Fooooood!

One thing I love here is the food. The salty and spicy dishes that are made from the same ingredients yet always seem to have a different taste. We have been to many restaurants and marked some of them as ones to go to again. A list of foods has been started and is added onto every day. There are some things that I would have again, and then some things that I remembered the name of just so I don't run across it again.

Here are some of the meals we have had:

This is the first western burger place I went to since being here. This is a 'frisco burger' with a steamed patty, bell peppers, lettuce, tomato, an extremely processed and breaded flap of cheese, and olives. Didn't look very appetizing.... I just got a cheeseburger which was pretty good for being made in Korea. But the fast food here is not nearly as fast as it is in America- they tell us 6 minutes before our food is ready, which I am not complaining about. It makes me think they made the burger with care, all neatly wrapped and perfectly stacked.

The set-up of the side dishes. Here are some pickled cabbages, pickled cucumbers- or just pickles, some steamed octopus, steamed broccoli, potato cakes- which are always delicious, and in the back are potatoes in mayo. They seem to really like mayo here and put it on a lot of things. I went to dinner with my teachers this night.

Below are some homemade rice cakes. They are sticky and have all sorts of nuts and dried fruits on the outside. They are pretty yummy but I wish they were slightly sweeter.

Above is banana milk- my favorite drink here in Korea!

Below is a menu at a soup shop. Most Korean restaurants are specialty shops where they focus on making one kind of meal. The shop normally includes the dish in their name.

Like I said in the previous post, the water here is not purified so with every meal they bring out a bottle of purified water before you order- there is one in the top left hand side of the picture below. They also give slightly damp hand towels.

Here are some pictures from when Jeremy and I went out to dinner. We got kalbi which is a kind of meat. This kind was marinated chicken and came with some pretty delicious side dishes, except for one. At the bottom of the picture below there is what looks like coleslaw but it's not, it is weird tasting salad dressing over top shredded cabbage. The taste is an indescribable tangy yet sour with a creamy feeling. Not my favorite by far.

In the background of the picture above is the marinated meat.

Now, the two pictures below are two things that were not necessarily bad but I just don't think I will have them again. The first one was something that I had at the soup shop. I just said the name and waited for it to be delivered to me. I had no clue what I was getting. When it came out, it looked like that. It smelled like tofu, tasted like tofu, and looked just like a darker tofu- so I assumed it was tofu. I researched to eventually find out that 선지해장국 is....... processed and congealed cow's blood. I have never had black pudding before and probably never will again but it's just knowing what it is. Between me and you, it wasn't all that bad. Oh, and Jeremy had a sort of beef stew (bulgolgi) - he stayed on the safe side when ordering. In the middle of the table is one of my favorite side dishes: kimchi radish!

Flower tea- one of the office staff made some for me. It tastes exactly like you are drinking....flower water.