Food

I pretty much split my dinners here between eating out and cooking for myself (which is somewhat limited by the fact that I only have two burners and no oven). I love galbi (Korean barbecue), and I used to enjoy kim-bop, which translates to seaweed-rice and consists of some veggies and meat wrapped in the namesakes, but then when I got the flu I wasn't such a fan of what I had had for lunch that day anymore. I'd probably be fine with it at this point, but I've been being cautious. I've also eaten at good Japanese and Indian restaurants. On Thursdays we go to Lindsey's for Family Dinner, so I have home-cooked but not cooked-by-me meals then.

For breakfast I usually just have cereal on my way out the door, but sometimes I buy pastry from Paris Baguette, a common chain shop with a store in my school's building. I like that French bakeries are the foreign food of choice here.

For lunch I usually have the kindy lunch. The kindergarteners are served lunch at school and the teachers are welcome to it. It always has purple rice (I don't know what makes it purple) and then there are side dishes and soup. The side dishes are always interesting and often good. I especially like the egg-based concoctions. Kindy lunch is always an adventure because we foreigner are unable to identify a lot of the food so sometimes we end up not taking enough delicious potato cakes but take a bunch of the weird tiny fried fish that taste like a fishmarket smells. Also, sometimes something strong, like a particularly strong batch of kimchi, will make me a bit queasy a few hours later. However, I think I will stick with kindy lunch because it is a convenient way to experience Korean food, and because I am cheap.

Update: I forgot to mention that Paris Baguette, and possibly Korea in general, is brilliant when it comes to birthdays. Paris Baguette has a kit that it includes with cakes: it has short and tall candles, matches, and a cake knife. Koreans have a convention that I think the West should adopt where tall candles represent decades and short candles represent years, which is way classier than the stupid block number candles I see in the US and more practical than putting a candle for every year (though this can sometimes be amusing, such as on my grandmother's 75th birthday when we were mean enough to actually light 75 candles on an enormous cake and she surprised us all by blowing them out with a can of compressed air).