First Days!

Hello everyone!
I'm finally starting a blog to keep track of our travels. I guess I'll get to it...

I think I left off at saturday afternoon...

Kraig's friend Tim, from Faith (his high school) agreed to be our tour guide for the night. We met up at the school gate (such a difficult task without a cell phone!)

We took a 40 minute bus trip to Myeongdong, a very hip shopping area for young people.



I led the way through the maze of vendors while the boys followed behind catching up on lost time. I'm pretty sure it would take me a day or two to get through all the stands. We probably only saw half of the market before it started to drizzle. As we were planning on dinner, it shocked Tim that I'm a pescetarian (I eat seafood, veggies, but no meat). Come on Korea, jump on the Western bandwagon and go vegetarian! Anyway, he took us to a traditional Korean joint, seriously a hole in the wall with steps leading into a basement restaurant able to hold at most 30 people.

I would like to compare a Korean meal to thanksgiving. You have a base item, main meat dish, and many side dishes, which you all share from. In Korea, you have individual bowls of rice and soup, the meat at our meal was squid, and there were about 18 side dishes (banchan). The sides are very small, but numerous. We had quite a bit left over.



The meal was a little saddening for me. I think it was my moment of acceptance that I don't like Korean food. Looking forward to coming here, I was so excited to try the new cuisine, which I thought would be similar to Chinese or Thai food. I find their food smells awful and lacks flavor. Like my fruit. Why is it covered in mayonnaise sauce? Or the soup. Why does it taste like sweat? Also, I can't quite get over all the different textures; everything is too squishy. There's probably 2 types of squishy, the first is similar to a mushroom, never ending chewiness. The second is like hours old pancakes, ugh.
The meal also frustrated me. Koreans think they're the boss, so their eating utensils include metal chopsticks and spoon. I can handle wooden chopsticks, but metal ones are the death of me! It was rather frustrating, and embarrassing in front of Tim, that I couldn't pick anything up with the chopsticks. After attempting to use them on 2 items, I gave up and stuck to eating soup and rice with my spoon.


Enough about that. After dinner with Tim, we met some of his friends at a coffee shop. Have I mentioned how much they love coffee? Seven out of 10 shops seen on the street are coffee shops. I'll take a picture of that sometime. He has an interesting bunch of friends. Most of them are South American Koreans, meaning their parents are Korean, but they grew up in South America. It's quite entertaining to hear a Korean speak with a spanish accent. Thankfully our outing at the coffee shop was cut short since they were going out to celebrate one guy's last night of freedom (he's joining the marines). It was only our third day here and we were exhausted from all the excitement.

Well, that's all for now. I'm sure I'll be posting more often as I catch up on the days. Miss you all!

Laura