Korean Food Part Two

The last entry is not to say, of course, that I don't like Korean food. There's a lot of stuff I like.





Had I written this a couple days ago, I would have said that every Korean food item presented to me in pattie form was great. This was until yesterday, when one of the side dishes at work was some sort of deep fried oyster pattie. The first time I ever had oysters was on Thanksgiving, when they were added to the stuffing. That was okay. But the two times I've eaten oysters since I've been here... Eating oysters makes me feel deeply violated.





But oysters aside, so far I like everything that comes in a pattie around here. This includes meat patties, fish patties, egg patties with vegetables, deep fried potato patties, and a number of patties I couldn't identify or can't remember.





Another Korean food I like is called mando. It's kind of like Korean raviolo. Circular pasta is overstuffed with vegetables and/or meat and folded over. I got a huge bag of it when I first moved in a month ago, and I'm still working on it. I finally got myself a steaming tray, so I can cook them properly. I've been boiling them. I don't recommend it. Wet.





Bulgogi is also good. It's just seasoned (with sesame, soy sauce, garlic, etc.), shredded meat. It means "fire meat." Wikipedia says over a quarter of foreigners in 2007 claimed it as their favorite Korean food. I might agree.





I've been greatly confused about the vegetables here. They seem to use a lot of leafy greens, but not spinach, and sprouts, which I know nothing about anyway. A popular sprout is pictured below. I don't know what it's called, but the end looks like a corn kernal, and the sprouty part looks like a noodle. These are okay. Sprouts, whatever.





A popular Korean food is pibimbap (aka bibimbap), rice mixed with vegetables. "Bap" means "rice," and I don't know what "pibim" means, but it doesn't mean "vegetable." It wasn't in my dictionary. The vegetables include the sprouts above, carrots, some leafy greens that I can't identify, and variable others. Scrembled eggs are also usually included in strips. It's served on a plate all separated, with a container of that stupid stupid red pepper sauce, and you're supposed to mix it all together, adding as much sauce as you feel right about. I actually tend to like it without the sauce. The natural flavor of it all works well. I think it's the eggs that really bring it all together.

Korean barbecue is great, as we all know. A couple times I've gone with Heather and her family to this barbecue joint by her apartment complex. As with all barbecue joints, there is a large grill in the middle of the table, and you cook your own meat. The servers bring a bunch of slabs of pork (I'm not sure if this places specializes in pork, or if that's just what the fam prefers), along with the perfunctory side dishes. This includes kimchi, zuchini, and squash, which are also cooked on the grill, plus sauces, cucumbers in vinegar, shredded lettuce with some sort of strawberry yogurt topping, and these large translucent leaves in water. Koreans like to take leaves of various sorts and wrap them around things. It's cool.

It occurs to me that after I've actually learned all the names for these foods, I'll look back at my descriptions and think myself silly.

Korean Food Part One

Nothing can really prepare you for the amount of rice Koreans eat. It’s hard to imagine and practice eating the same thing three times a day, in large amounts. And a plain thing at that. Even in Kenya they had a small variety of staple food, and didn't eat the same thing for each meal. But in Korea, it's rice and kimchi, morning, noon, and night.

When I was staying with Heather the first two weeks I was here, I was eating breakfast and supper at her place, and lunch at work. They tried to accomodate me as much as possible, and not give me the same thing all the time, which was nice. But I was still overriced.

And they still love the stuff. If you ask Korean kids what their favorite foods are: "Rice!" "Kimchi!" Blech.

The Korean way of meals is to eat your own bowl of rice, and share kimchi and numerous other side dishes, which are placed in the center of the table. In restaurants, you typically get a bowl of soup, and often at home soup is part of the meal, too. Having just two or three parts of the meal like we do is kind of boring for them, I think. Maybe it's because they have to eat all that rice. It all balances out.

Speaking of balancing, I have no idea how the hell all these Koreans aren't wicked fat. If each meal consists of one bowl of rice, which measures about a cup, that's six servings of carbs per day, just with that one thing. They also eat potatoes, noodles, and baked goods. I've never had so much trouble keeping a decent diet. I guess everyone gets enough exercise in these parts.

Evidently the only spice in Korea besides salt is red pepper. If you look at this link, you'll notice the first four spices are hot or red pepper, and most of the others are just different versions of salt:

http://koreanfood.about.com/od/spices/a/CookingSpices.htm

I freaking hate red pepper right now. Even though I'm at my own apartment now and I mostly buy food that I would buy in the US, I still eat too much of that stupid stuff. At work, they have a service that sends a bowl of rice and six side dishes to work, and lately three or four of them have been laden with red pepper sauce. So I have a little trouble with work food. I've been lucky enough to have a light schedule at work so far, so I've been coming home and eating a meal between my first set of classes and when the food comes to work. Starting next week, though, I will be in class almost straight from 1:30 to 9, and won't have time to come home for a snack. I'll have to bring something with me, I guess, because I can't go from 1 to 6 without food. I'd die.

