Korean food, culture, international love
Do you eat Korean food with your boyfriend?”
“Do you eat anything spicy?”
“What do you two usually eat?”
It’s already been more than three years since I met a Brazilian man by chance, and it’s been four years. Whenever I hear this story, however, the topic, which is located at the top of the unchangeable questions asked by Koreans, regardless of whether they are family or friends, is “Bob.”
Koreans, who are so obsessed with rice, worry seriously about the rice problem because they wonder if I’m living abroad with a foreign man, if I can’t eat kimchi stew with white rice, or if I’m using hamburgers instead of hangover soup.
But luckily, we really fit in.
His favorite dish is Korean food, and whenever he asks his favorite Korean food, his number one priority is always spicy chicken noodles, so he doesn’t have to ask how much spicy food he eats. The top two are Buldakbokkeummyeon + Jjapaghetti, followed by Tteokbokki, Jinjamppong, and Dakgalbi. To sum up, you are very loyal to buldak and spicy taste. Even the nuclear buldak I can’t eat.
The problem is, his body doesn’t seem to like spicy food. When you eat Buldakbokkeummyeon, you start hiccups from the moment you put it in your mouth and can’t stop until you finish eating. Her eyes are filled with tears and she looks pathetic. In addition, after about two hours, I go back and forth from the house to the bathroom continuously, and it looks like a kind of struggle, which makes me speechless.
When I say, “Do you have to eat that much?” Buldak is like a fruit of good and evil, and because I felt this perfect spiciness, I used to say that I would take this much pain with that punishment, so I decided not to stop it anymore.
In addition to eating spicy food well, no one will worry that I will not be able to meet foreigners and live on Korean food when I see us preparing grilled onions, kimchi, ssamjang, salted squid, and sesame leaf pickles for a meal. In addition, there is a Korean town in Sao Paulo, Brazil where I live, so I can recharge my energy by eating out regularly. The price is much higher than in Korea, but it’s a pleasure to buy it together sometimes. If she couldn’t eat spicy food, I always had to go eat it with other friends or endure it.
Oh, absolutely not.
What’s unfortunate is that he doesn’t eat pork, but he prefers beef and chicken because he doesn’t like the unique smell and the texture of fat. In fact, I understand that when I come to Brazil, I’m getting used to chicken and beef only because I don’t have an appetite for pork, which seems to be of poor quality unlike Korea. Still, I hope that the Korean soul food Sundaeguk, gamjatang, and stir-fried spicy pork, which I have loved all my life, will change my mind if I go to Korea and eat the dishes made from the ingredients there. (I’m trying to cut back on meat, but it’s very difficult.)
In any case, the difference in diet is not significant at the moment, as everything is somewhat better than Korea’s, but it has all kinds of Korean spices such as kimchi, red pepper paste, red pepper powder, and cada. Sometimes when I see him go out to eat bread in the morning and buy bread and spread it and eat it, he was a foreigner. To the point where it makes me think!
What did I cook this week?
I ate familiar foods such as braised mackerel, tuna kimchi stew, kimchi fried rice, jjajang rice, ramen, curry rice, etc.
As I am eating Korean food more than anyone else, I tell everyone who has been taking care of my food that you don’t have to worry about it.