Korean Idiosyncrasies

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Korean food. I had had some before I left. Korean food is incredibly spicy. They love to add to chilli spice to everything! Their most famous dish is called kimchi. It is pickled vegetables in chilli pepper. It can be cabbage, cucumber, or radish. They eat it at every meal, even breakfast.

Two of my favourite meals here are dol sot bibimbap (bee-bim-bap), and Korean barbeque. Bibimbap is rice, beans sprouts and many other vegetables with it. It is often served with a raw egg on top. It comes in a hot pot, and you mix it together. It cooks the egg and holds it all together. Then you can put a thick chilli sauce in it as well.

Bibimbap

Korean Barbeque

When you go to Korean barbeque there is a little barbeque in the middle of the table. You roast your meat and garlic in the middle. Every meal comes with sides like kimchi, radish and salad. The way that you eat this is that you take a salad leaf, put in a piece of meat dipped in sauce and anything else you want. Then you roll it up into bite size and eat it. It sounds strange, but it’s really good.

Little things that are different here are that:

* after you are finished eating at a restaurant it’s expected that you leave right away,
* you give and receive things with two hands,
* you touch your arm when giving and receiving money,
* you have to flag a bus down or it won’t stop,
* bowing
* everything is planned last minute
* people sell things on the subway
* you sometimes have to climb up a bridge to cross the street
* people triple park,
* sidewalks are for parking not for walking
* pedestrians do not have the right of way
* signs cover the business buildings

Samsung Plaza

* side streets have no street signs, so many times you see three cars heading towards each other, and trying to figure out how to get past each other
* their favourite snack is squid
* outside many restaurants there are fish tanks with all sort of sea animals (flounder, crustaceans, squid, eels, etc.) for dinner
* no street names
* there are markets everywhere
* Koreans are very patriotic!