(Eating) Night Out

I've found enough photos for several posts about food and eating in Korea. I'm going to kick off the thing with a typical night out for me and my closest friends here.

Namely, my favorite night-out food- cow intestines (소곱창), which I've mentioned before:

I'm pretty sure it's the combination of the intestines themselves and the chives (or little baby leeks? What are those green things up there called in English? 부추 in Korean), the grilled heart that comes with, which sounds horrible but is all kinds of delicious, the blood stew, which sounds horrendous but is delicious, and the soju that makes me love it so.

This is my favorite intestine place in Ilsan, and it's conveniently very close to my house. We usually have dinner at this place, indulging in a few bottles of soju and eating our fill, smelling of smoke and cooked cow and booze as we leave.

Once the intestines are consumed, there is the option to have fried rice, which is cooked on the same stone slab where the intestines and heart were sizzling mere moments ago. This rice is really good, but I can never eat more than a couple spoonfuls because I'm usually way too full by this time.

On this particular night, we decided to go to Kkanbu Chicken (깐부치킨), which is a fried chicken joint. Yes, I know-- fried chicken? We actually didn't have any chicken. We go to Kkanbu for the fries (these are the spicy potatoes, whereas the normal fries are big wedges that are not very good). I mean, after a meal of cow intestines, one's system shouldn't have to handle fried chicken.

And yes, despite indulging in my love for fried animal and French fries, I have still managed to lose weight here. It may be because I don't really have cocktails, preferring to drink soju here (see above, my friends were drinking beer and I was drinking soju), so I don't drink as many calories. It's probably more to do with the fact that I don't eat like this that often.

... Well ... some weeks are better than others with the frequency of drinking. This week, I've been good. Some weeks, a girl just needs to have a drink (or twelve) to combat the inner demons or to celebrate conquering said demons.

Korean lesson of the day- Koreans have some funny nicknames that are related to drinking beer:

- chi-maek (치맥): chicken and maekju (맥주, which is beer).
- so-maek (소맥): soju and maekju, which is, you guessed it, soju and beer mixed together.

There's actually some more slang, but my tired brain isn't working. I left work at 5:00 in the morning yesterday (er, this morning) so I'm dragging today. Hopefully, one more late night tonight and then a restful weekend. I really need to clean the apartment and do a boatload of laundry. And try to convince my hair to grow a half inch before Monday.