Saturday, August 13, 2011

The Korean 7-11, or, Experiments in Snacking

After we were done with our first Korean-food meal, we were still hungry. The food had been good, but there hadn't been much meat and the beds of lettuce under our meats weren't very filling. We had seen a 7-11 on our walk to the restaurant and decided to stop there and pick up snacks on the way back to the hotel.

I don't think it really occurred to me that the 7-11 was going to be carrying Korean snacks rather than normal food.

We couldn't read the labels, which were all written in Hangul, and we didn't recognize any of the packaging, except for:


We didn't buy this one, but it was funny enough to take a picture of:


An angry chicken? Okay. But why are those two creepy obviously evil guys dancing? And why do they have bubbles coming out of their heads?

We probably spent twenty minutes in that store, looking for stuff we recognized and figuring out what Korean foods we wanted to try. Here's what we ended up with:


First, I'll tell you about the green and white sparkling Tropicana drink in the can. It's actually been one of my favorite things I've found here so far. It was fizzy and cold and tasted like a sour apple Jolly Rancher. And it has English on it, so I bet you can buy it in the States, too. Somewhere.

Then there were the triangle things in the two similar-looking bags (left corner.) They're made by Kellogg's. They were like crunchy triangular cookies. I liked the apple ones and Joe ate the honey cranberry ones. (At least I assume those are cranberries...you never know, in foreign countries where you can't read.)

Next: The orange and white bag. These were sweet puffed rice and peanut snacks. They tasted like Quaker rice cakes, with peanuts. I liked them and would have liked them even more if they hadn't had peanuts in them.


Then there was the chocolate ice cream inside the plastic tube. (It's inside the package in the lower left-hand corner of the picture with all the food.)


It was delicious. It was like a Fudgsicle stuffed into a Mondo bottle minus the popsicle stick.

Next: The Soft Chocolate (upper left in the big picture.) It was one of two things we bought that night that had an English name (on the back of the box.) I wasn't impressed with Soft Chocolate. The candy came individually wrapped in powdered-sugared, bite-sized pieces and tasted exactly like the creme inside of a Keebler's E.L. Fudge cookie.


And then, the next day, there was one Soft Chocolate left, and I put it in my purse, and then a few days later it was mushed and flat and I opened it to see if it would taste good and it didn't.

I saved the weirdest food for last. The round thing in the upper right-hand corner of the big picture. We tried to figure out what was inside this frozen container before we bought it, with no luck. I guessed that the things illustrated on the outside were beans, though. Little black beans. The container was in the ice cream freezer, so I thought I was probably buying some kind of bean ice cream with colorful little square chunks of something in it. Unfortunately, I was 100% right.


The best way I can describe this concoction is as very sweet shaved ice studded with black beans. The pink square things covered in white sugar to the left of the tip of the spoon - I don't know what those were made out of, but I'm pretty sure it was bean paste. Joe liked the stuff and ate it all, which was good, because I certainly didn't want it. It didn't taste bad...it was just too weird to eat (like many foods I've found here.)

We were excited with each new package of food. We never knew what was inside or if it was something we actually wanted. It was like opening presents.

And that is what filled us up on the night of our first Korean-food dinner.

No comments:

Post a Comment