Korean food! #2 Sam-gu tang

I first had sam -gu tang a few months ago with Mimi. It is like a fresh chicken broth with onions, ginseng and garlic. It usually comes with a small chicken stuffed with rice a gin seng and chestnuts in a bowl of hot broth in which it has been cooked in for a few hours. It usually comes with a small side plate of salt and spice in which you can dip your chicken in or add to the broth. I really enjoyed it the first time as pictured above.


However sometimes it's great to be a teacher. My two conversation students invited me round to one of their houses to cook me lunch instead of having a class. Sometimes when I see the high rise apartments stacked around me I get a feeling of despair. Hundred of thousands of people packed into identical blocks.

How wrong was I. As I reached the 11th floor I buzzed the tiny metal door only to enter one of the nicest apartments I have ever seen. Granted my student is a University lecturer in art I didn't expect the sheer size never mind the interior design. It was decorate with tasteful art and an original Andy Warhol print. It had 2 bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, a study, extremely large living room-kitchen and and 2 balconies.

I was served a five course meal from prawn salad, homemade sam-gu tang, fruit, ice cream, coffee and tonic. Everything was either handmade in a traditional Korean style or designed by my student herself. Was excellent!

In addition to the food it was also nice to be accepted into a Korean's home and I enjoyed interesting cross cultural discussion with 2 older Korean woman. Was really interesting and insightful. Going back to work after a few glasses of red and a full stomach is not advisable.

Invade Privacy and Let the Industry off Scot Free.

Two new legislation on the table and one announcement on the banking industry and to me it's totally back to front and completely out of touch with reality.

First of the bat are plans to ban smoking in cars where children are present. Who would ever say that smoking when your child is in the car is a delightful habit?! What father would protest this bill? No one can come out and say this is a bad idea or that it's ok to smoke with children are around. However without an argument for the negative it doesn't mean the government should legislate control over an individuals lifestyle choice. The car at the end of the day is a vehicle in which you lose all your privacy. Cameras watching your speed. Police watching your driving and holding the right to stop and search you whenever they want. Government and companies ensuring your car's innards are in respectable order and so forth. And all this is needed to ensure road safety and a high standard of public safety. However new technology which auto tracks your windscreen and watches you from afar has already been piloted across Britain. Putting away the mobile phone is a good idea but being fined for popping a sweet or switching the radio on is backdoor secret surveillance and dare I say, totalitarianism. You can't smoke at work, in the pub and rarely at home now everyone has jumped on the anti-smoking banned wagon (which I am part of btw). Now you can't even roll down your window and have a smoke when your stressed out from grid lock, the kids are screaming in the back seat and your wife just left you for spending to much time at work.

It's a horrible image but I don't think the government or police should be concerned with our private habits and indeed their role should be protecting not suppressing them.

Legislation number two is tougher regulation on Sun beds, or tanning salons as they are called now. Again what argument or specialist is going to stand up and defend the right to have artificially brown skin, but I question the government when they want to clamp down on unmanned salons and underage bronzing addicts when hedgefund managers, banking executives and the like are off gambling with the public's savings; and after losing them ask for a government handout. When looking around the commons it is more likely that the sun kissed skin of our right honourable MPs is not from overdosing on UV beds but from vacations in the Caribbean or Sunday afternoons sailing on their moats which they fiddled through tax payer funded expenses. It almost too ridiculous to believe.

Looks like today Darling will announce that regulation was not to blame for the financial crises. To an extent tough regulation in the UK would not have stopped a global economic turn down but it would mean our banks would not have been such a major part of it. Regulation is what's needed and its what the public want too. If someone commits a crime you may blame the police for not catching them before they done it but you never let the criminal get off scott free on the same presumption.

Friday

A quick look at the papers and two statics hit me.

Firstly the gap between rich and poor is the widest since the 1960s and the gap between the wealthiest and poorest is the highest since Britain under Thatcher.

For Labour to hit it goals of halving child poverty by 2010 they would have the spend 4.5 billion pound a year. Very unlikely.

Is this the final nail in the coffin of New Labour?

Also t seems that the papers are eventually waking up to the truth about trash culture. Jonathan Jones writes

"If the left is ever to regain a voice in Britain it will now be necessary to face the truth about mass culture and its tyranny. Reality TV shows, celebrity "culture", inane pop groups and sport are not, and never have been, the hope of democracy"

Big Party

Come one come all to the big credit spending party!
The Patty has been so huge that the refuge is estimated at $4.1 trillion dollars .

