Around 50 people from Kazakhstan will arrive in Incheon on a medical tourism package offered by the western port city. The Incheon metropolitan government said this is the first time people from the Central Asian country are visiting the port city since it began offering the package trips to Kazakhstanis in June.
Kimchi, a side dish made with fermented vegetables, is a staple food consumed by Koreans in almost every meal. It is impossible to talk about Korean cuisine without kimchi.
Following the French-Korean conflict known as “Byeonginyangyo” in 1866, Heungseon Daewongun, the Joseon regent, became painfully aware that it needed to strengthen and modernize its own navy in order to fend off foreign intrusions and maintain its self-imposed isolation. He needed his own “vessels moved by fire.”
Throughout the 19th century, Western-style ships were occasionally sighted around the Korean Peninsula. Sometimes they passed peacefully, a mere curiosity to their bewildered witnesses, while at other times these strange vessels fell afoul of the weather or upon treacherous unmapped reefs and were cast upon the shore. It was these latter encounters that were extremely annoying as the Joseon authorities had to be deal with the shipwrecked crews as kindly as possible and repatriate them quickly through either China or Japan.