Food in Korea

I sometimes get asked what I eat for lunch. My students are very interested in my eating habits, since I'm a foreigner. My friends in America seem just as interested because I'm in a foreign country. I eat a mix of Korean and Western food. I usually avoid anything that has tentacles in it. I really love to cook, so I usually cook at home for dinner. I can cook a few types of Korean food, but usually when I cook, it is either Western food or Chinese food. Eating at a Korean restaurant is so cheap, it just doesn't make sense for me to cook.

I've been taking pictures of what I eat for lunch for the past few months. I kept forgetting to take out my camera at the beginning of the meal, so there aren't as many pictures as I'd intended, but here is a pretty good snapshot of what I eat for lunch.

I usually try to avoid this stuff. It is pickled yellow radish. But when it's in the bowl, it looks a great deal like pineapple slices. The very first meal I at in Korea, I was served this radish. Only I really did think it was pineapple. It might have had something to do with the really long flight and wanting to see something familiar on the table, but I definitely bit into it expecting to taste pineapple. It was a most unpleasant surprise. 

This is translated into English as "Pork Cutlet", and it's kinda like a fried tenderloin. You can get these all over the place with lots of different things inside of them. The strangest one I've ever seen was a pork cutlet stuffed with sweet potato paste. This particular one has mozzarella cheese inside of it. It is also served with some sort of sauce on top. Sometimes the sauce is sweet, sometimes it's spicy. This is always served with rice, cold corn, and shredded cabbage. Sometimes the cabbage has mayo on top of it. This day it was some sort of ketchup based sauce. 

Every once in awhile, there are days where I just don't have time to go get a proper lunch. That's when I dash over to the little snack store on campus and try to find something to eat. For about $0.60, I got two Peanutcream Sand. These sound really strange, and they kinda are, but they're pretty good. It's basically just white bread with some sort of peanut butter something inside. 

This is my other favorite thing from the snack room. Apple Lychee juice. Yum!

Sometimes I go out with my friend Renae. We often go out for Chinese food. Only it's Koreanized Chinese food, and isn't anything like real Chinese food or American Chinese food. This is fried pork with a sweet sauce on it, and it's one of my favorite Korean Chinese dishes. 

This isn't really lunch food, but it's great fun so I thought I'd share. It is called Pat Bingsu, and I'm not sure what the translation is. Basically, it's shaved ice with sweetened red beans, ice cream and some sort of fruit preserves or syrup. This particular one is strawberry flavored. You mix it all together, and it's really delicious!

This is a very foreign food called "Rich Cheese Pasta" that can be found at the local Pizza Hut. 

This is one of my favorite Korean foods. It's called Bibimbap, which means Mixed Rice. There's also some sort of strange soup. Every time I eat in the cafeteria, they serve me some sort of strange soup. I always taste it, but I never like it. Today was no exception.

This is what the Bibimbap looks like when it is all mixed up. It has rice, tuna, spicy red pepper sauce, lettuce and a fried egg. You should make it at home sometime!

Today was seaweed soup and fried rice with pork neck. It was pretty good, actually!

There are some days when my lunch looks more like this. Rice and some overly salty bean sprouts that I didn't really eat. 

Here's the reason I only ate rice for lunch. The other options were seaweed soup, seasoned grass stalks, and some sort of very spicy, very tentacle filled main dish. These are always sad days in the cafeteria. 

Sometimes I'll even go out with a whole group of people. We had some coupons for free pizzas, so we ordered a wide variety of delicious pizza to split amongst ourselves. 

There's not anything too weird here. I'll try to do better about taking pictures of the more adventurous stuff I eat!