Hi Korea, I'm Here!

On to the food and fun! So Anthea and I went into a restaurant where the menu was completely in Korean and there weren't any pictures. We had the owners pretty much translate/use hand motions to describe the dishes on the menu. We ended up ordering Samgyopsal and rice. It was sooo much food! I'm still not used to the massive amount of food that Asians eat. If I weren't walking home everyday and ate barely anything when I'm home alone in my apartment, I'd definitely be so much fatter than when I came. I have to mention again, school lunches rock ;p

Cooking for 1 is a hard task. Sometimes I undershoot and end up having to supplement my meal with snacks/yogurt.. but quite often, I cook way too much. Korean beef is extremely expensive.. I found that out the hard way when I bought a small smaaaaaaallll lump of beef for 20,000 won (~$20 US). The price was labeled as 3980 in the case but I didn't know that was by 100 grams until she weighed it and asked if that was ok. Because the other meat department people in the grocery store I went to (department store grocery store) were kind of making fun of me when I asked where the beef was -_-;.. I just wanted to get away as soon as possible and ended up taking the beef with me.

So I've been trying to make some of the dishes my mom cooks at home with the beef. I don't eat a lot so one dish takes me forever to eat.. that small lump of beef is down to 1/4th the size after 2-3 weeks. I don't have internet at home so I can't really look up receipes so I've been doing stuff by what I THINK is right. One dish = tomatoes (cherry tomatoes b/c that's all I had), garlic, soy sauce, and beef. My mom later told me that she never adds soy sauce to that.. oh well. Another dish = Beef, garlic, soy sauce, sugar, and seasame oil. I added onions, green onions, bits of carrots, some kind of stringly white mushrooms, and the dokpokgi rice cake things. It turned out um ok/looked ugly? Last one I tried was beef, garlic, soy sauce, onions, and oyster sauce. That turned out incredibly salty. I mixed up two of the recipes my mom mentioned.. you don't need soy sauce lol. I ate a ton of rice with that one XD

For veggies, I've just been frying them normally. I've noticed that the rice here is kinda hard.. and gets hard after one day in the fridge. I've been cooking 1 1/2 cup of rice with 1 3/4 cup water and have been letting it sit in the water for about 15 minutes before cooking but it's still harder than I guess the Japanese rice. I'll try 2 cups of water next time. Just for anyone who likes the tofu skin sushi thing and want to make it themselves.. One and a half cups of rice is more than enough (1 cup might even be enough). As you can see from my picture, some of my tofu things exploded b/c I put too much rice lol. There's also 14 skins in a pack so either prepare to eat a lot/microwave next day, or make them only when you have guests to eat them with. It took me 3 days to finish mine with me stuffing myself all 3 days. Anyone else have good simple recipes, please let me know!!



Aside from food, we went to Seoul last weekend! Ashley is here now so we went exploring :D Anthea came over to my place so we took the train to Yongsan together. We met up with Ashley there. It took us 30 mins to find her b/c none of us have cellphones lol. After finding her we went to Yongsan Electronics Market to shop around and mostly to survey what's there. I think we explored most of the area. I can't really tell b/c the map online didn't help too much.


After Yongsan, we headed over to Dongdaemun to meet up with Mi-Young (Semi's friend). Mi-Young is really nice and overall an awesome person. Her personality is really funny and matches with ours pretty well. We went to Doota to shop for clothes and then went to dinner. It happened to be Samgyopsal again but it was just as good :D Mi Young kept eating these really spicey peppers and she was addicted and claimed they weren't too hot. But then she dipped the pepper in the hot sauce and after biting into it she finally said oh too hot! That didn't stop her though.. few minutes later, she repeated the process. It was really funny to watch XD


After dinner, we walked along the "artificial stream" all the way to the end of the stream. It was a really nice walk. She said it was about 4 km and we walked maybe 2/3 of it. She did this all in boots. Craziness. I wish I was able to walk in heels as long as Korean girls. My feet were hurting from the little amount of time I had to walk in heels yesterday. I don't know how they do it all day long and on uneven ground.

Ashley came back with us to Guri that night and spent the night! The next day we had McD's in the morning for breakfast b/c it's right next to where I live and explored my market a little bit. I can't wait for this coming weekend. We're going to be exploring more of Seoul again and going to a crochet club. Jack might be coming up this weekend too :D Unfortunately, no Guri teachers were on the list for GEPIK orientation so we all have to stay at school and teach, but I'll just make up for all the fun this weekend :)