Food

I was unsure of what to expect in Korean food, but so far I've enjoyed most of it. The first few days being here I survived on a few lasting snacks from the US, but finally Heather and I ventured out to try eating in a restaurant. We also did some grocery shopping. The first grocery store that we went to was huge! I think the fish and meat section took up half of the store. There were people at each meat counter yelling at the customers to buy their meat, fish or seaweed. It was all pretty overwhelming. If we stopped to look at anything we'd get a swarm of venders trying to sell us their stuff. Free samples were also everywhere, but we had no idea what most of the stuff was so we stayed away from those as well. So our first grocery shopping experience went ok. We got a few basic things that we knew like milk, cereal, eggs, cheese and rice.

After buying our groceries we realized that our school serves lunch everyday and then for dinner the teachers would go out to eat, so we don't really cook or eat at home much. Eating out is incredibly cheap and wonderfully delicious though. For under $5 you can buy a huge meal of rice and veggies mixed together with other random stuff in it like seaweed flakes and mushrooms and stuff that I have no idea what it is. Then you also get between three and five side dishes. The staple side dishes are usually soup and kimchi. Then they will give you a few other things and a sauce or two. Dinner for one person will just about fill up the whole table. As far a utensils go they give you a big spoon and chopsticks. From what I've been able to tell you use the spoon for the soup and the big/main dish of rice, then you eat all the side dishes with the chopsticks. It's been fun to get the hang of chopsticks and proper eating etiquette. I'm also beginning to like some of the weird foods now like seaweed soup and kimchi. Kimchi is still too hot for my taste buds but I eat some of it with almost every meal. I think it's only a matter of time before my taste buds adjust.

Shopping for snacks has become a fun thing. We found this little grocery store right up the street from our apartment so we go there to buy snacks, water, milk and cereal. First of all everything is written in Korean characters and second of all they don't have the same types of snacks that I'm used to. So it's been fun to try things like green tea cookies, aero chocolate, Korean chips and all the different types of juice and green tea drinks that they have. Sometimes I'll have no idea what I'm buying but then I'll try it and love it! My most recent snack experiment was a red bag that looked like it maybe had chips in it. When I opened it there were all these little bird seed looking balls in it. I ate one and it tasted like crunchy peanut butter. :) So much fun!