20.Tteokbokki

When you go out in South Korea, you can see a lot of street food stands. Tteokbokki and Sundae are some of the most served snacks. Tteokbokki is made by boiling rice cakes, that have a cilindrical form, with rice cakes in a gochujang sauce. Tteokbokki dates back to the Joseon Dynasty. Back then it was a stir-fry  made with rice cakes, mushrooms, meat, vegetables, and was seasoned with soy sauce. But, since after the Korean War soy sauce was hard to get, people made a new recipe. This new recipe consisted on seasoning the rice cakes with the spicy-sweet gochujang sauce (spicy fermented soya bean and red chilli sauce). You can taste a wide variety of tteokbokki in the Shindang-dong Tteokbokki town. The original restaurant of the gochujang tteokbokki is in this alley. But, on this restaurant they don´t serve it the same way street vendors do, they don´t serve it so hot and it is seasoned with gochujang ang jajang (black bean sauce). Many people say that this recipe was created by accident, when Mak Bo Rim (a street vendor) dropped the rice cakes in a bowl of chinese noodles with black bean sauce (jajangmyeon). Since they tasted good, she tried to do a recipe with this and sell them, and it was a total success. 

Since in the 1970s food was more easy to get, people started adding boiled eggs, fish cakes, and glass noodles. In the 1980 many other tteokbokki restaurants started opening, each with a unique recipe. This was when the Shindang-dong tteokbokki town was formed. Since cooking tteokbokki is not an easy thing to do (it gets very messy) restaurants offer aprons. It is cooked on the table, many different ingridients are added, like onions, sauces, cabbage, eggs, mandu and different types of noodles. Many people even ask for more of these! 

Tteokbokki has risen to fame, many new restaurants have been opened. Also, every october, there is a festibal of tteokbokki in Shindang-dong town where you can taste many different tteokbokki recipes, listen to music and see traditional dances. It´s a total parade! I would love to go, tteokbokki is a dish I´m looking forward to try when I go to Korea this summer. 

Source:

http://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/Culture/view?articleId=100375

19.Yasik: Chicken and beer

We all have those delicious late night snacks we like to eat when we have an empty stomach. So do koreans, and a very famous snack is Chicken and beer. Late night snacks are called "Yasik" in korean. Although they are also eaten at other times in the day, they are very popular at night. Koreans until the 1970s ate chicken either stewed, steamed, or roasted. Many say that fried chicken was introduced to South Korea in 1984 by KFC (which opened its first store in Jongno, Seoul). As years have passed, chicken and beer has changed and many plates today are made with gochujang red pepper paste, garlic, soy sauce, red pepper falkes, and many other popular korean condiments. You might think that these ingridients make the chicken taste really bad, but koreans enjoy it a lot, its a perfect flavor for them. As the popularity of this snack has risen to the top, many Chimaek (chicken and beer) restaurants continue on opening. All these restaurants give their own touch to the snack, you can see a variety of menus, you can have your chimaek with a spicy or sweet dressing, a sauce made of soy sauce, and many other kinds of sauces. 

  

The anju are the side dishes for korean drinks. As koreans like to drink while eating, some side dishes make good combinations with alcoholic drinks. Beer  makes a good and refreshing combination with chicken, and rice wine (makgeolli) also does with pajeon (savory green onion pancakes) for example. Chicken and beer is one of the most delivered meals in South Korea, people eat it at work, home, parks, and many other places. You can see a group of friends in front of a convenience store enjoying some chimaek. Although chimaek is for any time of the year, you see it mostly in summer, many say it is the perfect weather for eating it. In every town, there are at least 2 franchises of chimaek, it is indeed very popular. There´s even an event held at Daegu (where many chimaek restaurants are) where many owners of different chimaek restaurants go and set up tents, different recipes of chimaek can be tasted in this festival, it makes your mouth water. 

Kyochon is one of the most popular franchises of chiken and beer, it opened 20 years ago. They have stores in the US and China, they are introducing korean chicken to other parts of the world. I haven´t had the chance of tasting korean chicken (can´t drink beer at my age) but I´m sure it tastes really good, seeing all these images makes me want to eat it even more!

 

If you ever have the chance of tasting it, make sure that you don´t waste it! And if you are thinking about calories, just don´t! Enjoy a little snack that you won´'t regret! 

Sources:

http://blog.korea.net/?p=2196

http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/AK/AK_EN_1_4_9_4.jsp

18. Korean Names

South Korea has unique and beautiful names, their names are a very important part of their culture. Unlike many western cultures that put the family name after the given name, korean names have the family name before. Korean names usually have 3 syllables, for example, in Kim Jong Hyun the family name is "Kim". The most common family names are "Kim" "Choi" "Park" "Lee", most family names have one syllable, but there are also some rare cases in which they have 2 syllables like "Namgung", "Sagong". As the names have 2 syllables, people might ask if it is a middle name, but there are no middle names in Korea.

Many korean names are based on chinese characters, but many people want an original hangul name. Names written in hangul have a very thoughtful meaning. For example, in the name Moon Ga Young, Ga Young means beautiful flower, a very beautiful lady. Many people think that the name might determine the person's fate, and this is why parents think really carefully about their child's name. Parents want the best for their child's life, full of health, success, love, etc, so they take the naming job very seriously. Some even ask a naming specialist for help! They believe that aspects such as saju (meaning the four pillars-the hour, day, month, year of birth) and eumyangohaeng (the theory of universe balance, ying and yang) should be taken into account. Despite many people saying that naming their children according to these aspects is old-fashioned, naming specialists have a lot of costumers. As the naming "business" has risen, there are many sites online for naming koreans, there are also many books about korean names. Others like to ask for advice to their elders. 

Many people in Korea these days like to name their children with meaningful and soft names, Hangul based names like Iseoul (which means dew "이슬"), Oejin (which means generous and wise heart "어진") are very nice. Another very popular way of naming children is using the "english style", names like "Su-ji", "Yu-Jin", and "Je-In" are easy to pronunciate and have a nice meaning. I really like Korean names, and I think it's very creative that they are using english names, I love korean culture. 

Try this, it is not very accurate, but it's fun:

Source:

http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/AK/AK_EN_1_4_9_1.jsp