Eat, Drink, and Be Merry

Commercial:

“Very delicious milk (God’s blessing). Let’s drink this milk. If you eat this, you’ll never die. This milk is made of God’s tears. You must believe it because believing God.”

– Tyler, 6^th grade English Camp student

I will start by getting this off the table. Koreans eat dogs. It is probably my number one on my list of things I hate about Korea, beating out banks that open for a mysterious few hours a day, a baffling absence of public trashcans, and the beating of students. But it’s not all Koreans and it’s not all dogs. Supposedly, the law restricts boilable dogs to a particular breed, so the stew that you might order in a restaurant is not the lapdog with a ruffled dress and pink dyed ears that you saw a Korean girl in high heels walking down the sidewalk. Except in rural areas, where it might actually be that dog. At least, as my friend’s student pointed out, Koreans don’t eat monkey brains and insects like Chinese people. Oh wait, unless you count the silkworm larvae that street vendors sell by the cupful.

Now that that is out of the way, Korean cuisine as a whole is very near the top of my list of things I love about Korea. While I had my moments of yearning for peanut butter, home made brownies, and real cheese that melts when heated, I am now sitting at home craving a plate of hot ttukpokki. The defining characteristic of Korean food is spiciness, and among the first words I learned to say in Korean was, “It’s hot!” Koreans were always surprised to see an American able to devour the red pepper laced food, but what made it particularly difficult to eat was not the spiciness in and of itself, which I found to be delicious. What was difficult was that they did not usually drink anything with their spicy meals. The hot, sometimes spicy soup was meant to be thirst quenching. Furthermore, nose blowing is a strict cultural taboo, which can be an embarrassing dilemma if you are not accustomed to eating a food named “tear noodles.” The teachers once took me for some exceptionally spicy tear noodles during our lunch break and we managed to slurp them all down, grunting, red-faced, and sniffling back our runny noses.

The national food, which should also probably be the image on the Korean flag, is kimchi. Kimchi is spicy pickled cabbage, and Koreans eat it with every meal. The first time I tasted kimchi, I was not particularly excited at the prospect of eating it every day, but the more I sampled the fonder I grew until I couldn’t fathom cooking without it. Okhee told me that as a little girl, her greatest desire was to travel to America. Then one night, she dreamt that there would be no kimchi in America, and she was sure she would never survive without it. Koreans have proudly claimed kimchi as a (unproven) preventative of stomach cancer and the avian flu, and they had high hopes for kimchi to fight the swine flu, but it seems to have run away with its tail between its legs. According to the Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul, there are 187 varieties of kimchi, which were traditionally fermented in ceramic pots, but are now mainly stored in kimchi refrigerators if not imported, embarrassingly, from China. Because Koreans consume such vast quantities of kimchi, they are recognized internationally for having bad breath. They brush their teeth after every meal, and students and teachers even keep spare toothbrushes at school. Despite their infamous breath, they have yet to develop an effective toothpaste. Although they have an array of flavors, including mint, pine, and green tea, my “2080 Toothpaste” was marketed with the slogan “keeps the 20 teeth healthy til 80 years old.” Needless to say, I obtained my first three cavities in Korea.

Another trait of the Korean diet is that it is very healthy and balanced. A Korean would probably never grab a chocolate Poptart for breakfast. Every meal includes rice, soup, kimchi, and a smattering of other side dishes along with the main dish, including breakfast. There were days when my favorite part of the day was school lunch. Even on days when it was spent sitting in awkward silence amongst the teachers, the cafeteria food would fill my stomach and brighten my mood. If one side dish was unappetizing, dried anchovies with almond or pig blood sausage (on special occasions), it would be balanced with a hearty curry rice or seafood and noodles. With the tray divided into five sections for rice, soup, and three sides, you could always count on something good. Since recuperating from financial depression, Koreans proudly serve side dishes as a reminder that they have the luxury to do so. Often, a fancy meal for a large group will be an entire table spread with 20 or 30 different side dishes, people reaching over each other to the opposite end of the table in order to try all of the foods presented. Even the cheapest restaurants with menus made up of ramen noodles and fried rice set out a serving of kimchi and sweet radish. When I wasn’t whisked away to group dinners, which was often, I frequented these restaurants, where gimbap – rice and vegetables rolled in seaweed – sold for under a dollar.

