- Day number one in South Korea,
I'm Chris this is Yellow Productions,
I do travel guides that are fun, informative, entertaining.
We just woke up at the Shilla Stay Hotel,
if you're wondering why I still have bed head that's why,
we just had a pretty good breakfast
with a very interesting aloe drink,
but a good breakfast at the hotel,
and today were looking forward to learning more about
Korean culture, some cooking classes,
and some Korean fried chicken for dinner,
so stay tuned for all the fun today.
Our first stop in Seoul is the K-Style Hub,
we boarded the YouTuber bus, I've never seen so many
cameras on a single bus, what's inside?
I don't know, we're gonna find out
See you in there.
So the K-Style Hub is home of the Korea Tourism Organization
floors two through five,
kinda like a travel agency slash museum all in one
but the first greeting you get
when you come in on the second floor is greeted
by the official tourism ambassadors of Korea in 2018
You recognize these guys?
They're XO, I think they need one more group member,
Topher, he's trying out.
This place is a great place to start your trip in Seoul
because you can pick up brochures for almost everywhere
all across Korea, you can also take pictures
with various K-pop stars, look at that guy right there
he's wearing yellow, I like him.
But come over here, there's something very interesting.
You know Seoul Korea is home,
like the plastic surgery capital of the world
particularly in Gangnam,
made famous by Psy with Gangnam style
and they even have a medical tourism information center
so if you're considering getting some plastic surgery
while you're in Korea,
you can get all the information you'll ever need up there.
Now let me show you what's up on the third floor.
They've got an exhibition about spices and ingredients
in Korean food but what I want to show you is,
you come back this way, they show you how they used
to store food back in the day Korea without refrigeration,
it gets really cold instead they would put food
in these pots buried underground,
but if you look over here one of the most famous things
that's buried underground is kimchi.
So kimchi you have today, you might get it
from the market but back in the day kimchi
would be buried to age in these vats in the dirt.
Here in what looks like an Asian medicine shop
they've also got an exhibition of typical Korean tableware
this ware, come closer take a look at this,
this is traditional Korean brassware,
these things super expensive, we saw a store that
sells these, these bowls can be between
50 to 100 dollars each and they're really heavy.
The fourth floor continues the exhibition Korean food,
looks like they've got cooking classes
and other things of the sort up here.
The fifth and final floor has the traditional
Hanbok experience where you can put on a Hanbok
take some pictures, you see some people back there
getting all done up in it, if you want to see more of this
stay tuned for the vlog on Friday,
all in Hanbok looking forward to it.
What's for lunch?
This is for lunch, what is this?
This is soft tofu stew and seafood pancake,
we're gonna do a cooking class and if you look over there
that's where the teacher's gonna show us how to cook
this whole thing, is it gonna be tasty?
Let's find out.
Alright, so we just got our instructions,
we are starting with the tofu soup, I've got my knife
I've got my cutting board, and I've got my onion.
I don't have my goggles to help me not cry,
but we start with chopping the onion,
as long as I don't chop my fingers off,
that'll be a good thing.
She said don't chop them too small,
we're not mincing it
and then we move on to the zucchini.
Look at this, I bet you haven't seen the Yellow Productions
cooking show yet so, this will be a first for us,
Zucchini, chopping.
Now I've got the veggies all chopped, we have to de-vein
and peel the shrimp so we need to find this vein.
By the way, it's really loud in here with all the different
YouTubers doing their stuff, I should tell them to be quiet
but then they would tell me to be quiet and then
we couldn't do any YouTube stuff.
You can see this little vein right here,
this is a hard thing to get out.
First before we put the ingredients in the pot,
and it's a stone pot, we have to turn on the flame.
Look at that, but not a big flame,
there we go, small flame.
This is gonna get really hot pretty quickly,
so let me get the ingredients, I'll be right back.
So we're gonna start by putting the vegetables into the oil,
we were just supposed to put the garlic and the leek in
but we kinda mixed it altogether so,
I don't want that part of the onion,
so this is gonna go in here.
And we've got more veggies.
Next step is to put the tofu into the stew,
it is called tofu stew.
Tofu has got some water in it so after it's been sitting
in here you have to drain the tofu.
So we're just gonna take that and pour out that excess water
down the drain and we're gonna go back over to our stew--
And we're going to spoon the tofu
into the stew.
Bigger pieces, we're gonna spoon bigger pieces.
Take our five or so clams right there
and we're gonna put out clams in,
now the most important part is not to stir it
because our cooking teacher says if you stir it,
it will look like trash.
Now our ingredients are done,
we've got our tofu stew right there,
we're gonna put some oil into the pan
and get that heated up nicely.
All right, the pans hot so we're gonna go ahead
and put the batter in.
Kinda spread it out a little bit,
put in the veggies.
Veggies, now seafood.
Okay now we're gonna wait about three or four minutes
and then we're gonna flip it over.
