By “half”, I mean that a lot of Korean food do share similar sour and spicy flavour just like kimchi. Different dishes are created by mixing kimchi with different ingredients.
However, if you treat kimchi as a side dish, there’s much more than the typical cabbage leaves. There are also soybean sprouts, radish slices, garlic cloves, spring onions, just to name a few. And they are normally free with ordered meals.
When I was eating in the Korean restaurant around Monash with a Korean friend, I asked him to comment on the food. “This is not real Korean food”, he said, “there should be more side dishes.” Now I know that he means.
4.
If you only know
cabbage kimchi,
that means you
know half or nothing
about Korean food.
My hometown sits on a quite flat area, and Melbourne doesn’t have many sheer ups and downs either. I therefore take it for granted that city roads should be fairly flat. This perception was severely challenged in Busan for the first time.
We lived in the dorm of Dongseo University, which is located on a mountain. It’s quite a pain to walk anywhere else, and confusing to find yourself on the top level of the next building after coming down to the ground level of the previous one.
“Busan is a rocky boi.” commented a mysterious guy.
It’s also a mystery to me how elderly people could live on mountains and climb up and down frequently.
However, it was also because of the hills that there were some unique beautiful sceneries.
3.
Hills
Hills
and hills.
This obviously isn’t the truth. However, I was shocked how deeply local big companies shapes people’s daily life in this country. From mobile phones to refrigerators to door locks, it’s impossible to spend a day without seeing Samsung logo.
I see this mostly a good thing — companies are capable of manufacturing a wide range of reliable products, and local people trust local brands.
2.
Everything
is Samsung.
If not,
it's LG.
I am not a big fan of Korean TV dramas, but I somehow got the impression that South Korea, or at least Seoul, is full of skyscrapers, stylish K-pop-star-like people, broad and clean roads on which sport cars soar (don’t ask me how this weird fantasy came into being. I don’t know). But I literally felt at home in Korea. I found out that there also exist small restaurants hiding in narrow messy lanes, popular street food sold at dodgy stalls, underground malls selling cheap and cheesy clothes and people dressing in a scruffy manner. People also live in tall apartment buildings. Even the traditional architecture is not really distinct from Chinese style.
It’s not a bad thing to me though. I kind of enjoy the strange feeling — it’s like you walk on the street you know so well that you feel safe enough, but cannot understand any lingual information.
1.
Surprisingly
similar to
China in a
lot of aspects
