Totodile's day out

Yesterday Totodile crept into my bag and made its way to the office.

It found a banana and started gnawing at it.

Mmm...this part is softer and yummier

Then it discovered a dog, but seemed to think that it was also food.

Totodile used bite!

But the dog was having none of it!

Dog used body slam!

Poor Totodile...or did it receive its just desserts? :P

Tangshan Cuisine

A friend organized a pre-CNY gathering last Friday night. We had a meal at Tangshan Cuisine.

Two of the attendees seem to be pretty serious Instagrammers, and were very professional in taking photos of the food. I took photos of each dish myself, but I've got to admit that my photos are firstly lazy (just snapped at an okay angle), and also less sharp (partly due to camera quality, but probably also due to unprofessional lighting). So I shall share their photos instead, despite not liking the fact that they are in portrait mode. :P

pork ribs soup pot, RM70

The soup had a nice taste, with plenty of pork ribs and radish. There was quite a lot of pepper at the bottom.

hot and sour shredded potato, RM22

My first time trying this dish, even though I've heard of it long ago. Nice...nothing to shout about, but at least I've tried it!

spicy chicken, RM48

This was one of the best dishes I feel...not really spicy if we don't eat the plentiful chilli pieces that come with it.

sizzling tofu, RM28

Nice enough, but nothing special...it can be found anywhere. :P

boiled fish with chilli oil (snapper), RM98

There were plenty of thin fish slices. At the end, I was surprised to see that there were a few small pieces of fish head parts. In the receipt, it says "full", so I wonder, was it a full fish?

dry pot cabbage, RM28

The cabbage was very flavourful...with quite some pork slices in the dish.

salt and pepper prawn, RM52

This was nicely seasoned...I guess the "pepper" in the dish's name is actually the red chilli pepper. We didn't taste much spiciness on the prawn though. There were some peanuts sprinkled on top, and at the end, when there were no prawns left, we ate up all the peanuts as well (they were flavourful too!)

Basically I was satisfied with all dishes. And no feeling thirsty afterwards. 👍🏼

There were twelve of us, so we ordered the big size for all dishes. We asked for the dishes to be less spicy...but in the receipt only the fish is marked as slightly spicy. So I am not sure whether the other dishes were at a "normal" spiciness level. All in all, I felt that the level was just nice for all dishes. I could even drink a bit of the fish soup, especially after it cooled down in my bowl, which means it's not a crazy level of spicy.

Prices are before adding 10% service charge and 6% SST.

The food was for these twelve people:

A rather elaborate scam

So here’s the story of how I almost got scammed into sending someone a friend request.

Recently I have been following Mark O’Dea, a British actor/host/content creator who lives in Malaysia. He makes some pretty funny reels.

Not long ago, he made a reel about how Malaysia has the most public holidays (Malaysia boleh!), and I commented on it. A few days later, I received a notification that Mark O’Dea had replied to my comment.

Wow, he’s asking me to send him a friend request!

However, my skeptical radar is turned on most of the time, so I wondered why he would do that. I scrolled down in the comments and found that he had written the same comment, not to all other commenters, but to the other top fan commenters. Hmm…makes sense. But then, why wouldn’t he just send the friend request to us? And what’s more, what would he gain by adding us as his friend? Does he want to see our content? Does he have content that are only available to his friends?

I even went to his profile page and looked at it…but there was no content there. Weird. Why can’t I see the previous content that he posted? This should have told me what was happening…but silly me, I didn’t figure it out at the time (blame it on the late hour?). I was almost going to bed at that time, so I decided to sleep on it before deciding to add him as a friend. I had a slight suspicion that someone may have hacked his account and written those comments.

The next day, his comment had disappeared. So had the replies on the other top fans’ comments. After that, I clicked on his profile, and that’s when I figured it out: This profile page had all his content. It even had the blue ring around his profile pic, that indicates that the page was verified. The page I was looking at the previous day was a fake account.

I still had the screenshot of the deleted comment (the one above), so I looked back at another comment that he had replied to on another reel. Here’s the difference:

The comment is marked as written by the author of the post, and there is also a blue tick that shows that the profile is verified. So it is actually very easy to check whether the real author or public figure is the one replying to your comment.

