m8888888's Blog

Before I went to Korea, I thought Korean food would be pretty much like other Asian food I'd eaten- rice and stirfried veggies, some chicken, some fish, things like that! In any case, I was comletely wrong and unprepared! Korean food is pretty special. Most things are quite spicy, there isn't very much chicken (except for fried chicken, which is quite good, but only once in awhile!), and there is A LOT of fish. I hate spicy food and fish, which rules out about 95% of the food, and I'm not a huge fan of beef or pork, which is the main ingredient in most non-fish dishes. It's very hard to get vegetarian food here, because there aren't very many vegetarians in Korea, and most people don't understand what the point is! You can ask for things specially, without fish or meat, but sometimes they stick some in anyway, and don't understand when you don't eat it! Plus, the red spicy sauce that is in A LOT of Korean food almost always contains fish. Almost all soup broth is beef or fish broth. So it's almost impossible to be an inflexible vegetarian, if you don't cook all your own food!

There isn't very much international food here, besides Japanese and Chinese, but even the Chinese food isn't like the Chinese food I grew up with in California- it's really similar to the Korean food! There are some American restaurants, like TGI Fridays (Which I normally hate, but I ate at sometimes in Korea when I was desparate!), Bennigan's, and Outback, but they can be pretty pricey. Korean food, on the other hand, is quite cheap. My boyfriend loved it, and always wanted to eat out. You can find a good amount of basic Western ingredients at the stores, so I usually cooked my own food. The one thing that I really liked in Korea was Chicken Galbi, which is chicken, beansprouts, and onions
, that you grill yourself at your table. Yummy! But of course there weren't that many restaurants serving it! Kimbab, Korean-style sushi rolls were good, and beef galbi could be delicious, too. 

You always get a lot of small side dishes for free at restaurants in Korea, with pickles, kimchi, seaweed, beansprouts, and other little dishes. That's fun!

I wish I could have learned to like Korean food while I was living there, but I just never got used to it!