Food pt. 3

tl;dr: Yummy food overall, free water everywhere, preferring the Korean eating culture.

First of all I can assure you: not only won’t I starve in the next 50 weeks, but I will most likely not even lose weight here. Korean food is just too good and the sweets are just too ubiquitous. So how and what do I actually eat here, and did I finally manage to bench the milk ‘n’ cereals habit?

Short answer to the last question: yes, I did. But as there is no real domain of food for breakfast specifically in Korea, I’m left without a real breakfast culture. This means that I either throw some Mandu (Korean dumplings) into my frying pan and stuff them into me before leaving for the university, or I quickly comsume two bananas and some walnut kernels, rounded up by some (frikkin’ expensive) orange juice. Speaking of food costs, they’re unexpectedly high here! This means, apart from sweets, they’re higher than in Germany.

Same rules apply when buying food at super-/hypermarkets like Lotte Mart or similar. Even though you can find almost anything you desire, including exotic food like thai, mexican or french cheese, the prices are equal to the ones I see in the smaller neighbourhood markets.

The fun part of Korean eating culture begins with lunch. From there on, eating is hardly done alone. There are two main possibilities:

• You meet in one of the many university cafeterias to have lunch or dinner (they even serve similar foods as breakfast). Cafeterias vary in what types of food they offer and therefore in food quality. What they all have in common is free water from water dispensers, free refill for most vegetable side dishes and some main courses and cheap prices! With 4000 KRW (3€), the menu shown in the picture below was the most expensive meal I had so far. While the student center cafeteria in the heart of the campus mostly serves traditional korean dishes, others offer more fusion food and stuff like burgers. Although I’ve only tried two different cafeterias so far, the worst meal I had so far is as good as an above-average meal in the KIT cafeteria.

  

• If you’re in the city, you enter one of the 28 gazillion restaurants lying in walking distance from your current position. There, you can order almost anything and everything and be satisfied with what you got. Generally, you order meals which are always accompained by your typical vegetable side dishes, and you share them with your friends. Free water is of course provided, and with every meal comes a bowl of rice and sometimes a bowl of noodles, too. The best part: You never pay more than around 8€ for any full-size meal you have. This is why the people eat out more often than at home!

A newer trend is fusion food: A mixture of traditional Korean food with western dishes and ingredients. These meals are also very tasty yet still different to what you would get in Europe.

The only real downfall of Korean cuisine is the fact that literally nothing is vegetarian, let alone vegan. Even if you don’t eat the main dishes consisting of meat and the like (which would already be a huge loss), almost all soups/vegetable dressings are somehow made/spiced using other parts of the dead animal than the meat. I actually wanted to reduce my meat consumption permanently, but it seems that I have to postpone this until I get back to Germany, just because I would be missing out on too much here.