Don't You Wish Your Dinner Was Hot Like Me?

That's what dakgalbi [dahk-gal-bee] would be singing if it were scantily clad and in a music video.

Maybe this is a weak metaphor. I'll start over...

On New Year's Eve, I went for dinner in 'town'--I use this term loosely--with my new curriculum development/teacher trainer team.* We took a short taxi ride to downtown (now I'm just being facetious) Yongmun.

Imagine Vancouver's Chinatown. Now squeeze everything together so that there's only room for single lane traffic and half a sidewalk. Now pretend that instead of being the inventors of gunpowder, they were the inventors of neon signage. Et, voila: you have downtown Yongmun.

Walking down the main strip, we located a hole-in-the-wall restaurant (I think it had five tables) that had come highly recommended and wandered in. There was a family (the owners) sitting at the farthest table cooking dinner, and as they saw us, most of them got up to prepare our table.

We sat cross-legged on a raised (heated!!) floor, around a table that was dominated by a large circular cast-iron pan. A woman came out with large pieces of chicken that were generously coated in some kind of chilli paste, and cut them up with scissors as they began to sizzle on the hot metal. The sheer novelty and authenticity of the smells and the ambience were giving me a hugh rush of excitement--I was having an Anthony Bourdain moment. When our cook came back a few minutes later to add cabbage, sweet potatoes, radish, garlic and rice cakes to the mix, I could barely contain myself.

The food grilled for a while, and soon we were pecking away at the pan, while enjoying the array of Korean condiments that come with--a briny, ice-cold radish soup; red leaf lettuce leaves; pickles and more chopped fresh garlic.

As we ate and drank chamomile tea, the food continued grilling. The food and sauces continued to caramelize and the rice cakes started to get crispy. When there was only a serving of chicken and vegetables left, our cook came back to the table wielding two large bowls of rice, which she dumped into the pan, mixing in the remaining food and scraping the caramelized bits up into the fray.

It was the second coming of dakgalbi!! Impossibly better than the first! Our tea was gone, but this was soon remedied as our cook appeared with one more miracle: two glass bottles of Coke and a bottle opener. Old school all the way, baby!

So, we worked our way through the rice and Coke (Coke gets capitalized when it needs a bottle opener), and eventually the frenzy died down and the conversation picked up as we were approaching satiation.

We wandered off to grab a few groceries and things, and capped off the night reminiscing over New Year's past at one of our flats. I brought my guitar. :)

So there we have it--New Year's in South Korea. Not a bad start to a year, I'd say...

*(For information as to why I am on such a team please refer to my previous... actually forget it--there's no good reason)