never like any of the ones made of greens as much as the cabbage, radish and cucumber ones. Making it green is just a step too healthy for me.





Although I'm a huge fan of kimchi, I wouldn't normally spend an entire afternoon dedicated entirely to fermented cabbage. However, the Kimchi Museum was really interesting and I'd highly recommend it for anyone buzzing around Seoul. In terms of actual information, it was definitely the best food museum I've been to, and they get extra points for providing information on everything in English. They even suckered me into buying a DVD with 59 kimchi recipes on it. Considering that it only took one kimchi recipe to get me kicked out of my flat in London, I shudder to think of what I may be able to do with 59.

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