김치!

(If you're seeing little squares here and there, that means your computer does not support or doesn't have Korean fonts installed.)

Kimchi is the national food of Korea, so it's not too surprising to have a museum dedicated to it! Sue and I had to go check it out. We got there without much time before closing, but luckily it's a pretty small museum so 45 minutes was actually plenty of time to see most of it.


This was neat. Just all sorts of kimchi fermenting jars from different time periods and geographical locations. I forget the source of the wooden "jars," but it was basically from a region where clay making was difficult, so they improvised with hollowed-out tree trunks.


They had a lot of plastic models of kimchi showing off the different kinds. This one caught my attention in particular: persimmon kimchi! Not an ingredient that I would have thought to ferment.


They also had a little nutritional section on kimchi with cute cartoon renditions of kimchi's lactobacilli. This one shows the bad bacteria dying off (and they've got halos as they float off to heaven!). Pretty entertaining way to teach about bacterial biology and fermentation.

Interesting note: during the SARS outbreak a few years ago, they noticed that the SARS incidence rate in Korea was relatively low compared to the rest of Asia, and so they attributed it to eating kimchi. As a result, kimchi sales in China and Japan shot through the roof!