Korea does not offer the array of ethnic cuisines that the U.S. does, and I took opportunities to eat Indian or Mexican food as a rare treat. The most prominent foreign cuisine was American food. Because the majority of Koreans are of the belief that Americans eat only hamburgers, fried chicken, and pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the restaurants that popped up the most were McDonalds, Popeye’s Chickens, and Pizza Huts, and Korean takeoffs of them. While I found the Korean McDonalds slightly improved from ours, offering shrimp burgers and green tea McFlurries, they botched pizza in every possible way. After demolishing a perfectly good cheese pizza with onions, canned corn, sweet potato paste, and hot dogs, they would charge $25 for a small pie. For the more cultured, there were T.G.I.Fridays where a steak cost more than a pair of XL skinny jeans, but in Korea, I preferred to eat as the Koreans eat, including a Dunkin Donut every now and again.

The set-up of Korean restaurants varies as much from America as the food. When you walk into a restaurant, the first thing you might notice is that everyone is probably sitting on the floor around a foot-high table. The next thing you might notice is that they are most likely eating from a communal bowl. My favorite thing about a group-centered society is that they share everything, no questions asked. If you are sitting in the teacher’s lounge and you want to eat a cookie, you had better have a cookie to offer everyone around you. If everyone is given a tangerine, each person will open the tangerine and split it into sections to pass around, despite everyone already having their own. Once, my friend and I were in a bus at a red light with our windows down. The bus driver in the lane beside us tossed us a tangerine through his window. Another thing you will quickly pick up on in a Korean restaurant is that the waitress will not come to you until she is summoned. When you are ready to order or need a refill, some restaurants are equipped with a buzzer on the table to alert her. Otherwise, you can simply call out “Yogio!” across the restaurant, which politely means, “Over here!” Even though the waitress is at your beckon call, there is no need to leave a tip on that meal that probably cost under five dollars. When you splatter black noodle sauce all over yourself or let a piece of pork slip through your fumbling chopsticks, you will notice that there are no napkins. There is usually a box of thin tissues, or if not, a roll of toilet paper. And if you order barbecue, which is my favorite thing to eat out as it cooks over hot coals in the middle of your dinner table before you wrap it in a sesame leaf and pop it into your mouth, you will notice that in place of knives there is a handy pair of kitchen scissors to cut your meat.

In Korea, with eating often comes drinking, and with drinking always comes eating. They go hand in hand, Koreans preferring to sit on a restaurant floor for several hours picking at spicy food and throwing back soju with friends rather than spend a night barhopping. Perhaps it’s because of this combination with food, or maybe it’s in their Korean blood, but Koreans can drink like fish. While Korean beer is nothing to brag about, soju is a much more popular alcohol. Soju is a rice alcohol that tastes like slightly sweetened vodka, with about 20% alcohol content. A half liter bottle costs about a dollar, and when you ask any Korean, from a frail old man to the skinniest young lady how many bottles they can drink, the answer usually ranges between 3 and 10. They typically drink soju as a shot, and the majority of our orientation was dedicated to teaching us proper drinking etiquette and preparing us for the huge dinners we were expected to attend with our school staff. I ended up going to dinner with the entire school staff once or twice a month, and it was common practice for one person, usually the principal, to go around to each person, pour them a shot, and have them pour him a shot of soju in return. For the person making rounds, that is a lot of shots. I even witnessed my principal and female vice principal exchange a ‘love shot,’ their arms linked as they downed a shot of soju in front of all of the teachers.

