Tuesday, August 11, 2009

This morning's breakfast included a potato pancake, which was pretty good and what appeared to be imitation crab meat salad. The "crab" seemed thicker and not as sweet or fishy as the crab I've had in the US so I think it may have been soy based. The soup today had a couple dumplings in it, which was new.

In class we did presentations and then had time to work on our group projects. Today was the first rainy day in Seoul. Light rain when we walked to class and heavy rain when we got out. After class I stopped by the post office and then grabbed a roll and pre-made sandwich at the convenience store and took the shuttle back to my room to eat. The sandwich had egg, pickles, lettuce, ham and what I think was honey mustard and regular mustard. I've only seen ketchup and mustard for condiments (besides all the salty and spicy Korean sauces) so I assume there was mustard mixed in with the egg, rather than mayo. For dessert I got an ice cream cone novelty.

I had wanted to see another palace, but since it was pouring out I spent the afternoon reading and doing school work. At 5:00 I took the shuttle down to the subway station and met up with my roommate Kate and her fiance, Pete, for dinner. They wanted to try grilled eel and of course I was game since I'll eat almost anything. We had directions to a certain restaurant, there are no street signs in Seoul and we couldn't find it. We went down another side street and found a restaurant that had a picture of an eel on the sign so we ate there. Everything was in Korean, but the owner spoke a little English and suggested a sushi dish and two sauteed fish dishes in addition to the eel.

I had the sushi dish, which was some mixed greens, herbs, scallions, onions and spicy sauce topped with various raw fishes. The other two dishes just had mixed greens and a women came and cooked some sort of white fish at the table in a electric saute pan. Of course there was spicy sauce on that. We were instructed to put the rice in the bowls and mix everything together. Apparently I didn't mix mine enough because the woman took my spoon and spent a few minutes mixing mine before she would let me eat it. Each table also had a built in grill and the eel was grilled on that and we could take pieces whenever we wanted.

The eel was really good - not too fishy in taste, just nice and buttery because of all the fish oils. The mixture in our bowls was also quite good, but very oniony due to the scallions and onions. We also got a ton of side dishes: some sort of egg custard, sweet cabbage leaves, various sauces, potato and cabbage kimchi, acorn squash, green peppers, salad, and octopus. Everything I tried was great. I especially loved the octopus - it was like squid - firm and not too chewy. We also liked the sweet acorn squash which was a nice contrast to the spicy food.

We took a cab back to the dorm since it was still raining and changed right away because our clothing reeked of eel and our breath smelled like onion. The cab driver must have been glad to get rid of us. To help mask the taste of onion I got a peach drink from the vending machine. It seemed to be coconut water with peach flavoring and some sort of sweet, white chunks in it - peach I think, but who knows. It was quite refreshing, though, after all the other foods I ate tonight.