Snacks

Updates are becoming less and less frequent. I just don't have anything exciting to talk about. It's hard to want to do things when it's so cold outside (and this is just the beginning of winter).. One thing I can still do, however, is eat. :)

So far, I haven't found any super exciting snacks here. There are no potato chips that I've seen... probably because that'd be difficult to individually wrap. From what I've seen, snacks in Korea generally come divided and wrapped by portion sizes. For example, I bought a box of cookies. I opened it, and found two dozen packs of two cookies each. The serving size for the cookies? Two. The same with Ritz-like crackers and saltines. I'm curious if this is part of why Koreans (to me) seem so skinny -- portion control. Or maybe it's got to do with their "go go go!" lifestyle... it's easier to carry a pack of cookies around, compared to a whole box. Regardless, it's given me a lot of trash to throw away... :\


Left: Pre-cheese'd crackers, cocopuffs cereal, corn flakes, chocolate-filled cookies. Right: Individual packaging.

Korea also has a ton of street vendors selling many, many different kinds of street food -- mostly (deep) fried. In Dongdaemun, we found a vendor selling a hotdog with wavy fries stuck to the outside of it. The most popular foods are probably odeng (fish cakes), mandu (dumplings), and ddeokbokki (spicy glutinous rice sticks). About 25m outside my building, there's a bread stand that sells banana bread, egg bread, and hoddeok (brown sugar pancakes), my personal favorite.


Green tea pancakes, filled with brown sugar, cinnamon, peanuts, and honey. It's about 90 cents for 2...
which is about all the glucose I can handle in one sitting.

Speaking of green tea (녹차, nok-cha), they have green tea lattes here. Some days, they're a nice alternative to espresso drinks. I actually bought a green tea mix, as well as some plain ground green tea powder (which is super bitter without sugar) used in the above pancakes, ice cream, etc.


Instant green tea latte packets, and the plain ground green tea powder.

And what post would be complete without mentioning alcohol? ^^


A Korean brand of beer (맥주, maek-ju) that's 4.5% ABV. I'm still not sold on its taste,
but it's 1600ml (a "54" if you will) of beer for ~$3.

We went to Dongdaemun again a week ago, and I have a few more pics I'll post in the next...post. :)