I was lucky enough to go to two weddings while I was in Korea, a traditional Korean wedding, which was beautiful, and a ‘modern’ wedding. Modern weddings, attempting the grandiosity and refinement of Western weddings that they have seen in the movies, take place in wedding halls. Often with the façade of a white European castle, these wedding halls host multiple weddings on each of its multiple floors simultaneously so that, as Okhee put it, “it is like a vending machine that spits out a married couple every twenty minutes.” On top of the cheesy photo op with the bride beforehand, the announcer narrating the quick walk down the 20 meter aisle while the laptop played an mp3 of Here Comes the Bride, and the audience, half of whom were standing in back due to a lack of chairs, chattering throughout the ceremony, they managed to Koreanize the traditional wedding grand finale. Instead of “You may now kiss the bride,” a dry ice steaming tower of mini champagne glasses was wheeled down the aisle as the announcer called out, “Love shot!”

Just because Koreans can drink their weight in soju doesn’t mean that they can hold their liquor. Ranking immediately behind dog eating on my list of things I hate about Korea is street barf. For some reason, it is not built into Korean etiquette that vomit should be confined to bathrooms, nor are there many shrubs or trash cans available in the city. Therefore, every time I went into the city for a Friday or Saturday night, I inevitably passed a drunken Korean crouching along the street while their supportive friend smacked them on the back as they regurgitated. On Sundays, I often had to sidestep around dried puke on the sidewalk. Fortunately, I never encountered vomit on the trains or subways. Ingeniously, Koreans have turned designated drivers into a business. Rather than drive home tipsy or call a cab while leaving your car in the downtown parking lot, you can call an official DD, who magically appears and disappears when needed, to drive you and your car home for you.

One nice thing about the custom of eating with alcohol is that, since most Koreans drink in restaurants, there is no need for an open container law. I have fond memories of running to the corner store for a bottle of makoli before a long bus ride and of drinking fiber beers with friends on the bank of the Nakdong River in Waegwan, a couple stars poking through the polluted sky. Cocktails in a bag became a popular niche market for foreigners, and for $5 you could carry a Ziploc of mango margarita as you window shopped through Daegu. Although not nearly as hip as bagged cocktails or ‘So-mek,’ a mixture of soju and beer, my drink of choice in Korea was makoli. Makoli, as well as its close relative, dong dong ju, is an opaque, milky rice wine and naturally sweet. Although it can be bought by the bottle in 7-11 or Family Mart, it is best served in certain restaurants in a pot with a ladle. Another item high on the Things I Love about Korea list is its mountains, and what makes them remarkable is not their size, but how pristine they are. Despite South Korea being a crowded country with high rises piled into the valleys, only maples and pines spring up from the mountainsides. Nevertheless, the popular hiking trails are stocked with public restrooms and makoli restaurants. I was at the top of a mountain notorious for its tall, golden wild grass, and as my friends and I wandered the path through the six foot high grass reeds, I came upon a lady trying to help her friend stand up off the ground. At first, I thought naively that her friend had been hurt and tried to help. As it turned out, she had just overdosed on makoli. I have no idea how she ever got down from the mountain.

Another time, I was in a park with a group of friends in the middle of the morning. We were smiling at a group of older men and women singing in a nearby shelter when they called us over. They poured us a cup of makoli and fed us kimchi and before we knew it they were singing and dancing and clapping around us, red faced and making jokes that we couldn’t understand.

Food brought me closer to a lot of Koreans. Even as I attempted to learn Korean and the rules of Korean culture, nothing I did was appreciated more than eating Korean food with vigor. In the school cafeteria, Jang would coach me on how to eat meat with bones still in them and the proper way to mix bibimbap while my food vocabulary expanded faster than all of the rest of my Korean words together. Although it doesn’t make for stories quite like playing Frisbee on an island or traveling across the country to see a park of penises, many of my greatest memories in Korea involve eating and drinking. And in a country that is wrapped up in a high-pressure world of academics and quickly advancing business, there is something moving in watching a ragtag crew of elderly folks passing around a bottle of rice wine and dancing through the morning.