Adventures with buses

The Dakbatgol Mural Village is just opposite Somang Stairs. At least, the top of it is. When I arrived at the bus stop near Somang Stairs, at the beginning I considered going downhill, before I decided to visit Somang Stairs first (so that I might not need to climb back up later).

a general view downhill

behind the signs (the part with the green floor) seemed to be a parking lot

stairs going down to Dakbatgol

a nice mural

just showing the short steep incline up to the mural

the entrance at the bottom of the village

I didn’t really know where I was at that point, and when I didn’t find the bus stop that was supposed to be located at the bottom of the village, I decided to go back up to the bus stop I knew.

But before that, I noticed a small gallery (at first I thought it was a souvenir shop) and went inside.

I think the person manning the gallery told me I could go upstairs. I started taking photos upstairs where there was no one (didn’t dare to take photos downstairs…and I can’t even remember what it looked like). I only snapped a few photos because I didn't know when someone would come along...

It seems like this is an exhibition of this person's art

When going back up to the top of the village, I made a few detours (and discoveries). This is where not having data (which I called a “semi-good thing” in this post) was kind of a good thing, because if I had managed to look up how to get to a bus stop earlier, I might not have come back to see these places. I am sure that I still missed quite a lot of the village, because it was really a maze.

a little garden illustrating a fairy tale

Here's the translation of the story from Google:

I guess the "hunchback", "black", and "lumps" in the story are actually warts. It sounds like neither old man was really nice though. :P

another viewpoint from above

Let me end this post with what was a not-so-good thing about not having data. I was using the Naver app for maps and navigation. Despite having an option to download an offline map, I found that the offline map didn’t really work. And if we were to check for buses (and other ways to go anywhere), it works well, but only when there is data. (Note: Google Maps is not really updated in Korea because South Korea doesn’t want their data on Google servers, for fear of it being used by North Korea. And we can’t even download offline Google maps of South Korea.)

There is free public wifi in Korea, but the coverage is not really good. While at the bus stop to return to the Busan city centre, I checked the app and found a few buses that could take me back. But not being familiar with the app, I decided to take one bus that happened to NOT stop where I wanted…instead, the bus would go to the stop right before the one that I wanted, but I would walk the distance to the remaining stop (which is not that far).

But…not knowing that, I waited for the bus to announce my stop…which never happened. The bus then went through some hilly roads, and I was confused, but thought it was a detour before getting to where I wanted… (this was only my second bus ride in Korea; the first brought me to Somang Stairs without incident).

It was only when the bus stopped somewhere, and the driver came out of his seat…that I asked whether it was the last stop. It was. Oops! The driver and a few other passengers were helpful enough to tell me in broken English that I could take another bus from the same stop, back to where I wanted to go. (I think those passengers were going to transfer at that stop.) They even reminded me to scan my public transport pass when exiting the bus, so that I could get the transfer fare (instead of a “new trip” fare) for the connecting ride (I already knew this from my research before flying there).

And at this bus stop, I discovered an interesting heating seat!

I still don't know how it works... 

I saw this kind of seat again at another bus stop, I can’t remember where. Probably not in Busan. But it is not at every bus stop.

Anyway, after that fiasco with the bus, I learned to check properly how many stops the app asks me to ride, and where to get off. :P Also, later on I learned to take screenshots of the remaining distance I would need to walk to my destination, from any public transport stop. I learned that after getting off at a stop and being totally disoriented (Seoul Metro does that to you, since by the time you get up the stairs, you have turned around so many times, you no longer know from which direction you arrived earlier!)

Drama in the office!

A shark was spotted in the office today!

It first gobbled up a yummy banana.

Then it swallowed a tiny Pikachu whole!

After that, it clamped its jaws on Captain Tetra!

But Egg White valiantly tries to save Captain Tetra!

Egg White: Are you ok, Captain?

Just when Egg White thought all was well again...she loses sight of Captain Tetra!

Stairs of wishes

So…after all the Pokemon, I guess it is time I started posting about the touristic places I visited in Korea.

My first destination in Busan was the Somang Stairs (stairs of wishes).

The stairs, like a number of touristic places in Busan, had been featured on Running Man before; it is located in a residential area. A monorail was built for the elderly to ride up and down the stairs, and this turned it into a tourist attraction.

