AND a whole lot of other Jeollanamdo-ers are coming too! Tonight is 'newbie night' but also 'reunion night' for those of us who trained in Gwangju, and apparently it's also 'farewell night' to foreigners I've never met. There's only one foreigner bar in town (Elvis's of course) so I guess we'll all be there! Friends from Mokpo, Wando (that's Suze), Gwangyang, and Yeosu are all coming.
Hopefully Suze we'll be here within the next 20 minutes, and then hopefully she's up for going on a walk (a VERY long one) to the Duck-e boats! (peddle-boats). Something about peddling up and down a Korean river in a Duck-e boat completely appeals to me.
It's been pretty lax for me since my Yeosu trip. Thursday night Dean, Mandy, and I drove to Gwangyang to have dinner with Kerry and Nicki, Vietnemese style. Then LAST night I called Ali around supper time and BEGGED her to have ANYTHING not Korean with me!! I love Korean food but it is KOREAN.
In Canada the food is so diverse and influenced by so many countries. But here the food involves rice, kimchi*, spice, meat, tofu or bean sprout soup, and millions of side dishes of veggies. Maybe you bbq your meat at the table, or maybe it comes pre-cooked, maybe you mix stuff in with rice, or maybe you wrap it in lettuce leaves, but it is all basically the same formula. After living with variety for so long it's hard to eat the same thing for lunch and supper every day. (and Korean people even eat spicy kimchi and rice for breakfast!)
Anyway Ali was SO with me! So we went to the grocery store and made the best meal we could with the random food we came across. We ran into Mike, so he came too for random food. We also tried to get an ice cream bar each. They were sitting in the freezer individually packaged. But when we took them to the checkout, the cashier made a big X with her arms (this means NO, making a circle over your head with your arms means YES) then she flashed 9 fingers at us. And mimed a box. What? I didn't see any boxes. And if you need to buy 9 (random number) at a time, why aren't they packaged like that? So..no ice cream for us!
*Kimchi is the national dish of Korea and they eat it at EVERY meal. It's cabbage that's been fermented with various vegetables and probably oyster juice, plus something that makes it spicy. It's served cold. So to re-iterate, Kimchi is cold, spicy, fermented cabbage, that tastes fishy .Korean people can be VERY offended if you say you don't like Kimchi, as they equate Kimchi with Korean culture (I've never made this mistake, I've just heard). They believe Kimchi is very very good for health. The person who created the Jeollanamdo Language Program casually mentioned that the reason Korea never got SARS is because they all eat Kimchi.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment