Dinner!

A few of you have been asking me about the food here, and, in the spirit of directly answering your questions, I thought I'd post a sumptuous photo of some of the cuisine I've run into. Here goes:

A typical dinner at the office. Though I d0n't always look forward to a long night of teaching, I do always look forward to the food from the joint downstairs, and the many side dishes that overtake the table every day. And this is a pretty good spread here. There's a little variation on the main dishes, along with some characteristic side dishes. I'm about to eat a kind of tuna stew called chom chi chigae. Those are my coworker Eddie's beautiful hands opening up the prize. Chigae is definitely my favorite Korean dish. It's hot, spicy, and it varies just enough from place to place to keep things interesting. The kind we get from work is particularly good, so I was likely drooling a bit as I took this photo.

The other main dish there is called dduk guk, or rice cake soup. The rice cake in question is more like a large, flat, medallion-shaped rice noodle. A few handfuls of these are thrown into the guk(soup), which is based on a mild seafood broth. Throw in some seaweed, shellfish, and tofu (or dubu, in Korean) and you're all set. As for side dishes, we've got the world-famous gimchi (the red pickled cabbage in the small dish, center-right); gimchi jeon (the red pancake underneath); one fried fish (pretty good, despite the gross-out factor); a kind of pickled cucumber (basically another kind of gimchi, of which there are several); odang, or something very much like it (chopped and pressed fish - not bad, but, in my opinion, only when warm); and sweet beans (a particular favorite of my coworker Beth's). There's also some sugared seaweed back there (top left); and some spinach stems in sesame (I think they're spinach. Anyway, they're good).

All in all, a good haul, though this is by no means the most plentiful. Sometimes the food barely fits on the table.