Places of interest in SNU

In the map below i collected a few places of interest on the SNU gwanak campus. By the number of restaurants i indicated you might guess correctly that im mostly interested in eating ^^



View Places at SNU in a larger map

Korean arcade

Saw today a new arcade in a saloon in seoul. Its similar to the guitar hero style arcade machines but with a large touch scree and eye cancer causing flashy 'things' to increase enjoyment ^^

The arcade machine below is around since a while but i tought i will share it too. Just enjoy :)

Playground in Yoido / Hangang Park

My parents came to Korea, so we went to the Hangang and Yoido park. There we found a playground with the.... Ummm 'things' ? below.
I never saw playground equipment like that.

This is medium entertaining, you are supposed to step onto the boards, hold tight and been turned by a friend.

The concept of this slide  is quite nice. You step onto the small platform which is able to slide along the rail, and then propel your self around by holding onto the chains above.
Sounds nice in theory but it's not sliding well enough and it's also nearly impossible to get high on the sides.

This is Tarzan rail slide. Similar ones I saw previously in Germany, but normally longer and straight, not curved. This is actually fun but because you have to hang on to the handle it's hard on the arms.

My wife demonstrating the slide

Chinese Cabbage Root

On a small traditional market near the seoul national university subwaystation we found something what looked like a sugar beet. The old lady called this the 'tail of the chinese cabbage'. This flowery description left me wondering if this might be indeed the tail (root) of a chinese cabbage. After asking my wife's mother we found that its indeed the root and that its neither a common nor a very rare vegetable.

The taste was surprisingly pleasant. A bit sweet, a bit nutty, not unlike kohlrabi but in consistency less 'glass like' and with overall better taste. Also in the ones we tried we didnt find any fibers as you might encounter them in kohlrabi.

Unfortunately they were too tasty so that there were none left to cook ^^
All in all highly recommended, if you can find them.

Raw, roughly 200g. peels like a kohlrabi.

greek letters

While doing valuable research (which might one day grant me an income which doesnt make me cry), i saw that google has more hits for 'beta' than for 'alpha'. I wondered a bit and did a small survey which led to the following figure:

Figure1. Google hits for the indicated search phrase representing greek letters. If the top ranked search result was not the wikipedia article, a short description of the  top hit is given above. The queries were send 2011.3.23 14:00 (GMT+9)

Baja Chicken at Quiznos

After my recent experience with the tasty looking add in quiznos, praising the black angus sandwhich, which turned out to be a total disappointment, i was hesitant to try the new 'Baja Chicken Sandwich'.
However the food stylist made it look awesome so i thought i will risk again to get disappointed.

Actually i turned out to be quite OK. The sandwich is, frankly speaking, heavy as hell. Its loaded with beacon, chicken meat, cheese, BBQ sauce, Mayo and not a trace of this nasty green stuff called salad ^^.
The taste of the BBQ sauce goes well with the beacon but this in conjunction with the mayo overpowers the chicken as well as the cheese, which i believe is supposed to be cheddar.
The sandwich is worth trying once but thats also enough.

p.s. There are currently 2 quiznos restaurants on the gwanak campus: one in the 301 building at the top of the campus (02-871-9329), and one at the new dormitory near the back gate of the university, close to the sports field (02-881-9211). They close at 10pm in the engineering bld and at 9.30pm at the dorm.