My Days in Daegu

It's now almost Tuesday here, and I'm just now finally sitting down to write about my weekend... shame on me!

The campus here pretty much shuts down on weekends, which leaves us international students with very little to do. Most of the Korean students live within the city, so they're able to go home. I filled my days mostly with catching up with people from home while they were awake (the time difference is most annoying), and then venturing off campus a few times with various people.

On Friday evening, for example, Ally and Lily (Angela's buddy) invited Angela and I to go out to dinner with them. Dinner was pretty good, although not what I had expected. My "steak" turned out to be hamburger steak, and had a sauce that was so peppery, even Lily - a Korean - admitted that it was spicy. It wasn't bad other than that, and for dessert we went to a Baskin Robbins for ice cream! Yay! It was just like ice cream from home, so that was comforting. Of course, I stayed away from the flavors like "green tea" and stuck with plain, great chocolate. Our next stop was a game room - basically like a small arcade where we played a few games. Ally beat me at DDR (a dance game) and I beat her at Indy racing, so I think that turned out reasonably well. :)

Our last destination was another restaurant (so much food!) where Ally and Lily treated Angela and I to a Korean traditional alcohol drink which was served in a big wooden bowl, with smaller bowls for us to ladle our own drinks into. We also had appetizers there, like small, crunchy puffed rice-chips of some kind which were good, and Korean "pancakes". I'm not entirely sure what it was, but it seemed to be a flat layer of scrambled egg with things like green onion and squid cooked into it. Seems more like an omelet to me...















But yes, I have officially eaten squid. Tastes like shrimp, but chewier.

Sunday was a good day too. Jonathan and I went with Jennifer (another international student from the US) and her roommate deeper into the city to do some exploring. Our goal was to find the Outback Steakhouse, but it wasn't at the subway stop where Jennifer thought it was. Instead, we ended up at a TGIFriday's, which was just as good. We weren't picky about our Western food at that point.
It's one of those restaurants that gives you a basket of bread when you first get to the table and then which keeps refilling said basket as the bread gets eaten. I think we figured out that we went through five baskets between just eating the bread and also hiding the small loves away in various pockets and purses. :) Because of that, I was only able to eat half of my delicious chicken fingers and fries, so they packed the rest of it for me in a to-go box and bag. They must have picked up on our taste for bread (can't imagine why...) because there were three extra loves packed with my meal for me. Ha. What nice guys... It was expensive, though, as I suppose we kind of expected. For just my meal, it was W10,900, or a little over $10. Oh, well. It was worth it.

Dinner was amazing, also. Jonathan took me with him to his aunt and uncle's house, and his aunt had made a dinner for us which included my favorite - bulgogi! I think I've determined that my problem with the food here is not only getting used to Korean food, but also to Korean cafeteria food, which I realized when I enjoyed Jonathan's aunt's meal so much. It's too bad that we can't get that on campus, or I'd feel a lot more at ease here. And well fed, for that matter.

I tried to take more pictures of the view of the city tonight, but no luck... just more blurs. I also tried to get a few of the traditional village all lit up, but that was a bust as well. My picture-taking has kind of declined as I haven't seen many new sights lately, but if anyone has any requests as to what they'd like to see more of, let me know!