The funny thing about red pepper is that Koreans think their food is too spicy for Westerners. Countless times Heather or her family has warned me about the food I'm about to eat, and then I start in and have a hearty inside laugh about how not spicy it is.

There is some occurence of curry around here, though. Heather's mom made me rice (really?) with curried chicken and vegetables a couple times, which was wicked good. I also get bowls of ready-to-eat vegetable curry soup at the grocery store.

Open Court Reading Book 2 Class

This is my most advanced class right now. The kids are about eleven by our count, and just entered fifth grade (grades advance in the wintertime here). The class meets at 7pm the same days the other OCR class meets--Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The class until today consisted of Kate, Sally, Jenny, Sue, Tana, and Chris, but Chris is being transferred to the other branch of Kate LA as of tomorrow.

Kate is Heather's (my boss') daughter. She's probably the best student in the class. She understands everything really well compared to the others, and usually does her homework. I'm not sure if this is the result of having her mother as a principal or if she would be this way anyway.

Jenny is a giggler. I ask her if she's sitting on a feather a lot of the time, and of course I had to explain what this meant the first time I used the expression. Jenny speaks very well and understands spoken English well, but her reading comprehension isn't as good. She has asked her mother to take a month or two off from classes at Kate LA, but Heather wants me to get her to stay because she is a good student who tries hard, despite how good a student she thinks she is.

Sally is a very quiet girl (in class). She seems to understand the majority of what I say in class, although, like the others, she doesn't always know the answers to my questions. Her homework is pretty good, but she's kind of a sloppy mcslop slop, a trait of which I am trying to cure her.

Kate, Jenny, and Sally are also in one of my storybook classes, which meets Tuesdays at 8pm. We're finishing Ella Enchanted next week, and I think they're all very glad to get on to a new book. I really enjoyed this book, but it is way too advanced for them. I think even native English speakers their age wouldn't quite get it, and would need a couple years.

On my first day of teaching, Sue asked me to give her an English name. Her real name is Chae Eun, but she said that was too long, and she wanted a short English name. Sue was the shortest name I cold think of for a girl. She is a hard worker. She sometimes has trouble with the homework, but she asks me questions about things she doesn't understand. I'm glad she's developed this habit.


From left to right, this is Kate, Sue, Sally, and Jenny. They were all running around the classroom instead of crowding together, so I just snapped this shot real quick. They're going to get pissed at me if they ever see this.




Tana was transferred to this class from the lower level OCR class about three weeks ago because she found it too easy and she tested at the same level as Kate. She's a wicked slacker, though. Of all the homework I've assigned since she joined the class, she's handed in about a third of it. Strangely, though, she was overdiligent in the essay I had them write over the past couple weeks. I wanted them to write and essay and make an oral presentation on a topic of their choice. I had them do a rough draft and a second draft of the essay, and she passed both of those in on time, I think. Because most of the second drafts were mostly free of mistakes, I didn't make them complete a final draft. Tana passed in a third draft, anyway, though. So I corrected it. Then today, the week following the actual oral report, she passed in a fourth draft. It strikes me peculiar given her lack of other homework, and that she didn't even prepare for her oral presentation and did kind of a lousy job at that.


This is Tana. She was hiding behind my desk for some reason while I was taking the picture of the other girls. What a weirdo.




Chris is an odd boy. Lissette, the teacher I replaced, warned me about his tendency to sleep during class. She said at first she tried to keep him awake, but gave up after a while. Stephen, our Canadian teacher, told me he's actually seen him fall asleep midsentence. Apparently he's been tested for narcolepsy, but does not have the condition. He's just a very tired boy. I asked him how much sleep he gets, and he says almost six hours. For a fifth grader, that's wicked shitty, as we all know. The other girls make fun of him a lot. They make loud noises to wake him up, and talk about how much he sleeps openly in class. They make fun of him a lot. I try to get them to stop, but you know kids. I hope he'll get better treatment in his new class. He's quite smart when he can keep his eyes open. The couple classes he stayed awake for me, he really dominated. He sucks at homework, though. He didn't even bother to take part in the whole essay/oral presentation project, and he forgets or doesn't do his homework about 60% of the time. Too bad.

This is Chris, of course. I tried to get the whole class together in one picture, but the girls were being assholes, and kept running away every time he got close. Poor guy. He said he wanted to kill them.

View of Ulsan

So from the highest point on the trail I walked, this is what Ulsan looks like to the north:

And this is some little pagoda that I zoomed into from the above picture (the clearing in the center).

When I finally got to the end of the trail, after wondering for half an hour if I was going to regret taking it, for fear of it getting me lost, I came out onto a street that runs into the huge Gongeoptap Rotary, which I've walked around several times. It's about a mile away from home, so not too far a walk to get back. Phew. I met a group of teenage boys on the way who were eager to practice their English. It's fun to talk to the kiddies.