Goodie Bag

Filed as: Korean Food, Non-Video Posts // Responses: One

Goodie Bag

We were gathering the forces of darkness to bring you a giant entry of goodies! Food, Engrish, and Fun await you, so read on!

We have been quite adventurous with trying new foods, so we decided to try the weirdest looking place we had every seen before. It was called â€œMcDonaldsâ€ and itâ€™s bright neon menus beckoned to us. Martina tried a â€œBig Macâ€ and it looked picture perfect. However, she found it to be lacking. Perhaps because it was missing itâ€™s Big Mac Secret Sauce. Simon tried the â€œBulgogi Burgerâ€. For an update on what Bulgogi is, check out our â€œSeng Bulgogiâ€ blog entry. Anyways, it was okay, but a little too sweet. All in all, it was our most disappointing and meal so far.

There is something that no one in North America will ever experience. Everyday at 4:10pm the chimes ring and the students clean the school top to bottom. Some sweep, some mop, and some vaccum. Others will gather the teachersâ€™ mugs and clean them, and afterwards they place them in a weird UV cleaning/drying/sterilizing cupboard. In the morning the teachers find their mugs squeaky clean and ready to go, as if placed by secret cleaning fairies. Gathering their clean mugs they fill them with strange tubes of coffee or iced tea. We have a hot & cold water cooler in our English office that is heated to the perfect temperature. Iâ€™ll post pictures another time.

Iâ€™m going to explain the coffee tube phenonmenom which is Korea. It is very hard for me to find a normal cup of coffee. Instead, there are aisles of boxed freeze dried coffee tubes, equipped with sugar and cream. The weird part is, even if it says â€œblackâ€ the coffee still has sugar. YUCK! I hate sugar in my coffee! At my school there is a cupboard stacked with these tubes of â€œblackâ€ coffee, coffee with sugar and cream, coffee with just sugar, hazelnut coffee, and iced coffee. Iâ€™ve tried all of them, and while it is very tempting to drink from the conveniene of a little tear tube, I canâ€™t stomach the sugar.

In turn, Simon and went on a mini-adventure to find brewed coffee, and we landed in a posh little coffee shop that looked more like a little rainforest/tea garden. I ordered the â€œhand drippedâ€ coffee. I had to choose my beans from a list of 15 types, and it took 10 minutes to make. It was the most expensive cup of coffee EVER at $5.00! Wow! It was good, but not that good. It came with little dutch butter cookies, a tiny glass pitcher of liquid sugar, and some warm, steamed milk. Check out the pictures here or click the picture above.

For those of you new to the word Engrish, it is when any Asian language attempts to translate something into English. We gathered a few of these pictures into one place, so click here for the pictures or click the picture above.

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Rachael Murphy
Okay, funny story. I went to Paris last summer with three friends and after we found our hostel and stored our bags we were hungry for some breakfast. So we strolled down the street and found a cafe on a corner at the base of Montmartre. Well, none of us spoke any French (except for the token “Merci”). But we conveyed to the waiter that we each wanted a coffee. He brought out four of the most delicious cups of coffee (you probably wouldn’t like it though, cause it had cream and sugar already mixed in) I’ve ever tasted. I’m pretty picky about how my coffee is made too, not too much cream and not too much sugar or I feel like I’m just eating warm coffee flavored sugar water. Anyways, he also brought out a bowl with four croissants. I had remembered reading somewhere that if you didn’t refuse the bowl right away you would also be stuck paying for the baked goods when in reality you only wanted coffee.
We were all super hungry so we decided to keep the croissants. Then we got the bill. I paid NINE dollars for ONE cup of coffee, plus another FOUR for the croissant!!!! Sad thing is, I figure it was totally worth it because I’ve never had a cup of coffee or a croissant that good in my life, ever. And now I have something to compare it too. Still, nine dollars?! Silly evil waiter taking advantage of our foreignness.