Adventure Eating

Here in Korea, Joe and I have inadvertently taken up a new hobby--we call it Adventure Eating. It seemed easy enough--we go to a restaurant, we order some food, we eat said food, we go home happy. Except the problem here is, of course, the language barrier. Now, I can read the Korean alphabet (hangul) just fine; I can sound everything out and mutter something that vaguely sounds like Korean. What I can't do, however, is understand what I'm reading or saying. Slight problem there. It's no one's fault but my own, but I haven't studied much Korean in the last six months and my working knowledge of the language is definitely sub par. I can say hello and thank you; I can get us to the subway station or the airport; I can ask for water at a restaurant; I can say "that was delicious!"; and I can also utter a few insults that I've recently learned are more insulting than I originally thought. (I guess calling someone crazy is not cool in Korea.)

Anyway, Joe and I want to try new restaurants around our city, and you don't know if a restaurant has a menu with pictures until you sit down and the hostess has brought you side dishes of seaweed and barbecued silk worms or the like. By that point, you've pretty much committed to the restaurant. So, if a menu doesn't have pictures, as has happened many times before, and as happened tonight, we just do the best with what we know--which isn't much. All we knew about the two dishes we ordered tonight was that one had seafood and the other had kimchi. What consistency, shape, or size the food would arrive in, we did not know. This, my friends, is Adventure Eating. We run our eyes down a menu that we glean very little meaning from, choose some things at random, and see what we get. Tonight, we got a brutally spicy seafood stew and kimchi pancakes. The stew was amazing, but gut burning--Joe nearly choked and spewed a mouthful all over the table after accidentally inhaling as he brought the spoon to his lips. The kimchi pancake was not too spicy and pretty good, but we thought we were getting kimchi and tofu. Not that I know the Korean word for tofu, so I think I was just hoping against hope that's what I was ordering.

After gulping down the cauldron of hellfire we ordered, we asked for rice to help our stomachs out a little. But of course, language failed us again. Do I know the word for rice? Nope. And I had left my little dictionary at home. After trying a few Konglish words and getting nowhere, I called my ever-helpful co-worker, William, and asked how to say rice. I said the words to the lady and she burst out laughing as she walked away. We heard her saying "Rice, rice!!" loudly to her cohorts, as they laughed good-naturedly at us.

We've had lots of these kinds of experiences. We went to a Japanese sushi restaurant once, and not knowing what we were doing, just gestured indiscriminately at something. We were surprised with a ginormous, beautifully laid out seafood extravaganza that looked as though someone had just scooped up the ocean floor and placed it before us. Adventure Eating has been, at times, totally nerve-wracking, what with our language ineptitude and our fears over ordering dog or turtle, but it is ultimately awesome. It's been a way for us to try things that we might not have tried had we known what we were ordering, and it's nice to relinquish control a little--we just point and see what happens.