Food Shock
Before going to Korea, I asked a friend who had spent a couple of years here what the food was like. The answer? Hot, hot, and more hot! This worried me a little. I've never been good with hot food. It tends to make my stomach feel a wee bit upset, as well as making my mouth distinctly uncomfortable.
For the first two weeks of my stay in the country, I ate cafeteria food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The meals consisted of kimchi, rice, soup, and a couple of side dishes. These side dishes could be anything from whole fried fish to tentacles to a green salad. There was no difference between breakfast, lunch or dinner. It was there I tried kimchi for the first time. It was the last time, too! It's apparently one of those foods you either love or hate, and I definitely hated it. The soups also varied. One day it would be a nice vegetable broth, and the next it would be a hot'n'spicy tentacle soup.
After a day or two of fishy, tentacle-y breakfasts, we English teachers rebelled. No fish for breakfast! Gah! We could handle strange foreign foods for lunch and dinner, but breakfast was sacred. So the cafeteria started serving eggs and rolls with jam. Thank goodness.
Since those two weeks, I have been at the mercy of various schools for my lunches. I learned quickly which ones I could rely on for a good meal, and which ones required me to bring in few bread rolls to fill up the gaps. I learned to dread "Tentacle Day" as we teachers came to refer to it, which unfortunately, was always unpredictable and could happen at any school, on any day. I looked forward to my Wednesday afternoon school, which always had something good to eat even if it was Tentacle Day there.
I was always in awe at how the children could eat some of this food. I mean, we're talking seriously hot here! Even my father would say, "Whoa!" and reach for the water glass, and he always orders hot curries. And, sometimes it's just not hot enough for the teachers. They have to add MORE hot sauce, and always wonder why on earth I don't want to add any to my meal.
"Don't you want some hot sauce, Eleanor?"
"No. Why would I want it?"
"Flavour!"
"But... but... it already has flavour!"
Sigh.
I have a theory about Korean adults and their taste buds. Since they were children, they've been eating kimchi and other extremely hot foods about three times a day. By the time they are adults, they've lost most of their sense of taste, so they have to ladle on more and more hot sauce. Eventually, I expect, they will be unable to taste anything at all. I have seen Korean adults pick up giant jalapeño peppers, dip them in hot sauce, and eat them like carrots. You know your taste buds have been killed when you need to add hot sauce to your jalapeños.
You are probably thinking, "Wow! Korean food sounds dreadful! Remind me to never ever eat it!" Actually, that's not entirely true. There is some food here I will miss when I go back to New Zealand:
Galbi. The best-ever Korean food. Galbi is marinated pork ribs. You are given a large plate of the meat, which has been drowned in marinade, and you get to cook it yourself over a gas-heated grill. It's fantastic, and my favourite Korean food. After it's cooked, you wrap it up in a lettuce leaf with various side dishes and eat it like a sandwich. Mess usually abounds.
Sangyeopsal. Korean bacon. You prepare it the same way as the galbi. It's extremely fatty, though, and very expensive. I don't usually have it. I object to paying exhorbitant amounts of money for fatty bacon.
Bulgogi. Marinated pork bubbling away in its own sauces, with vegetables and noodles on top. Quite tasty, but not on par with galbi.
Bibimbap. Basically, it's a giant salad served on rice with an egg on top. Koreans usually add about a gallon of hot sauce. I don't. It's nice and healthy and a good light meal.
Even though there are these tasty, tasty things available, I still miss New Zealand food terribly. The thing I miss most is cheese. Sharp, crumbly cheddar in particular. The only cheese available in my town (and most others) is processed and mozarella. It's just not the same. I also miss bread. The bread here is always white, soft, and quite sweet. I would kill for a good loaf of wheat bread, slathered in marmite.
Now let's look at the non-traditional Korean foods, like their biscuits [cookies], chips, and cereals. We're talking sugar galore here. The healthiest cereal is coated in excessive amounts of sugar. The biscuits are so sweet you feel sick after eating a couple. And the chips are just plain odd. This hasn't stopped me eating all the junk food they have to offer, though! I learned to regret that in the past few weeks--I've gained a bit of weight, and had to visit the dentist to have a massive cavity in a back molar filled. Yikes! (I am told by my fiancé that it was actually quite tiny, a millimetre by 2 millimetres, but he LIES. It was half the tooth, I swear!)
There are also traditional Korean sweets. They are usually made of rice paste and beans. Odd? Yes. Mostly they are either tasteless or disgusting, except for one type. It's rice paste filled with sweet sesame syrup, which actually provides a nice counterpoint flavour to the bland, rubbery outside. Koreans gobble all these "treats" up and say, "Yum!" but I usually have to discreetly dispose of my portion.
The food is the absolute biggest culture shock for me. It's the thing I miss most about New Zealand (along with my family, friends, and fantastically temperate and changeable Dunedin weather). I've made something of a list of meals I will eat as soon as I get back to New Zealand. Most of them include cheese!
I'll miss the galbi, though.