Using the monorail is free; there were a few rules listed down, amongst which are to give way to the elderly. Only two passengers are allowed at a time.

You can zoom in to read the rules.

There was a man at the monorail whose task seemed to be to open the door and press the destination button for us (for tourists? :P ). When I arrived, there was someone using the monorail, so I went around snapping photos.

While I was doing that, a rather big group arrived. (around ten people?) They went straight for the monorail, and I was feeling disappointed that I hadn’t waited right in front of the monorail (I would have been first in the “queue”).

But I was pleasantly surprised when the man on duty called me over, asking me whether I wanted to ride the monorail. I guess he had noticed me when I arrived. I accepted immediately, and the man gestured to one of the children in the group (a girl of around 12 years old) to join me, since two passengers were allowed at the same time. One of the ladies there immediately protested, and told him in slightly broken English, “we are not the same, different people!”. So I managed to get the monorail to myself. :D

The group of people were speaking something that sounded like Cantonese, but rather accented (not really like Malaysian Cantonese? I’m not sure, but that was my impression.) One of the men spoke to me, asking me where I was from, and when I said I was from Malaysia, he exclaimed that he was also from Malaysia. I switched to English happily. Haha! I didn’t think of asking at that time (and it might not have been appropriate to ask anyway), but I felt that part of the group was probably not Malaysian. When I said that I was travelling alone, he said, “very brave”. (I also got “so daring” from a Malay family and also a Chinese-American later on. Not sure whether I will mention it in later posts.)

I think I took this photo right before the monorail came to a complete stop.

Going up

Looking down

Middle station (which the monorail did not stop at, since the man pressed the last destination for me)

Looking down after reaching the destination stop

There's a separate monorail going further up, but there seemed to be works in progress

I hung around the destination “floor” for a while, but walking left and right, there seemed nothing much to see. It was just a residential area, after all… I took a few selfies with the stairs in the background, but they didn’t turn out very well (my selfies got slightly better as the trip progressed; I hope I won’t lose those skills before my next trip!)

I believe I saw a resident actually using the monorail to go down, so it delayed my descent a bit (but it’s been so long…I can’t be sure that I'm not mixing it up with something else :P ).

Going down, I pressed the button myself for the destination. It didn’t seem worth it to walk down those steep stairs.

Right opposite the Somang Stairs is the Dakbatgol Mural Village, but that will be for the next post!

The rise and fall of a simple restaurant

A long time ago I posted about Sam Gye Bab, a restaurant selling Korean ginseng flame-grilled chicken.

Since then, the shop has expanded to a full shop-lot, and its menu has also expanded to include a few other Korean soup dishes (tofu stew, doenjang stew, …)

I’ve been there to dine in with a couple of friends before, and at that time, I tried the sam gye tang (Korean ginseng chicken soup), which was highly recommended by my friends.

it is served with white rice

there's glutinous rice in the soup, just as my friend said (see previous post linked above)

The soup was extremely flavourful with a strong ginseng taste.

One of my friends ordered the flame-grilled chicken with additional cheesy corn.

Another friend ordered ginseng soup as well, and received one with the breast part (with wing). He had received the thigh part the last time he ordered the soup. He said that the thigh part tasted better.

Today I went there again with my mother and WW. We ordered a half-chicken set of the grilled chicken with cheesy corn, and a ginseng soup. After ordering the ginseng soup, I asked whether they could give us the thigh part, since I recalled what my friend had said about the breast part. They said yes, and surprisingly the half-chicken set also arrived with two thighs. Maybe they thought that my request was for all the dishes. Well, I’m not complaining…I prefer this part! (Or did they switch to using only thighs? Or is grilled chicken always the thigh? Another table received both thighs as well...)

At the back of the menu, there was an announcement that they were closing soon.

Because they want to keep the prices low, the rising costs of imported ingredients made the business no longer sustainable.

It is true that their prices are pretty low for a Korean restaurant...the half-chicken set costs RM26.90 (quarter-chicken costs RM13.90 if I remember correctly), the cheesy corn add-on RM4.90, and the sam gye tang costs RM17.90 (excluding 6% service charge).