Vagina

I'm a fan of kimbaps, rice and stuff rolled up in a seaweed sheet: this has already been established. My favourite variety is tuna, or in Korean, 'chamchi'. Written down it looks like this: 참치. The Korean symbol for the phoneme 'ch', you can probably work out, is the one that resembles the pi symbol with a hat on. The Korean symbol for the sound 'j' is the same but without the hat, and obviously 'ch' and 'j' have a similar phonetical resonance.

Now. I talk to my kids about food all the time, so kimbaps are frequently discussed. And to my incomprehesion, a couple of times my response to the question 'what's your favourite kimbap?' has elicited giggling. What? Tuna? What's funny about tuna? Then one kid was kind enough to spell it out to me: the Korean slang word 'jamji' means... that's right, vagina. Yes, I've unwittingly confessed to eight year olds that I enjoy eating vaginas.

One class went sick on it. Really sick. I walked into class one day to find this on the board:

The on the second picture you can also see 'jjijji', translatable into English as 'boobies'. I think those are meant to be nipples.

I'll be home in ten days. Ooh.

Sweet, sweet, unobtainable western food

Korean food is good. I like a regular daeji galbi, kimbaps are healthy fastfood options, hell, I've even discovered that over the course of the year I've developed a taste for kimchi. Fifty weeks ago even the smell made me queasy; now, in moderation, I find it delicious. Oh yeah, and that's right: fifty weeks down. Two more to go.

But today I'm talking food. Sweet, sweet, unobtainable western food. There's a Kurt Vonnegut short story about three POWs working on clearing rubble in a bombed German city who discuss nothing but what they're going to eat as soon as they get home - they have notebooks filled with recipes and sketches and lists of their favourite meals. This is me in Korea. Here's my list, as I dream of the impending two months of gluttony.

1. Roast dinner. Meat unspecified, would favour beef joint.

2. Large, crusty, fresh baguette filled with bacon, real cheese and HP sauce.

3. A shepherds pie.

4. Lasagne/Spag bol.

5. A cassarole replete with big chunks of beef, carrots, potatoes, and suet dumplings.

6. Another roast dinner.

7. A real English curry. Indian food is gettable here but there's no subsitute for the real thing.

8. Nice, oily tuna, on fresh pasta, with feta cheese, coarse black pepper and lots of vinegar.

9. A ham and Branston's pickle sandwich.

10. My personal culinary pièce de résistance (the one thing I can cook that might actually impress people): hunks of chicken breast topped with goats' cheese and basil, wrapped in prosciutto ham and lightly browned in the oven. With CHIPS.

Take note, mother!!

Food

Now, I'm no chef, but in my old apartment I often rustled up ricey-seaweedy-tuna stuff with a hot sauce from a bottle, and really enjoyed it. In my new place, however, I have hot plates that don't even reach the temperature required to boil water in a pan. Which is annoying.

Food is readily available on the high street though. A roll of kimbap is a pound, or go into any convenience store and for about 35p you can get a triangular prismic block of kimbap-type stuff. I usually get the latter for lunch when I'm at school. In fact here's a photo of my typical lunch.
There's a place that does beautiful bagels down the road, and if you're really in a hurry, street vendors are ubiquitous - you just point at what you want, and hope it's edible. Once I ordered a lightly battered sausage on a stick, and the ajuma asked me if I wanted it with ketchup... or sugar. Er.

My favourite place in the world, though, is Little Jakob's. I live directly above it here, and can get there in about 45 seconds if I jog. They sell chicken and ham sandwiches full of chicken and ham, and fresh lettuce and mustard. And it is good. I had one today.There it is. Half of it.

Yesterday, Sean and I went to Dongdaemun and had food in the large food thing on the top floor of the Doota mall. You order your meal at a till in the middle of the room from a choice of seven menus from seven separate kitchens: western, Korean, western, Korean, western, Korean or Japanese. I chose Korean. So I took my ticket to the relevant kitchen to pick up my meal: a hot plate with a big pile of rice and spicy cheesey kimchi stuff with pieces of octopus in there, side dishes of kimchi, something else and seaweed soup. This cost £2.75. I was happy.

Can't really do kimchi on its own, cold, but hot, with stuff, it's much better. Well, I can eat it without gagging anyway.

Going for something more adventurous tonight. Let's see how that goes.