Fooooood

This past week I had summer vacation, so I went south without much of a plan. I will break my adventures up into parts, and the first one will be about food. Only about food. I will explain the towns and people later, so if you feel lost, just know that feeling is OK.

This is the general path I took:
Seoul-->  Jeonju-->  Gyeokpo--> Wido Island--> Jeonju--> Seoul
I say general because there were off shoots to other small places, too.

김치찌개

This was the first meal I had in Gyeokpo, which is a little town on a spur of land out into the West Sea. The big bowl is kimchi jjigae, which is like a stew made of kimchi, tofu and pork. Jjigae means soup, so it is kimchi soup. It is very popular in Korea and is one of my favorites. I had it for supper, and it is often eaten for breakfast, also.  

All this food was for me, the kimchi jjigae, rice and eleven side dishes. I'll start in the back left corner:

The soup bowl is a vinegar/seaweed soup that is eaten in the summer because it is cool, to the right of that is a cooked seaweed, next is pickled garlic and last is squash. The second row on the left is regular kimchi, then a bunch of dried, salted fish which I do not like (but my students eat as snacks all the time), then some sort of other kimchi, and lastly a dried and warmed seaweed. The front row starts with a vegetable omelet, two whole, cooked fish, and finally sweet and sour clam strips. I paid 5,000 Won for the meal, about $4. It was wonderful.

The next morning I had almost the same thing I had for supper, except this was a seafood variety of jjigae with clam and fish. I had a few less side dishes this time because the waitress knew I wasn't going to eat the salted fish. This morning I also got lettuce, which is used to wrap rice and pepper paste and really anything else you choose to eat. 

It rained my first day on Wido, so Young and I spent the afternoon eating seafood and drinking Soju. It was great. I can't remember what it all was, or what specific fish we ate. The big plate in the middle on the left is all raw fish that we dipped in soy sauce, wasabi, and korean barbecue sauce. We had clam soup and krill, also. This meal was 50,000 Won, about $40 between the two of us, but was well worth it on a rainy, lazy afternoon.