-kimchi (of course. Koreans eat this with every meal. Even breakfast. And if you don't know, this is usually cold, crunchy, pickled cabbage or hot radish, and it tastes vinegary, salty, garlicky, and spicy (it's covered in spicy red pepper paste).)
-some kind of mixture of vegetables, chewy rice dumplings, and squid in a decently good-tasting sauce. Squid is edible to me because it is almost tasteless, but it is not my favorite because sometimes there are suction cups on the tentacles and this bothers me, and it's too chewy, so, as another American put it, it's kind of like eating an eraser.
-soup. We always have soup, which is mostly broth, with things floating in it ranging from some type of greens, to bits of egg, or pieces of beef or seafood, or cubes of tofu. Sometimes it's good; sometimes it's not.
-egg soufle. This was pretty good. It had onions mixed into it and chopped green scallions on top.
-rice (of course) with (and this part was my favorite) sesame leaves. They were big cooked leaves about half the size of my hand saturated with hot red pepper paste, and you get a little stack of them, and then to eat them you take one with your chopsticks and lay it over your pile of rice. Then you press down on the edges of it with your chopsticks horizontally, and then bring your chopsticks together under the bite of rice, which folds the leaf around a bite of rice into a little package. Then you pick it up with the chopsticks and put it in your mouth. And it's delicious.
Here are some other things I've really enjoyed eating at school:
-fried tofu dipped in soy sauce. Sounds weird but it's really good.
-some kind of fried pancake thing they make out of some kind of flour with onions and scallions etc.
-Bibimbap. This is always one of my favorites. It's a bowl of rice with sprout-like mushrooms, egg, greens or lettuce of some sort, and other things I can't remember, and you mix red pepper paste into it. If you order it in a restaurant it's even better because they bring it in a hot stone bowl still cooking and the rice gets golden brown and crispy.
-greens. They are shriveled and sometimes they are cold and vinegary, and sometimes they are medium temperature and garlicky.
Notes:
1) I am becoming quite proficient with chopsticks and actually prefer them a lot of the time.
2) Something we eat quite a bit when we want to eat quick and cheap is gimbap (sounds like kimbap). It's a long sliced roll that looks like a sushi roll (rice wrapped in seaweed) but instead of raw fish it has a piece of ham, a piece of egg, a piece of carrot, some sort of green, and a piece of pickle in the center of the rice. It's good and only 1,000 won, which is about 65 cents.
3) On kimchi. At first I didn't like it/wasn't impressed. Then I just got tired of it. But it kept BEING there, at every meal, so I kept having a bite here and there, until last night, I all of a sudden found myself craving it. So weird. And today at lunch I was looking forward to it and it was delicious. I ate it all, first thing, really fast. The Korean teacher across from me watched me eat it with an amused expression on her face.
