Adventures in Asia

After a long day touring the Demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, I'm feeling hungry! An American guy from my tour (we can call him Cameron, or we can call him Hottie Marine, but I think Hottie Marine is more fun), asks me if I've tried gabli yet, which I have not. He gets our tour guide to recommend a good galbi place near our drop-off spot.

She's an angel, and not only drops us off at the restaurant, but takes us inside, recommends her favourite dish, and orders it for us. She really goes above and beyond what I would expect of a tour guide!

She orders us two kinds of galbi, which is raw beef rib meat, that we cook on a hot coal fire at our table. Our waitress cooks it for us, but I notice she doesn't do this for the Korean people in the restaurant. I'm not sure if this is pity, or preferential treatment. We also order a bottle of Soju, which neither of us have tried before. I expect it to be like a beer, but instead we get a big bottle of 18.5% rice wine. Thankfully, we only order one.

She motions for us to wrap our meat in a leaf of lettuce and throw some rice and kimchi in there with it. I do this on a plate, which is apparently NOT what you're supposed to do because she rolls her eyes and comes over to me, slaps a piece of lettuce in my hand (and slaps my hand a few extra times for emphasis) picks up a piece of meat, throws some sauce, rice and kimchi in my lettuce hand, rolls it up, and literally stuffs it in my mouth. Hottie Marine tries to follow suit with what I've just been taught, but apparently he messes it up too, because he gets a lettuce hand slapping lesson next.

It's all we can do to keep from coughing up our food we're laughing so hard. From then on we try to be sneaky and eat when no one is looking, for fear of getting more lettuce slaps.

This is just an excerpt from my blog post "North Korea(n Border)". If you want to read more about my visit to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, you can find it here! www.naomilai.wordpress.com