Our Favorite Korean Café

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We posted a couple of videos a while ago on Insadong and its Cookie Makers. Quite possibly, Insadong is our favorite place to go outside of Bucheon, and we're not talking about the tourist area which is a long cobblestone street filled with cheap wares.

How do you get to this secret area? It's a bit complicated.

1. Walk along the busy cobblestone street, all the way to the end, keep going and you'll see a small set of lights.
2. Cross at the lights, turn left once you cross.
3. Turn right onto the second street. It looks kind of like a tunnel because it has high walls. At first, it looks like nothing, just a narrow street with some high schools hidden behind high walls, but if you keep walking, you will be rewarded. The area is SO unique. Tiny shops and restaurants all different from one another, with quirky workers and decorations.
4. To get to our favourite café, you keep walking past the restaurants until you have to cross a busy little street (there are no lights).
5. Once you cross, keep walking and turn left on the first tiny street.
6. You'll pass a couple other big looking coffee shops, but you'll soon see the 커피 선반 café on your left. It's across from a hat shop.

Why do we love this place? Here are a few reasons.

Décor:
The café is covered in Polaroids of people and things, and the owner has a small guestbook filled with people's polaroids and their comments. The tables in the back rooms are scribbled on by guests leaving happy comments and drawings. The walls are coated with little love notes to the café. They are delicately written on paper napkins with the many encouraging pens hanging around on the tables. If you're there, try and find our napkin!

Comfort:
The napkins are printed with cartoon doodles of the café's owner and workers. Sometimes the employees wear Mickey Mouse ears or hot pink construction hats. Why? No reason needed. You can stay a long time and no one is going to kick you out. In the back room, there is a secret upstair attic (only 4 steps high) which can only hold two snugly people. If you're hungry they serve dessert (homemade fresh waffles, ice cream) and freshly made pressed panini.

Coffee:
This place takes its coffee seriously. They roast their coffee on location (it's a bright red roaster) and have a wide selection to choose from. If you order a cup of hand dripped coffee, it will NOT be served with milk and sugar. Trust me, this coffee doesn't need milk and sugar. If you get an expresso based drink, it will be perfect! Nothing burnt, bitter, or weak about it. Just perfect! If you want some beans to go, it comes with a hand-drawn picture.

We love this place, really love this place, and we'd be there everyday if it weren't so far from Bucheon. If you're ever in the Insadong area, make sure you check it out. Click on the picture above to see our video tour of Our Favorite Korean Café, or click on the sidebar to see it on YouTube.

Korean Sticker Booths

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Our experiences with photo booths in Canada are limited to a tiny booth with a single strip of 4 pictures that are overpriced for how simple they turn out. Sure, it's fun to jam yourself into the booth with your best friend and make silly faces, but wouldn't it be better if you could more? Well, Martina's dream has come true! The sticker photo booth trend originally started in Japan and made its way to Korea; it is an entire store dedicated to (at least) five different types of booths, plus they have free props, wigs, and outfits you can use too! The one we went to was in the Hongdae area (near Hongik University) but if you live in Bucheon, we have one in the Sopoooooong Mall, upstairs, near the movie theatre.

Here's what you should know:

1. These places are self serve so don't feel intimidated. Pick a booth you like and check the currency it requires. Some of them are in Japanese yen, so you'll have to exchange your Korean won at the front cash.

2. Expect to pay between 3,000 won - 6,000 won depending on the newness of the machine. The older machines have only a few backgrounds that literally roll down before each picture is taken, but the newer ones have you posing in front of a green screen, and you can choose different computerized backgrounds. The more expensive machines often have ladders and monkey bars that you can hang off of, and they allow you to manipulate your computerized image in a more complicated way, such as erasing your body and adding a cartoon body.

3. All the instructions are in Korean, but it's not too hard to figure out. As soon as you put your money in BE READY because a timer counts down for you to choose your backgrounds. Use your finger or the touch pen to choose your favourite backgrounds. Most machine take 8 pictures and let your choose the 4 best.

4. Once you choose your four best you can lighten or darken the images. WARNING: It appears MUCH lighter once it prints, so be careful.

5. Once you finish taking the pictures, leave the booth and walk around to the computer where you get to decorate on them using a touch pen and touch screen. WATCH THE TIME LIMIT!!!

6. When you're finished, pick your layout style. In our experiences, the littlest pictures are so so small (smaller than your "enter" key) that the decoration details barely show up, so don't waste your time decorating a lot if you want 32 mini pictures!

7. Once the stickers print out, head to the front cash and choose which coating you want on it. Each place differs, but most have sparkle coating, bumpy coating, glossy coating, matte coating. Once you're finished, you can buy many things to keep your pictures in, such as keychains or picture frames, or you can peel off the backing and use it as a sticker!

Have fun and be prepared to be addicted! Of course, we made a video about them, so click on the picture above to see our video tour of Korean Sticker Booths, or check the sidebar instead for different formats.

Restaurant Reviews: Hongdae's Dos Tacos

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Korean food is great, but - as you can tell from our last Thai food restaurant review - we're also looking for foreign food. Our hunt for Thai food failed. We can't find any Mexican places in Bucheon, so last Friday we travelled to Hongdae to try our luck there. We heard about a place called Dos Tacos, which supposedly served really good Mexican food: burritos, nachos, margaritas, tacos, so on and so forth.

Would it be authentic, though, or at least as good as the Mexican food we're used to from back home? After all, back in Toronto we constantly ate at Bar Burrito or Burrito Bros, and they serve some pretty good stuff. Have our standards been met here at Dos Tacos? Click on the picture above to find out, or click here to see our review of Hongdae's Dos Tacos Restaurant. If all else fails, you can view the video on YouTube through our sidebar.

If videos just aren't your thing, then we'll spoil it for you right now: Dos Tacos was a big let down. Any burrito with pickles in it just ain't a burrito to us. The refried beans were kidney beans! Although it tasted good, it just wasn't Mexican enough for us. What a letdown.

Korean Poke Machines

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If you saw our post on Korean Claw Machines (or the Lobster Machine), you'd know that Korea is full of little money-gobbling-difficult-to-win-but-addictive toy machines. You can win anything from gum, golden turtle statues, lighters, or women's underwear. Well, there is a new machine in town. The stick-poke-out-a-toy-machine. You can win a solar powered bobble head guy or an mp3 player that looks suspiciously like an iPod shuffle. When Simon sees these machines, he is determined to beat them. Luckily we have a huge box full of change that just grows bigger everyday, so we use our coins to fuel the toy machine industry in Korea. Unfortunately, these machines are rigged, as the stick used to poke the toy through the hole is too fat to fit into the hole itself. Honest! We have video proof of the stick going in, but getting jammed because of it's cheating-outer-ring. If you don't believe us, check it out: click on the picture above to see our Korean Poke Machines video, or check out the sidebar for other video formats.