Part 4...Getting used to Korean food

I was never a fussy eater but some of the Korean food was literally hard to swallow.  There was a cook and a 'kitchen' in the basement of my building and when the teachers ate there it was free.  If there was a company with a lot of staff or clients there was a kitchen and in large buildings and factories there was a cafeteria.
Their food was a big part of 'culture shock for me.  It was vastly different from my European-descent experience.

Cabbage kimchi

First of all, every Korean ate cabbage kimchi with all meals.  Kimchi is an acquired taste.  Once you can get used to it, sometimes you crave it in a way, like they do, because of the spicy hot pepper flakes in it.   It's addictive in the same way chocolate or hot peppers are, because endorphins (cause you to feel pleasure) are increased in your body after eating it.
The process of making it sounds gross though, because Korean cabbage or Chinese lettuce is cut up and mixed with fish sauce and garlic and hot pepper flakes.  This is after the cabbage is soaked in salt to reduce the water in it, similar to when any pickle is made.  The mixture is stored at a cool temperature for a few weeks to ferment it.  This process makes protein and special enzymes form so it's highly nutricious.  Through the past centuries kimchi was stored in distinctive brown pots in the ground.  There are many kinds of fermented vegetables with the hot pepper flakes as well, like kimchi radish and cucumber kimchi.

This shows many kinds of fermented side dishes they can serve.  I see round, brown, fermented, sliced lotus roots, or what I think are lotus roots, toward the left.  It looks like a bowl of quail's eggs near the right-hand corner on the bottom...

I had many vegetables in little bowls at most meals, with a little bowl of plain short grain rice and perhaps soup or a stir-fry.  I always tried to find out what I was eating.  Many times I couldn't find out but I ate it anyway.  The only thing I didn't like was 'seaweed soup', which they all absolutely loved.  And I ate it anyway.  Western food was difficult to find and was expensive.  Sometimes I found a McDonald's or other western franchise and when I went to a place like that it was good.  Even the Big Macs were bigger than in Canada.  It was just a little cheaper in Seoul for a Big Mac combo than it was back in Canada, at least.  But I couldn't live on deep-fried food and had to eat the spicy Korean food with rice most of the time.  Now I miss Korean food terribly and it's not the same if you try to duplicate it over here in Canada.  Our ingredients and even our water, and pots and stoves are not the same, so it turns out differently.

They did not have cartons of milk like we would have because they never did have a lot of dairy.  They had some yogourt or yogourt-flavoured items for sale sometimes.  At that time they did not eat cheese and I saw a few potatoes once in a large grocery store and they were quite expensive.  Their bread was heavy and yellow-coloured.  They did not know about how a sandwich should be made or how a pizza should be made.  Things were not sweet if it was a dessert.  Chocolate bars weren't as sweet as the ones sold in North America.  Chips in the chips section were rice snacks and the bags mostly all had pictures of shrimp on them, meaning they had shrimp flavour!  I remember marvelling at the 'shrimp bags' in their chips section, thinking of how in my city at home there would be mostly potato chips for sale.  

Packaged noodles, mushrooms, Korean pancakes and pork for sale at a market.  There is also street food on sticks, certain seafood and even 'blood sausage' here.

But everything for sale to eat was of great quality and a lot of it was tasty.  They had no room in their country to keep cows, so beef and dairy weren't available much.  Eggs weren't refrigerated and it was okay - no one got sick or died.  Many times the boiled eggs served were little quails' eggs.  If they were in their shells, the shells were beige with little dark spots on them.  They caught a lot of squid in the ocean so at a certain time of year everybody had dried squid to eat; people were walking down the streets eating dried squid in the summer, I was told.  Soy was common and tofu, made from soy, was in many soups and stews or fried and served on a plate.  Garlic was used a lot in cooking. All of these foods are healthy and delicious and a lot of them were new to me.  

One good thing I had in the basement of my building was cut-up green garlic stems fried in a pan.  They were wonderful and tasted like garlic.  I would like to have them in Canada but we don't ever get the stems here.

Vegetables and fruit were so common.  They grew them in greenhouses everywhere to sustain their population.  The juice often had chunks of beautiful fruit in it.  I never imagined such wonderful fruit or juice and I was thrilled to try all of it - pear juice with chunks of Asian pears in it, grape juice with unpeeled grapes in it, etc.  When a pub served me a fruit plate, the strawberries and watermelon, grown in controlled greenhouses, were out of this world.  And in my province, if you see an Asian pear it's smaller than the huge Korean pears that were a meal in and of themselves that cost $2 each in 1997.