The thought-"porking" food experience!

Oct 22 09

Oct 24th, This Saturday is Joydeb Sir’s son, Jyothy’s birthday. The little boy who is so fond of the cartoon series “Thomas and his friends” and has also infact made me a fan of Thomas too. So I’m planning to buy him a T-shirt with Thomas’s picture, or a game or something to present him. As usual I sought my friend Hassan’s guidance to know the shop. He suggested E-mart, especially the one in ‘Guro digital complex’ subway station. And then I checked Saji’s availability to join me on Friday evening to accompany me to the place.

But there are two issues right now:

• I have not yet received my last weeks fellowship even. So I’m out of wons now. Need to convert dollars or INR to won. But I believe I’ll be getting it before Friday.

• Its Friday, and we have lab meeting. So I don’t know if I’ll make it to Emart.

So I told Saji to wait for my information till Friday eve and we’ll make it only if possible, since he too had some tasks to be completed.

Oct 23 09

The lab meeting was to start by 11am and I thought after 4 pm I will be free to leave for shopping. But after reaching lab I came to know that the meeting was postponed to 2pm. It means it will end by 5 pm and I can leave only around 6pm. Anyway I updated this to Saji also.

My cells are growing slowly so I have no jobs left in the lab. But time passes away very quickly. At 2pm the lab meeting got postponed to 3pm and when it started finally it was in Korean. Only Joydeb Sir had made an English lecture.

At last around 7 pm I met Saji in Nakseongdae and we took line 2 towards Sindorim to reach Guro Digital complex subway station. After reaching there we were somewhat lost, but we could make it to the place without much difficulty. The Emart was in 3 floors and I checked several things to find out that this place is also like other malls I visited- Only to see and not to buy.

The kids section had several cute garments and many many things(As used by Lijia- the Chinese friend, she keeps using this term “Many many zings”- she uses ‘Z’ in place of ‘T’, for 3 she would say Zree. Oh my god, I squeeze my head many many times when I talk to her to figure out what she’s saying). Anyway, I put Saji in real trouble eye-ing the ‘Zhings’, sorry ‘things’ than buying.

I found some good t -shirts of his size, toys, games, colour pencil sets, Thomas and his friends kitty and all. Finally, I found a base ball and a defender set and I remembered Jyothi likes to play baseball. And both of us settled on that one.

The Pork Food Experience

It was past 8pm already and we were hungry. Chicken is available in limited shops only. Moreover to get the real Korean food experience, we should be ready to eat pork. Saji wanted me to experience it, but was quite not sure if it will be a real treat or some treatment. Anyway we entered a restaurant there.

We need to first remove our shoes and place it in the rack. Then they made us sit, Korean traditional style is similar to ours, sit in the floor. We sat opposite to eachother and between us in the table was a big Turtle shaped pan. They switched on the regulator on the side and in a while I felt the turtle generating heat.

The food is some kind of sizzler. They will arrange 6 pieces of pork on the turtle pan, some mushrooms, kimchi(fermented cabbage), and some garlic. They provided chop sticks and spoons along with other side dishes-
Onion sliced in some brown horrible liquid,
Salt- its liquid brown coloured traditional salt,
Some sprouts which are edible
Some cold raddish in sugar syrup and the most important of all
Lettuce and some other leaves in a cane basket.

All was served and garnished well. So that’s the dinner, now its upto you to cook and mix whatever u feel.

After some time they came and using a scissor and forceps, cut the pork into small pieces and inverted them, to cook both sides and served Coke as compliment.

Saji gave a demo of how to eat this food. First he took a raw lettuce leaf; put one piece of pork, some veggies, garlic and wrap with another lettuce. That’s all. He handed over that to me to start with and told me it’s also a way of thanks giving in korea. We can offer to give this way to impress our professor.

This experience costed 18,000 won.

Technical details:
The food we ate is a very popular one in korea and is called "SAMGYEOPSAL" means three layered meat, "three (sam; 삼) layered (gyeop; 겹) meat (sal;살)," of course hinting at the three layers that are visible in the meat.Commonly served as an evening meal, it consists of thick, fatty slices of pork belly meat (similar to uncured bacon). The meat is not marinated or seasoned, and cooked on a grill at the diners' table. Usually diners grill the meat themselves and eat directly from a grill.