My welcoming party

So the other night I told you guys my coworkers were taking me out to dinner as my welcoming party, then it mysteriously never got mentioned again.

Thursday night two of the Korean teachers took all of us foreign teachers out to dinner. We had Korean barbeque, where there are grills in the middle of the tables and big exhaust tubes that come down from the ceiling. They serve you a big pile of raw meat chopped into little bite size hunks, and you grill it yourself. It was so delicious. The sides were great too.

Everywhere you go to eat in Korea, they have side dishes. The most famous is kimchi. It is pretty much everywhere. Different places have kimchi that tastes different, but I really like some of it. The sweeter, more pickle-tasting version is my favorite. There are also usually a salad of some sort, and some kind of korean cole-slaw. The barbeque place had onions you put in this awesome sauce, and I cannot describe how much I liked it. It was awesome.

We put the meat on the grill and move it around so it cooks evenly, then everybody just grabs some with their chopsticks. Every person has little dishes with sauces, like a spicy chilli-paste based sauce, and sweeter bean paste sauce, and you dip your meat in a sauce and NOM. There was also raw garlic in sesame oil that we put in a little dish and set on the grill, so we had roasted delicious hunks of garlic just eat them as they are or put them with a piece of meat in the sauce and eat together. It was a huge awesome delicious meal.

We also ordered soju, since I hadn't tried it before. Soju is Korean vodka for those that don't know. It comes in little half liter bottles, like 20oz cokes back home, and it is cheap and it is strong. It went down pretty smooth for how strong it is, but man it is strong. I only had 2 shots over the course of dinner. I'm sure it is an acquired taste. :-/PPP

Another point, I have no idea how Koreans eat so damn much and stay so damn thin. For real, they must all be bulimic or something. Every time I have eaten with a Korean they have eaten 3x as much as me, yet I am the fat one. This is like eating with my little brother only worse because it is EVERYONE, not just him that stays freakishly thin. :(


After we were all completely stuffed, we walked down the street to a makali (?) house for a little more food and a lot more booze. Makali (Rhymes with brocoli) is a sweet rice wine. You drink it out of bowls. I will have to try it again at some point because I was so full and so tired that I didn't like it at all and couldn't drink more than a little. We also ordered a Korean seafood pancake and split it, and the Korean teachers ordered acorn jelly. I didn't try the acorn jelly, sadly. It looked kind of gross, and as I said I was completely stuffed (having not eaten as much as the thin people. Ugh FML) so I will have to try these things again later at some point and report back to you. An assignment for the month I will spend photographing and reviewing strange foods just for you, dear reader. Until then, this little taste of the strange foods to come will have to suffice!