Thursday, December 1, 2011

Thanksgiving in Korea!

Dinner at a Korean restaurant
on black friday.
So Thanksgiving came and went in Korea with little acknowledgment. It was a little bit odd for me because I am used to America where it is one of the largest holidays we have. It is like the prequel to Christmas.

So for Thanksgiving Evening Aly, Imcheol, and myself were planning on going to go to Johnny Rockets for an American style dinner. But they were closed by the time we got there. Then we tried a few other places that were all closed. So we ended up going to an izakaya above Johnny Rockets. The izakaya was nice, but the menu was all in Korean so we were glad that Imcheol was there to translate for us. We ended up getting some chicken katsu and cheese katsu. Good stuff.

On Friday some people from work went out to a Korean restaurant were we had a lot of food. It was very good, and they even had sweet potatoes! We decided to call it our Thanksgiving dinner, and it was a lot of fun. There was a large crowd and we ate a lot of food and had good conversation, which are the most important aspects of Thanksgiving.

Can you guess who plays Murder Ball?
After dinner we went across the street to have a beer and continue the good times. In Korean bars it is typical to order food when you go to the bar, so even though everyone was stuffed, we ordered more food and stuffed ourselves even more. This really was a lot like an American Thanksgiving, just more people talking Korean and less turkey. We didn't have a turkey so we did the next best thing and ordered some good fried chicken. It is strange that in Korea they aren't known for fried chicken, but they do a fantastic job of cooking it up!

It was a good night, and I met a few new people, even one guy who used to play Murder Ball. Well they don't call it Murder Ball anymore, now it goes by Wheelchair Rugby. I prefer the name MurderBall.

Sang Mook and members of QoLT
The Bird
After a night of too much food and drinks, and a little more food, I returned home to spend the evening just completely stuffed with Aly. She was not able to join us for dinner because she was working. But we enjoyed our evening together sitting around watching episodes of Star Trek.

Aly had to work Saturday, apparently her job wants to torture Americans for the holidays. Her coworkers were discussing going to Gangnam, which is near our apartment. So that evening we all met in Gangnam where we went to Johnny Rockets and had our fill of good American Burgers, Patty Melts, and Philly Cheese Steaks. After dinner we went to a Board Game Cafe, where we spent a couple hours playing Settlers of Catan. I forgot how much fun that game is, and I think we should get a copy to play in our apartment.

So after our game we decided we needed some ice cream so we headed to "favorite D", they sell Baskin Robins ice cream as well as gelato and a few other specialty dishes, where we had some fantastic ice cream. There we got a giant bucket of ice cream for us all to share. We choose three flavors of ice cream and then they just crammed it so it was overflowing and we got tiny spoons to dig into it. At the end of the night we were proud we made it through the whole thing!

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