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- Guide to pojangmacha: Why Koreans love drinking in tents
- Hwanseon cave: Hiking with bats and Buddhas
- U.S. baseball's opening day heads to Japan
- Skip the pasta! And other unsavory truths about airplane food
- Travel chaos: Bangkok airport ordered to get its act together
| Guide to pojangmacha: Why Koreans love drinking in tents Posted: 22 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PDT by Esther Oh , Frances Cha, Seoul Editor It's a typical Wednesday night at Hanshin Pocha -– a street bar with a plastic tarp for a wall in the trendy Hongdae district. The plastic stools are uncomfortable, the bathroom is repulsive, half the customers are chain-smoking and the noise level is slightly below rock concert level, but all the tables are full and people are lining up to get in. And it's only 8 p.m. While every table starts out single-sex, by the end of the night the boundaries have blurred, as the guys approach the girls' tables with pick-up lines that range from asking for shots to claiming they lost a drinking game and had to go chat up a girl. "We're famous for our chicken feet (닭발) and 'booking'," says Choi Sung-wook, the manager, referring to the Korean term for groups of men foraging for groups of women and vice versa. "Our waiters don't facilitate the 'booking' -- the customers just do it themselves." read more     |
| Hwanseon cave: Hiking with bats and Buddhas Posted: 21 Mar 2012 02:57 PM PDT Many Koreans may not have heard about Hwanseon Cave located within Deokhang mountain in Gangwon Province. The 6.2-kilometer cave is actually the biggest limestone cave in South Korea, and the second biggest in all Asia (the world's biggest is Son Doong cave in Veitnam). It takes about four hours to get to the region of Samcheok city, but you then have to climb more than 40 minutes through the steep hills and mountains.
And that's not even the actual "cave" entrance. You either have to take a 15-minute monorail ride or hike up to get to to the top of the mountain, where you can then finally see the large mouth of the cave. read more    |
| U.S. baseball's opening day heads to Japan Posted: 21 Mar 2012 02:55 PM PDT by Dan Shapiro With professional football eclipsing baseball as America's pastime, and Japan's dominance at the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics (WBC), is it time to proclaim Japan as the world's ichi-ban baseball country? No doubt U.S. baseball fans would take exception to that claim, but consider that even before the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league begins its 76th season on March 30, Major League Baseball will throw out the first pitch of its 2012 season not at a packed stadium in the United States, but at the Tokyo Dome. Tokyo will host a pair of games on March 28 and 29 between the Ichiro Suzuki-led Seattle Mariners and Hideki Matsui's Oakland Athletics. Before that, a stellar lineup of games will be played between local outfits and the visitors from across the Pacific, making Japan in late March one hot destination for sports fans. In honor of the coming season of "Puro Yakyu," as pro baseball is known in Japan, herewith are some of the legends who raised the profile of Japanese baseball around the world. read more    |
| Skip the pasta! And other unsavory truths about airplane food Posted: 21 Mar 2012 10:16 AM PDT
If you need one golden strategy for ordering your in-flight meal, it's this: always order the stew. If the stew's not available, go for fried rice and fatty fish. Pasta, noodles, chicken breast or anything deep-fried does not fare so well in the harsh conditions of the aircraft galley. These recommendations come straight from the people tasked with making the millions of meals served in-flight every day, such as Fritz Gross, director of culinary excellence at LSG Sky Chefs Asia Pacific. As the guy in charge of LSG Sky Chefs' Hong Kong operation, which churns out 30,000 meals daily for airlines such as DragonAir, United Airlines and British Airways, Gross' challenge is a tough one: serve hundreds of people quality meals, but do so with no knives, no crème brûlée blow torches (or indeed any fancy equipment) and with no fresh ingredients at the point of service. read more    |
| Travel chaos: Bangkok airport ordered to get its act together Posted: 20 Mar 2012 11:07 PM PDT by CNNGo staff Airport officials are working to solve issues of overcrowding and painfully long immigration lines that are causing many passengers to miss flights at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi International Airport. Immigration troubles have been acute for nearly a month according to various reports, with some travelers complaining of wait times of more than two hours at both departure and arrival immigration checkpoints last week. Depending on the time of day, international fliers either breeze through or get stuck in travel gridlock. "Allow plenty of time to go through passport control," advised traveler J Cullen of the United Kingdom on Skytrax's Airlinequality.com on Wednesday. "It took us a very uncomfortable [and squashed] hour to get through a queue of only 20 meters." In response to the overcrowding and insufferable lines, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra says she wants all budget carriers to move to Bangkok's secondary Don Muang airport to ease congestion at Suvarnabhumi. read more    |
Yes, Gangwon Province is the chilliest region in Korea. 
Fritz Gross wants to make good food; doesn't want to get sued.| You are subscribed to email updates from CNNGo.com To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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