Re: CHAT: A pretty bad language joke :]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> writes:
> > I was appalled when I learned that (some) Americans eat eggs and bacon
> > and sausage at breakfast.  It seems like such a greasy way to start the
> > day--and that much grease will make me ill until I've been up for an hour
> > or so.
> >
> > Cereal.  Toast.  :-)  But no milk if I can help it.
>
> Very interesting.  I stayed at a Korean hotel and was quite astonished
> about my breakfast: several sorts of Kimchi, rice (of course), fried,
> stired egg with ketchup, fried fish, white cabbage (with ketchup),
> fish soup and warm or cold water.
>
> But no grease, that's right!
Well, I suppose the egg qualifies.  And I've had fried egg with ketchup,
but usually for lunch or dinner over fried rice.  The food served in my
parents' household is usually a sort of mishmash of American? and Korean
(and occasional takeout from Chinese restaurants, or Kentucky Fried
Chicken--my sister is a fried chicken addict).  But for breakfast we
usually got sweet things (cereal, poundcake, or a few weeks of leftover
cake after Christmas...) unless it's New Year's or something, in which
case we got ddeok (er...how to translate?  a soup with...don't know the
term...argh).

> But hey, I like to eat unusual things... :-) Actually, I loved the
> Kimchi.  The only thing: no black tea anywhere.  Seems to be extremely
> strange to drink black tea in Korea.  Of course, there were thousands
> of sorts of other tea, but I had to go to at least five shops and ask
> to `hong cha' with my horrible accent, having to repeat several
> times. :-) I'm really addicted to black tea.
<nod>  Yeah--it's a pain to find, and I prefer black to green myself.  I
do confess I'm fond of some of the other "teas" (though not from
tea-plants): yulmu (which is almost a sort of sweet grain-porridge,
served as thin or thick as you like, and which I think of as "Korean hot
chocolate" even though there's no chocolate involved), yuja-cha (citron
tea, though in the U.S. my mom tells me you can substitute lemon), insam
(or ginseng)...

And OC, after 4 years in Korea, when I returned to the U.S. I was shocked
that people drank tap water instead of boiled, bottled, or bori-cha
(barley tea, very little flavor, but it colors the water so you know it's
been boiled at some point).

The English and Americans have us way beat for the black teas, though.  =^)

YHL