The Bitter End

This is going to be the most exciting entry I've written to date.  A few topics that will be covered include and are probably limited to:

Pizza in Korea

A Rock and Roll Show

A dancing cook

and

another Korean hot dog adventure

Saddle up and prepare to experience Korea vicariously through text and images.

I'll start with our first (and to this date, only) encounter with Korean pizza.  Just around the corner from me is a cozy little place called Pizza Flower.  One Sunday night Caroline and I decided to give it a shot.  Twenty minutes and seven dollars later we were sitting on the floor of my apartment.  Nothing stood between us and the pizza and the cameras were rolling.

Just in case curiosity has got the best of you, I'll describe what you've just seen.  You were looking at a Bulgogi Pizza, or a pizza with Korean-style barbecued beef on top.  What you probably don't know, and what we also were lucky enough to find out, is that the pizza was also covered with other bits of randomness including corn and maybe onions.  Corn seems to be a condiment here.

I hope you're all geared up for the first bite because it's happening right now:

Good not great.  Similar if not identical to a standard frozen pizza.  Nothing about it tasted Korean to me so I decided to improvise.

Buckle up:

Kimchi strikes again!  This stuff is fantastic.  Add it to anything that tastes of mediocrity and sit back as it instantly drums up some flavor.

The next topic that I'd like to cover is music here on the peninsula.  I'm not sure why, but KPop reigns supreme.  KPop is loud, dancy, technoey, (what?), rap/pop music.  I'm about to offend the entire country but I'd like to be honest about my feelings towards this musical genre.  

I think it's pretty terrible.  Every single song sounds exactly the same.  The male singers look like they've never heard of sandwiches.  The girls look fake.  The musical groups have more members than the entire Wu Tang Clan.  It's as cookie cutter as it gets but the  everyone here loves it and I mean everyone; from kids to teenagers to adults; I've even caught some older men listening to WonderGirls while devouring chicken and knocking back shots of soju.

I'd pretty much given up on seeing live music while living over here but then we stumbled into a bar called Urban.  We couldn't believe our eyes or our ears.  On the stage were about 6 or 7 young Korean rock and rollers.  In front of the stage were about 15 or 20 young people flailing around uncontrollably.  We had struck gold.  

Here's a quick glance at the Chef, as I've named him, dancing around to a rendition of the most popular KPop song in the world; Gungnam Style.  We're still debating whether or not this guy was actually a chef who had just finished his shift or if wearing a chef's apron is hip with the country's alternative youth.  Either way this guy was great.  We danced around with him and his crew for a while.  I even introduced some college kids to the Charleston and the Twist.  I hope it catches on. 

I'd rather not leave this post on a sour note but I can't be held responsible for my culinary exploits.  Dancing around like idiots strikes up your appetite.  There were some hot dogs on the horizon, Korean hot dogs.  After my first experience I still haven't learned my lesson and decided it was a good idea to try something else.  The dog I selected looked pretty decent.  It resembled a giant corn dog and it looked something like this:

Shock and Awe

My taste buds are still recoiling in horror at the sight of this thing.  It was crunchy, lukewarm, a little sweet and it tasted like a battery.  The contents of the picture above ended up in an alley somewhere downtown.  Before you judge me allow me to defend my littering ways.  There aren't many public waste bins here in Korea.  Trash is hauled away everyday and people just bag up their refuse and put in on the sidewalk.  Think New York City but without the rats, roaches and garbage smell.