Well now it's time, as after all parties, to clean up the mess. Throw out the garbage, pour toxic assets down the drains and replace some furniture (institutions) that got broke during the long night. As with most parties it takes time for the head to clear and the stomach to settle before you can pluck up the energy to sort the place out. It's only after a few bitter pills and some liquid stimulus that you realise the people who made the most mess, ate the most cake and drank the most beer, had long shuffled off home to retire for the night (or life) or maybe to cleaner climates.

Now only a future of careful spending and higher taxes can cure the hangover and restore us to normal life.

Hang on a minute!!!!

I wasn't at no party. I was at uni!
I had to scrape by on minimum wage, work full time, pay extortionate rent rates, get used and abused by the property owning classes. Who took out massive mortgages in order to 'buy to let' and make a profit off some of the poorest sections of society, which only fueled (started?) the party and added to the headache.

Now I have graduated and started to pay back a thundering student debt I find that I also have to pay to clean up a massive celebrity party with champagne, caviar, and cocktails? A party that I never even got invited too!!!

I am not too sure our generation will be quite helpful at the ballot box.

Charlie Brooker

This guy just disassembles the news right in front of you. Hilarious, insightful and thoughtful. Each episode gets better and better. His first series, Screenwipe, I always enjoyed but I find this show highlights his humour and skill much more.

Watch on bbc iplayer here or on youtube

Brilliant

Crazy Korean

A 1980s hand book on how to live life from Korea. I came acroos it on Korea beat and found even more here.

Haeinsa

On Saturday I visited the much awaited Haeinsa temple. It was good to get out of the city where the 'Chinese yellow dust' blows down from the north at the start of spring. It took an hour and a half bus journey to get there, but the air was certainly fresher and the temple offered a nice walk and some history.

Haeinsa is most noted as the home of the Tripitaka Koreana which became a UNESCO world heritage site in the 1990s. It consists of 80,000 wooden blocks engraved with ancient Chinese Buddhist scripture. It was completed in the mid 16th century and stored in a building specifically designed to avoid the rotting of wood. It was excellent to see and to catch up on a bit or Korean culture. However all of the blocks were locked in on shelves you could only glimpse through slated wooden walls. No photos are allowed either, so I've uploaded the diagram from outside the temple and a few sneaky photos I got in.

I find the walk round the temples always relaxing and interesting. They are usually built in the countryside overlooking Korea's mountainous but lush territory. This allows for fresh air, amazing scenery and an easy hike. The temples themselves allow for a little musing over religion, architecture and about the anecdotes painted on the outer and inner walls of the buildings

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I get paid next week so time for something completely different. Seoul perhaps?

Surveillance

I used to think the phrase 'They're watching us, they control everything!' was reserved for a select group of people. Namely 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, UFO enthusiasts, Elvis spotters and the like. But in all serious how much can,or will, Britons take?

Off the top of my head I could name several government policies or actions since 2001 that have not only infringe on our freedoms but seek to severely undermine and curtail them. Just think now, just for a second, and I bet you can too. ID cards, DNA capture, bio-metric passports, detention for 28 days without charge (wait 90 days is what they want right?), refusal for freedom of information on MP's expenses (our employees mind), are just a few policies being continually pursued by the good new Labour Party. They see nothing wrong in denying European Union citizens entry into the UK, even if they are elected representatives, or allowing local councils (not the police) to monitor someones movement 24 hours a day. They are suspected of banning evidence in court cases because it may simply be embarrassing for them. They ask university lecturers and professors to report students who they suspect of academic misadventure. But when two subs collided in the English Chanel last week the extent of the damage was classified. Yet it is not like it was damaged in battle, and even if it was there isn't a precedent for not disclosing this information. We learned more about the crash from the French media than our own government. I'm sure the list could go on and on but the problem is compounded by the governments inability to keep the information they suck from us secret. The loss of 25 million individuals' data last year comes to mind.

Well, have you heard the latest operation Glasgow to take place on the Merseyside? Surveillance cameras with automatic face recognition. I'm sure the only thing holding back a national out rolling is the unreliability of previous face recognition software. The worst thing about it is that anyone detained by the police, regardless of whether they are charged or not, will be photographed and linked to the Surveillance network.

Why are we quiet about this?

The Convention on Modern Liberty is on in London this week. If I was home I'd be there.