Spring 2020 is coming!

As the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted virtually every aspect of life here in Korea and around the world, my annual "first blossoms of spring" post serves this year particularly to remind us that, in the larger sense, life goes on. Korean public schools have been postponed for a total of five weeks so far, baseball and soccer seasons will have a late start, the Tokyo Olympics will be rescheduled, but the flowers are blooming on their regular schedule. Gotta love Nature!

As the first photo shows, with the Magnolia campbellii in the foreground, spring has even managed to spruce up my school frontage with a nice splash of color.


On the other corner of the main building at school is a purple variety:


But the first flowering harbinger of spring is always the "kenari", the Golden Bell, scientifically Forsythia koreana, which is the bush that lines both sides of Airport Highway along my walk to school.


Another of our first bloomers on the peninsula is the azalea, member of the rhododendron family:


My recently downloaded plant recognition app (PlantSnap), which is really really cool--take a picture, inside or outside the app, and it does a pretty good job telling what plant you're looking at--insists this is Prunus cerasus, or sour cherry, but I think it's the "Chinese apricot"--maehwa in Korean.


And finally, right next to the school, is this fabulous entry, that I think actually is sour cherry:


Caveat, I am not a botanist, I am just a middle aged guy who likes flowers. Regular visitors to my Seoul patch surely know this, but if you didn't click on "flowers" in the label cloud for 41 other posts that have lots of pics of, um, flowers. From Korea, and from my travels around Asia since I came here in 2008.

Majang Meat Market

I had heard of this place, and was excited that my buddy Adam organized a dinner trip to the eastern side of Seoul, just past Wangsimni sta. on line 5, the Majang Meat Market.


It was pretty deserted during this outing, since the coronavirus has led many Koreans, quite sensibly, to stay at home. Just an update after my Cambodian vacay, I spent two weeks in "self-quarantine" before coming back to work this week. School has been postponed until (at this writing) March 23rd from the usual opening day of March 2nd, but teachers are expected to periodically come to work for planning.
A covered arcade of three or four streets, mostly retail customers deal with shops like this, which offer high-quality 'hanu' beef at reasonable prices.


It is also a wholesale center, with highly photographable offal like intestines, beef hearts, livers and etc.


We selected two packages of different "modem" or sampler sets, totaling 120,000 W (approx. USD 100) for four guys. They look pretty damn good! There are numerous restaurants, mainly upstairs, where you take your prize to grill up.


We went to Hanu Town, where they charge a 5000 W plate fee per person, which is pretty reasonable, since that's paying for your real wood charcoal and all the banchan--kimchi, samjang, vegetables, etc. And they get the proceeds from all your beer and soju.


We ate and drank and conversed delightfully for a good two hours. Each cut of beef, curated by Adam, was better than the one before. Then we finished up at a foreigner-run pub for a couple drafts from Magpie before finally making the long, full-bellied trek home.


Highly recommended! A great evening out, coronavirus and all!