Dear Family and Friends,

Last night, I peeled grapes at dinner.

I mention this in response to several inquiries about what I’ve been eating here in Daegu.
After a full 15 days and counting, I must confess that I recognize little of what I catch with metal chopsticks, test to ensure that the food will stay in my grasp, and then lift towards my mouth.

Rather surprisingly considering my family history, I am not at all familiar with Korean food - although I fancy myself better equipped than most to deal with the unidentifiable foreign food. As I was carefully reared by my mother’s gourmet family, at a young age (probably mostly to be special), I learned to use chopsticks and eat a plethora of Asian foods that cannot readily be identified. Upon rare occasion during visits to New Jersey, I was fed Korean foods and I just decided that I should like both seaweed and kimchi – and I do like them to this day. I’ve also learned to eat more spicy food than average (by US standards) and I do not so far find Korea as dangerous from a hot/spicy angle as Thailand, where I recently developed strong diligence in regard to hot/spicy foods. And I strongly suspect that in Korea, my lacking a sense of smell must be deemed an advantage.

I consider myself quite lucky because the school is willing to spare the trouble and expense to feed me breakfast, lunch and dinner; however, the caveat to this luck is that meals are served at the school cafeteria. Although the school is a block from my apartment, I haven’t yet taken them up on breakfast, which is served an hour and a half before I am required to clock in. However, when the bell chimes after 4th period, I willingly follow students and faculty members in the rush to the cafeteria. We teachers walk to the head of the long student line, and help ourselves to a metal plate, a long-handled soup spoon, and metal chopsticks. We then walk to one of the two flat, metal tables and serve ourselves the requisite kimchi and rice, and one or two side dishes, a soup, a main course, and a packaged item.

To elaborate: a myriad of items can be considered side dishes. Sometimes there will be recognizable stir-fried noodles or steamed broccoli and mushrooms or pickled vegetables but there are a lot of times when I simply cannot begin to recognize what I’m eating. I find the soups generally under-flavored and over-salted and I keep threatening to not eat them; however, everyday, my co-teacher (who quite likes the soups), entices me into trying “today’s really good soup.” The other day there was a very special and quite delicious mudfish (?) soup, today the soup was filled with green vegetables & was spiced nicely, and last night at dinner, we mixed pickled vegetables into udon noodle soup, which rendered it surprisingly good. Main courses are often fried and thankfully not plentiful: fried chicken or bony, bony fish or fried egg or well, other items that I cannot now recall. And I suppose that the packaged item is intended as dessert: we’ve had orange juice, a variety of yogurts, and one day, I could swear I was eating a frozen, packaged persimmon – unfortunately, I ate the evidence and tossed its packaging.

The Taegu Foreign Language School cafeteria is like most cafeterias: students love to complain about it. They complain about it in class and they wrote an article about the problems in the pending school English language magazine. Personally, especially compared to cafeterias in the States, I don’t find the food bad nutritionally or quality-wise (although the meat can be dodgy) and I’ve taken an informal staff survey that seems to confirm this impression. The cafeteria room itself is filled with the clamor of conversation and the heavy clanking of metal trays against meal surfaces – and noisy to the extreme. If is ambitious, one can converse over the din, just don’t expect to catch every word. And distraction from one’s meal involves a certain amount of risk – due to the precise coordination requirements of metal chopsticks. After the meal is over, we proceed into another line where we toss plastics or foil or napkins into garbage pails, we scrape our unfinished food into large metal funnels (with collection garbage cans underneath), we then place our trays on the counter by the washerwomen, we drop our spoons into a designated pail and our chopsticks into another designated pail. The meal finale is walking over to large “water” tea kettles filled with a cold roasted corn (?) tea, pour a measure of the tea into a small metal cup, down it in a single gulp, discard the cup into a plastic basket and exit. Koreans don’t drink during their meals.

I elaborate on the cafeteria because that is where I’m doing the majority of interesting Korean food consumption. I fend for myself for breakfast, which now always involves coffee or tea and a piece of fruit, with yogurt or toast or an omelet. I do not yet add rice to my omelets as the Koreans do but the other day I scrambled an egg and found that shrimp sauce much enhanced the flavor – so I suppose it only a matter of time before my omelets acquire a Korean flair. As for dinner, if I work late (and this is me, of course I sometimes work late), I’m swept up in the 6:20 pm faculty expedition to the cafeteria for dinner, which is lovely and devoid of students and their noise. I also sometimes prepare my own dinner; the first dinner I prepared was a Thai green curry that turned out pretty good despite several substitutions.

