This Omnivour's Dilemma

The good news is I met my Korean teacher this past weekend. The bad news is I’ve been here almost a month with no formal training (discounting Bonita’s valiant attempt) in a language that sounds to me like guttural gymnastics. As you can imagine – and have read in some of these posts – my lack of any ability to communicate beyond wild facial expressions and gesturing has left me extremely frustrated. And so on Friday night, when I was introduced to Pixie (almost certainly not her Korean name) and was told that she is the best Korean teacher in Busan, I immediately signed up for classes. The only problem was we met at a bar sometime after midnight, and so by “signing up,” I mean scribbling my email address on a napkin. But I did get her number (score), and plan to give her a call this week.

I’m only explaining this because I didn’t want to write yet another story of me bungling around town and leave you thinking I’m the ignorant foreigner who isn’t making an attempt at learning my host country’s language and customs. I am. In fact, I woke up early on Sunday morning to head to a bookstore where I came home with “Survival Korean,” a book/CD program that looks extremely promising. In order to impress Pixie, I’ve already begun working on the alphabet, which is surprisingly straightforward. But what led to this burst of determination, you ask?

Going out to eat in Korea is something that I didn’t really anticipate becoming a regular habit. When I envisioned settling in, I mostly saw myself cooking (endless amounts of pasta) in my apartment and trying to keep the trips out to restaurants to a minimum. I am on a budget and hope to save money here, and coming from New York City where you pay $10 just to look a menu, I didn’t think the two went hand-in-hand. Once again (are you sensing a theme here?), I was wrong.

The Korean dining experience is like nothing I, or my gastrointestinal tract, have ever seen. To begin with, there seems to be food everywhere. The street corners feature older women who have unfolded blankets on which they sell potatoes, scallions, and more varieties of lettuce than I ever thought possible. Men stand outside parked pick-ups overflowing with fresh apples. Impromptu food trucks appear, hawking various steaming dumplings and meats on sticks. Small outdoor cafes spring up in tiny alleys, which feature menus varying from fish to waffles.

And then there are the actual restaurants, which seemed to be stacked five high. Beyond the lame western imports (Bennigans made it over here? Do people even eat Bennigans in the States anymore?) the majority of the cuisine offered that I’ve seen has been different variations on the Korean theme. Which is fantastic.

Most of the restaurants are divided into two sections, with patrons choosing to dine either sitting on the floor or at a table and chairs. Always wanting to feel as Korean as possible, I opt to sit on the floor, routinely trying to wedge my six-foot tall frame underneath a table that’s maybe a foot off the ground. Halfway through any meal I am forced to get up and do a couple yoga positions just to keep the blood flowing.    

Regardless of whether you’re on the floor or at a proper table and chairs, the center of every table either has a pit for a bucket of coals, over which you roast different meats or seafood; or is a type of burner, on which pots of various soups are placed. Either way, almost every entrée comes with five to ten side dishes, filling the table from end to end with different vegetables and a salad and rice and more meat and more seafood and more rice. After a night of roasting your own meat, and then picking around a table of small dishes, you leave feeling full, but nowhere near stuffed. And the bill? Usually around $4 - $6. Seriously.

The only problem is if you can’t read Korean, you can’t read menus. And if the menus don’t have pictures, you’re reduced to randomly placing your finger down in the middle of the page and seeing what comes out. This has resulted in me getting seafood when I wanted soup, beef when I wanted chicken and pork intestines when I really just wanted a salad. Do I have any room to complain though? Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t tell them what’s wrong with the situation – instead I pick up my chopsticks, take a deep breath, and dig in.

So, when a friend called on Saturday night telling me I should meet him at this great seafood restaurant in the center of town, I had no qualms putting the pasta away and heading out. At the restaurant I was introduced to John, a friend of my friend, who has been in Busan for eleven years (he originally came for a summer sabbatical, and…). The seafood restaurant was situated on the seventh floor of a tall, shiny building with wall-to-wall windows, and definitely seemed more upscale than any place I had frequented. However, I figured after not really spending any money up to this point, I could afford to splurge a bit. And when I saw the menu didn’t have a graphic in sight, I decided John should order for the table. And order he did.

Course after course of seafood came out for a good hour and a half. Some I could identify, but not wanting to keep bothering John with “what’s this one?” every thirty seconds, I ended up just closing my eyes and chewing. Raw tuna. Crab legs. Cooked tuna. Raw salmon. An entire fish of some sort. Cooked salmon. Shrimp. White fish. Fish eggs. Seaweed soup. And on and on and on. They had to keep taking empty dishes away to fit the new arrivals, and by the end of the night the table was littered with our intrepid attempts at keeping up with the wait staff’s endless barrage of food.

    John: Which one was your favorite?
    Me: Umm. This one, I think. This salad thing.
    John: Oh, you mean the whale?
    Me: Excuse me?
    John: Yeah, it was a tuna and whale salad.
    Me: Oh…
    John: Good, right?

Now, I haven’t been the best on keeping up with my Greenpeace newsletters, but I’m pretty sure there are entire non-profits dedicated to saving the whales, right? I can’t imagine that munching away on a whale salad is helping their cause. Not wanting to appear uncultured, I continued to smile and nod while internally deciding that this would be the last thing I unknowingly ate because I couldn’t read the menu. Which is why the next morning I picked the Korean book with an entire section dedicated to ordering in restaurants, and one of the first lessons I want Pixie to review is food items. At any rate, when it came time to pay the bill for what I imagined was an extremely extravagant dinner, I only owed $15. Unreal.
 
But at least now I know why they’re having such a hard time saving the whales: they’re really tasty.