LOOKS AND SINGING AND BECAUSE AND MISSING FOODS

three posts in one week?! WHAT?!





Wherever there’s a reflective surface you’ll find at least one Korean – a guy or a girl – checking themselves out. It doesn’t matter how many people are around, they’ll all do it at least once. Did I just fail to notice this happening back home? Everyone here (the Koreans, at least) makes sure they look their absolute best. I’ve even seen girls on a full subway take a picture of themselves just to make sure they look okay upon review.

So I’m sure you all know about karaoke. It’s fun, ridiculous and generally all will have a good time. Here, it’s like their bread and butter. Noraebongs (literal translation: music room) are a dime a dozen here, and they really do karaoke right. They add some sort of echo/reverb on the mike so everyone sounds halfway decent, especially me, because I have a voice that’s like a combination between a cat getting raped by a baby. Work dinners are always followed by a trip to a Noraebong, where my bosses and Korean co-workers, who are extremely drunk, are hamming it up like no tomorrow on the mike (usually to Korean pop songs or classics). It’s a site to behold, really.

Did your elementary school ever forbid you to start a sentence with ‘because?’ I remember the teachers telling us (repeatedly) that starting a sentence with that conjunction is, like, the worst thing you could do, and they would always, always circle it with the reddest of red ink if it preceded a sentence. Well, we all know that that’s not necessarily true... BUT I NOW KNOW WHY THE TEACHERS WERE SO ADAMANT ABOUT IT. “Because I am full.” “Because Korea is the best.” “Because it is delicious.” Oh, man, it’s such a pain when correcting their journal entries. I now get so unbelievably frustrated when I see ‘because’ at the beginning of a sentence, and have since banned every single student from starting a sentence with ‘because.’ (As it turns out, the Korean teachers said that that was okay.)

So there are a few – actually, a lot – of foods I miss. One of my favourite snack foods back home were chips. The chips they have here are shit, and I wouldn’t feed them to my dogs. 85% of the chips here have a weird tinge of sweet about them, and the chips that aren’t sweet are bland as fuck. Who started replacing salt with sugar? I don’t understand. When I’m lamenting about my craving for ketchup chips to an American, they’ll stare at me blankly before saying, “…well, they have ketchup here.”

Another food I miss is pizza. It’s not like they don’t have pizza here - in fact, Koreans are bat-shit crazy about their pizza. It’s just that they’ve heavily Korean-ized their pizza. The most Western toppings you can get on your pizza are cheese, pepperoni and…corn. Aside from a really expensive pizza from Domino’s, you cannot get pizza with out corn. I love corn and all, but…I just don’t want it on my pizza. And the pizza chains here, including Pizza Hut, refuse to allow you to customize your pizza. It’s their way, or the going hungry highway. As it turns out, Koreans really have a thing for Koreanizing foreign food (because whatever Korea does is the best, and that’s that). At this sushi place I once ate at, they included kimchi and processed cheese in their maki rolls. WHAT THE FUCK.

The thing with Korean food is they love the red pepper paste, and they use it for just about anything (it’s what’s in kimchi). So after awhile a lot of the food starts tasting the same if you don't know what to order.