As an ardent lover of eating, one of my favorite parts of Korean culture so far is the food. Like everything else, food is really cheap here. I had eaten Korean food before, but I was totally unprepared for how different restaurant culture is. A typical visit to a restaurant here actually starts outside, because most restaurants post their full menus outside with prices so you can know what you’re getting yourself into. This kind of preemptive competition helps drive prices down as well, because customers won’t even mess up the first time and go to a more expensive place. Since comparison is easier and more upfront, restaurants are more inclined to offer lower prices.
After you’ve selected a place, you will walk in and tell the wait staff how many people are with you. Most restaurants that I go to are pretty cheap, so it’s usually the owner who will do this. Most restaurant owners are older people who cook out of a normal-sized kitchen and bring the homemade food out ready to order. It’s a very cool, intimate way of dealing with food. Anyway, so after you sit, most people order immediately since the menus are outside and pretty much every Korean restaurant has the same things. Usually the server won’t follow you to the table, so you just have to yell your order across the restaurant. And they -never- write things down. It’s very, very rare. This usually doesn’t cause issue, but I have just eaten the wrong thing a couple of times thanks to a neglectful waiter.
The cool thing, though, is that side dishes are always available and always free and unlimited. To get more, you just yell at the worker. And water is always free too, though it is almost always self-serve. It’s very rare that people drink things with their meals other than water and alcohol, and even then, Korean people feel that drinking too much water will complicate digestion of food, so they don’t drink a lot of it.
Depending on what type of restaurant you go to, there will either be a kitchen in the back where someone cooks your food or there will be little grills at each table which you use to cook your own food. This will usually include a meat, garlic, and kimchi, which you roll up along with rice, bean sprouts, and sauce into a piece of lettuce.
The point of all of this is, I’m gaining weight.
Another phenomenon pretty unique to large Asian cities like Seoul is the cat/dog cafe. The concept there is that you go to this cafe, order a coffee, and then get to play with cats or dogs while you enjoy. It makes sense, since most apartments either don’t allow pets or are too small to have large pets or more than one. It’s a great stress reliever and excellent in case you really wanted your clothes to be totally coated with animal hair. (They have lint rollers, but it just doesn’t quite do the trick.) My friends and I recently visited a cat cafe where we met some lovely tabbies. Here’s the best cat beard shot I got there. 
Otherwise, I haven’t been up to a whole lot. Classes are picking up (kind of), and midterms will be coming up soon. I finally know enough Korean (and enough directions) that I can occasionally help taxi drivers find the apartment, and I have learned that usually if a person can’t speak English, they know some Chinese. So communication barriers have been dropping left and right! Also good news, the weather is beautiful here now. Barring today and yesterday, it has been the upper part of 65-70 degrees the last couple of weeks. The cherry blossoms are out, and they are beautiful. I’ll post pictures when I get around to taking them. Also good news is that I have begun teaching an English class to senior citizens along with one of my good friends. Look forward to the next couple of posts, where I’ll try to post pictures from that too!
There and Back Again 