I'm so full.

Everyone keeps asking me about the food. Obviously I can't cover all of the delicious things to eat in one blog post, so expect this to be a reoccurring theme. This particular post is going to be fairly random.

Restaurants are everywhere. The area where we live has streets lined with tall buildings and there are stores on every floor. If you don't read Hangul than figuring out what's in the building is challenging, but chances are there will be a bunch of places to eat. There are also sidewalk vendors, food trucks, and people selling fruit out of their cars. I can't believe people here are so skinny, there's delicious food everywhere!

First of all, let me just point out that THIS is the oven I'm working with at home. This is one of my excuses for eating out a lot. See all those stickers on it? Those are handwritten English labels so that I can work the oven. Unfortunately they don't help much. This is the most confusing oven/microwave/fermenter/grill combo I have ever tried to use. I attempted to make dinner in it the other night and after 15 minutes of trying to remember the magic combination of buttons that would make it bake things I got desperate and started pushing all the buttons randomly. Surprisingly it worked! 30 minutes later we had a perfectly edible Apple Oven Pancake. I'm not betting that I can ever make the oven work again though.

Also interesting (perhaps only to me), my eggs have Hangul stamped on them, and my Styrofoam meat tray has wood grain printed on it!

 

 Restaurants here seem to like to advertise with pictures of raw meat. Lots of very large pictures. This particular one is just one in a series of floor to ceiling pictures down an entire hallway. I don't know how pregnant women can stand it.

 

 I enjoy browsing in the bakeries. They have beautiful cakes and desserts and so many delicious looking breads. The small square one on the left was labeled "Milk Rollin". It was a dense and slightly sweet roll. The homely looking piece of bread on the right was delightful. It was disguised as an ordinary loaf of sliced bread but upon removing a slice I discovered that it was so much more. It's super light, fluffy white bread pre-buttered with whipped, sweetened vanilla butter. Yes, I realize that's essentially frosting. But it's OK. Because I say so. I purposely haven't purchased more of this because I ate all far too much of the loaf last time.

 

 This is another picture of what Americans apparently like to call a "beef and leaf" restaurant. So named because you typically take a large lettuce leaf and fill it with meat and various toppings and eat it taco style. Everything I've tried at this type of restaurant has been delicious.

 

 

 This, dearly beloved, is Schneeballen.
We went to a very fancy mall (more to come on that later) and this is what my dear husband came home with. By the name I presume it's German, but as we found it in Korea it's going in my blog. It's kind of like unsweetened very crunchy ice cream cone wadded into a rock-like ball and coated in flavored powdered sugar or chocolate. Or cheese if you're so inclined. To eat a Schneeballen you smash it with the hammer and then you eat the shards. I was not a huge fan but the boys (including my husband) seemed to be quite pleased to get to smash their dessert with a hammer before eating it.

 

 Sorry, terrible picture, but this tasty dish still deserved a mention. Half an acorn squash filled with candied potatoes, walnuts, and dried bananas. All soaked in honey. They served it to me cold but I think it would have been fantastic warmed up. Yes, those are white potatoes. I don't know how they got them so crispy and sugary on the outside, but they were great.

 

 My dear husband whom I love very much has had some tough luck ordering food for us. Several times now he has managed to order the spiciest food I have ever eaten. (I can't fault him, I don't know what we're ordering either!) This dish of soup is called kimchi jjigae. It had such a good flavor and was so good I just kept eating it but I was crying by the time I was done. We still don't know what it was that my husband is eating in the picture. Some sort of breaded meat covered in only slightly spicy sauce. And about 5 french fries artfully drizzled in ketchup.

 

 Just for fun. A new restaurant opened and a Korean clown on stilts gave balloons to the boys. Yes, I believe the girl behind him is bopping him with a balloon.

 

 I took the boys to a "traditional Korean porridge" restaurant. They had pumpkin porridge (soup) with very chewy little dumplings in it and I had porridge with rice, chicken, and vegetables. It was delicious! I foresee many porridge deliveries in our future.

A side note: Most restaurants give you lots of yummy little "side dishes" that can contain any number of things like different types of kimchi, seasoned veggies, bean sprouts, fish cake (I don't know what it's made out of but it tastes good), and sometimes meats. I've seen people just eat them or add them into their main dish. Sometimes you also get a little cup of tea or barley water.

 

 Yes, we can get pizza delivered here too! The easiest thing to do is to order a "set" (what we would call a combo). This place included pasta and cheese bread. Oh, and sweet pickles, Parmesan, and spicy sauce. Also, the pizza crust was green. But it was pizza and it was good.