I've got my spatula, and I'm ready to turn
but we can only turn it once,
so we just have to be patient.
But how do we check whether it's done?
We just kinda put this spatula under
and check what that color is.
Still white, then not done.
I assume that was still white.
Five minutes, it's time to flip
and we gotta do it in one motion we have to be brave,
let's see if we can do it.
Ta-da.
- [Woman] Good job!
So in Korea you eat everything with chopsticks,
metal chopsticks, so it's gotta be made small.
So we don't use a knife to cut this,
actually scissors to cut this.
Something you'll find when you come to Korea
is they use scissors for a lot of things,
cutting Korean pancake, cutting Korean barbeque
and you need to cut it to pieces
that are small enough to eat with chopsticks.
Now that it's all done
there's nothing left to do except eat,
but you know we're not eating in that bronzeware,
we're eating in some classic Korean paper bowls.
Now that our bellies are full,
continuing our cultural tour,
the afternoon today is the National Museum of Korea.
One of the major pieces in the museum
is the Pensive Bodhisattva,
from the early seventh century
it's a little bit like Rodin's Thinker.
on the ground floor of the museum is a traditional
Korean scholar's house, complete with furniture inside
and this is the men's quarters.
And in these glass cabinets
they've got the women's items which are far more ornate.
In the main atrium is the ten story pagoda
built in the year 1348.
It spent some time in Japan before it came back to Korea.
And just around the corner from the pagoda is a gold
crown and belt from the Silla period, fifth century.
That is a lot of gold.
There's a special exhibition here right now,
it's the Arhat exhibition,
which is the equivalent of Saint in buddhism,
it's not a Buddha, it's not a Bodhisattva,
but someone who's enlightened
and doesn't really need you to know it.
We took a quick tour through the museum gift shop
but they also handed us this book
that has museum gifts for overseas the best top ten.
Don't know what to buy in there?
Well, these are the best.
So after the museum tour, now we're getting
to carve a seal with our name into it, so what's a seal?
Not like a thing that lives in the ocean,
but in Korea, they use seals to basically sign things
and been using it for many thousands of years
and so today we are carving our own.
And they said we could carve in English
but since we're in Korea we should carve it in Korean.
So this is my name in Korean,
ka-ri-su and seal right there.
And so I have to practice writing this,
now why do I have this funny thing on?
So this is the seal, it's stone
and then we're actually gonna use this chisel
to chisel it into here,
but right now I have to be like an elementary school student
and practice writing this four times before I carve it.
So, let's see here
Ka-ri-su
and seal.
But then to actually carve that onto the seal
we have to carve it in reverse order
so they actually give us tracing paper,
that we can trace it on
and then flip it upside down to actually it onto carve this.
Okay so now like a kindergartener
I've practiced my name a bunch of times.
I'm gonna write it on the rock.
No pressure, because there's no do overs on this.
And it's harder because the rock is smaller
than the tracing paper is and there's no lines
and you can't really rest your hand like you normally could,
actually it's probably better
if you come over here so you can see.
All right, so I've got the name all etched in
and now it's time to carve, I've got on the glove,
and I've got my chisel and so we're gonna start carving this
see how this works, I've never really carved
stone before, and I'm actually surprised that the stone
kinda carves so easily, I guess that's maybe soft stone
or this is a easy chisel, well I probably won't be saying
that after I'm doing this for a while.
Four hours later,
okay maybe like twenty minutes,
plus some help from the instructor,
plus a little bit of sandpaper
to help iron out the extra scratches I put on it,
we have a finished stamp.
Wanna see what it looks like to stamp it on paper?
I'll see you over there.
Okay, it's all done, It's been made to look vintage
so now we're ready to stamp it.
She's gonna do it for me to make sure it's good.
It's an interesting ink.
It's a very thick ink.
All right, look at that.
To end the evening, we had dinner,
Korean fried chicken at oven chicken and beer.
Which the chicken was actually fried,
three different types of fried chicken spicy,
soy sauce and regular fried chicken.
Also with beer, cause beer goes with Korean fried chicken.
But after beer, the second course was beer with soju.
And the way this works, is you put a little bit of soju
in a small glass, you put beer, in a bigger glass,
you pour the soju in and then to stir it
they put a chopstick in and they hit it with a second
chopstick which stirs it up and then you can drink it.
It tastes just like beer
except it gets you drunker, faster.
Say, it's the end of the stamp class, we got to stamp
and do some calligraphy on this paper
and so if you haven't yet, subscribe, please.
I wrote please subscribe, but they they reminded me
that in Korean, they write, the other way
not left to right but right to left, top to bottom.
Signed, Ka-ri-su.
By the way if you want to watch yesterday's vlog
of my arrival into Korea, you can click right here
to watch it, day number zero, or if you want to watch
tomorrow, if it's tomorrow, day number two.
Click right here to watch that
or you can find links in the description below
to my entire Korea playlist.
Well I won't say goodbye,
because I'll see you in one of those videos.