From Denpassar, we took a red eye flight to Seoul. (You know that you've been traveling a long time when a red eye seems like a good night's sleep.) Going straight from Bali to Seoul was a refreshing shock. Every sensation seemed calculatedly opposite those of Bali: the chill in the air, the crisply dressed subway-riders, the stark, geometrical beauty of palace eaves rising against branching pines, and the clear awking of magpies.

The change in cuisine is appropriately dramatic. To warm the belly against the brisk wind, Korean cuisine prepares an arsenal: spicy kimchi stews and rich bone broths, the comforting caramelized corners of grilled red meat, steaming hot dumplings and pillowy rice cooked with beans and grains, and, of course, a veritable pantheon of pickles.

There was not a single meal in Korea served without at least one kind of kimchi, and I think the average (I wish I had counted) hovered around seven. It is to celebrate that delightful fact that Greg and I made the trek to the Kimchi Field Museum, a small but informative place that is oddly located in the basement of a gigantic underground mall.

The huge jars in the photo are where kimchi is made, and every Korean household traditionally had an outdoor terrace for these containers. The containers could also be buried, covered with hay, or water-cooled to keep them at the right temperature for the fermenting pickles. The museum illustrates the history and process of making kimchi, as well as the huge variety of kimchis - a kiosk in the museum provided recipes for 70 different kinds, from elaborate "blossoms" fashioned out of cut radishes wrapped with cabbage leaves, to knotted green onions pickled with fermented fish. We later were able to identify a number of these varieties at restaurants.

Usually kimchi comes as part of the banchan, which are the side dishes that come with almost every meal (and a huge part of what makes Korean food so awesome.) Apparently the government has tried (and failed) to curtail the deployment of banchan because it encourages food waste. But I don't see why - in the five days we were in Korea, we left only a few mouthfuls of uneaten banchan in our wake.

Related to banchan is the hanjeongsik, or Korean banquet. Many restaurants serve this fixed-price, many-coursed meal, and it is very handy for foreigners, because you get a little bit of everything and you only need to learn a few syllables of Korean to read it on the menu. The hanjeongsik that we tried ranged from homestyle cooking and presentation to elaborately plated amuse-bouches, and included dishes like fried whole fish, tofu kimchi soup, rice porridge, and meats in hot stone pots, as well as huge numbers of banchan.

Only slightly less easy for the foreigner is Korean barbecue. The general procedure is to cook the meat on the grill at your table, cut it into bitesized pieces, and wrap it, and any accompaniments of your choice, in lettuce (or shiso leaf, or glutinous rice sheet, or whatever is provided), then pop it in your mouth, and then wash it down with soju. We sampled beef and pork ribs, as well as both raw and lightly smoked pork belly, and every slice was succulent, marbled and indulgent.

While we ate a lot of hanjeongsik and barbecue in Seoul, we also had occasion for some between-meal snacks. The most common street food were these boiled fishcake skewers. There were literally six restaurants serving them on the block next to our hostel, and after walking down the block a couple times the aromatic steam and glimmering bowls of dipping sauce became impossible to resist. You can get several kinds of fish cake served this way, as well as glutinous rice sticks. Glutinous rice sticks are also sold toasted on little grills, and have a crisp, smoky exterior and a delightfully chewy interior.

In between visiting two of Seoul's beautiful palaces, we were lured by an incredible heavenly smell, to a stall selling these little cakes. Made in molds, similar to stuffed pancakes we've seen in China and Singapore, these little cakes had a fluffy, moist crumb, a crisp crust, and a filling of bean paste with perfectly tempered sweetness - the treat as a whole was reminiscent of a truly excellent churro, with red bean paste in the role of a surprise guest star. Another dessert, although with slightly less balanced flavors, were these packets of sweetened almond paste wrapped in sugar floss. While they had a delightful, delicate texture that disintegrated into chewiness, they were incredibly sweet, and we found ourselves incapable of seconds.