It didn’t take me long to find a personal gastronomic Achilles heel: a chain of bakeries called Paris Baguette. On my first food shopping foray, I wandered in and found myself purchasing a loaf “mocha cream bread” and some honey butter to accompany it, only to find that the “cream” portion of the bread was carefully hidden between the slices, a disgusting butter/frosting/yucky filling that could happily be scraped off of each slice. That bad experience didn’t at all deter me and I was back in a less than respectable amount of time to discover the same loaf sans the yucky cream. I’ve returned to Paris Baguette several times since – my most recent purchase was peanut butter, which was surprisingly good on a corner store purchase that resembled crumpets but turned out to have a subtle, sweet bean curd in the center (arguably the Korean version of a hybrid crumpet and Pop Tart).

Sadly, I am not finding the grocery stores near me as heavenly as Gourmet Market in Bangkok. My new grocery stores are currently a crowded mass of majority unrecognizable Korean ingredients, every aisle seems to have a lady advertising certain wares in voluble tones, and it is rather picky of me but sometimes I’m not happy to recognize items such as live eels or frozen whole pig legs (with hoof) and one night a blue-green jellyfish sent me scurrying to the cash register without fulfilling my intended purchase of chicken meat. Also, I cannot find a lime to save my soul and because I was desperate, I ended up using what I now know is white ginseng in place of ginger (although I discovered ginger today).

I’ve read that 2-persons are preferred in Korean restaurants and there is so little English here that I am rather petrified regarding eating out by myself. I must get over this. Soon. Anyway, I’ve so far only had 3 restaurant meals: sushi with a Canadian lady that I met while walking across the street, and chicken fried rice that was fried for a bunch of us Western teachers by a waiter in a sunken almost-wok at the table, and a wonderful new teacher welcome meal of all TFLHS English faculty at a place that I had already heard several accolades about called Sea House. Sea House is a buffet restaurant: clean, spacious, western chairs, tables, napkins + forks, wine in glass cabinets, and fantastic food. I enjoyed sushi, noodles, a crab salad, fruit, pickled side dishes, chicken sate and goodness knows what else. Every morsel was delicious although I briefly burned with mortification when I realized that I missed and even started talking while someone was giving a welcoming speech about me - in English - so I didn’t have much of an excuse except that there was no “attention” and not even everyone was looking the speaker’s way. *sigh*

Anyway, back to grape peeling. Last night I was glued to my desk proof-reading the student English magazine (not an easy job – it took me in excess of 4 hours). I took a break when dinner was served and picked up some extra deep purple, globular grapes to return with me to my desk for dessert. However, during dinner, my left-side dinner companion startled me by demonstrating her grape peeling technique. “We peel our grapes in Korea because of bad skin.” What the (#(*(*w#??? I wasn’t sure if this meant that grape skins were bad for the skin (i.e. one’s health and beauty – ever a Korean concern) or if there was a pesticide problem. I was informed by my right-side dinner companion, who is from Shanghai, China, that the Chinese also peel their grapes. When in Rome… so instead of having a nice dessert at my desk, I had a full tummy and sticky, grape juice covered fingers and had to thoroughly wash before resuming my work. Later, I found out that grape peeling is indeed due to pesticide-laden grape skins and that there is a technique for slipping grapes from their skin with your teeth. Oh, dear. I may have to buy a bunch of grapes and practice.

In sum, overall, I’m doing ok with the food – but I have a lot to learn and more to experience. And I haven’t a clue what I’m eating so every meal is an adventure.

Bon Appetite! --Laura

PS: Naturally, I’ve made a few laughable mistakes: I had one Jonah day when I forgot my morning coffee and at lunch, I dropped a bright orange noodle down the front of my white pants. Wiping the vivid evidence of my chopstick error with toilet paper did not help but rushing home and changing did.

But my biggest mistakes was bragging to a class of students that I do fine with chopsticks. And I can – so what is the problem? The problem is that they line up near the faculty table for lunch and find observing me adequate entertainment while they wait. But I hate being on a figurative stage with metal chopsticks in my hand. One day I tried to cheat by using the spoon and was actually goaded into demonstrating my chopstick ability by a giggly student. I gave a competent performance and simultaneously promised myself to never again tell the students anything about myself that they can verify!