Wine and dine in Korea

Today my day got better. Because it involved food! But when school starts, dining out will be a luxury cos we are back to being students now.

My first meal in Korea is called gukbap and it literally means soup with rice (guk is soup and bap is rice). It is at a restaurant near the main gate of Pukyong National University. We went there around noon with my labmates. I just went to the lab for a short while today cos my professor is still in Finland so there's nothing much arranged for me yet. And this Monday is a holiday in Korea! Independence from Japan.

They serve kimchi, at EVERY meal. Anti-clockwise from left: green chilli which is eaten with paste from the next plate, yellow onions in sweet sauce, kimchi cabbage, kimchi turnip, and in the middle is salted shrimps something like cencaluk minus the stench, and a small plate of noodles. And short grain rice served in a metal bowl.

This is the gukbap! It is a kind of pork stew which, according to the shop, has been stewed for 48 hours and the soup is just so tasty! The meat inside are all the fatty slices of pork, and they taught me to throw it the shrimps and leek to add flavour to it. Stirring the soup brings up the chilli below which turns it into a red colour, making it more appealing. Koreans dump in their bowl of rice to eat together with the soup, but I prefer to eat it seperate for now. I like this dish cos it's something like the Korean version bak kut teh, which is one of my favourite foods. :-P

After that Su Lin and I took a walk up the street to shop for stuff and we saw this huge steaming cup of coffee on top of a van! They were promoting some Arabica coffee. I got to sample not just one cup of coffee but they also gave away five sticks of Maxim Arabica instant coffee powder. And the promoter in red is sooooo pretty! Tall, slim, flawless complexion and beautiful face... I was like, do they need to hire such a pretty promoter ar...??! @_@

At 6pm we met up with a few other Malaysian students from Dongseo University and we went to eat... guess what... pork stew again. Koreans love their pork, huh? But it's a different version called gamjatang. Big pork bone and I had to pick at the bone to get the meat out. The meat is so tender and the soup is very flavourful!

Gamjatang

This is the dried version, something like 干捞 with 冬粉.

Then we moved to a pub in a nearby building for our second round, doing what Koreans like to do best -- drink!! The place was filled with youngsters and most of them are girls!

Huge jug of Cass beer.

It was something like a welcome dinner for me and also a joint birthday celebration for Pearly and Su Lin. This is the BEST tiramisu cake that I have ever tasted! From Tous les jour.

There were 11 of us in total. Bryan was holding the camera.

Fruit punch, non-alcoholic. I downed a glass of beer and two shots of soju.

Lastly we played this cool drinking game where a shotglass is put into a glass of beer and everybody pours a little soju into the shotglass and the person who makes the shotglass sink into the beer has to down the mixture of soju and beer! Pearly was the one.