Coming from Hanoi and their warm weather, I walked around in shorts in Seoul even in the cold while everyone was out with their winter clothes. People must’ve thought I was crazy. My flight landed early in the morning too, so I had to kill 2 hours before shops actually opened.

At the time, I had not realized that a massive protest against the government had been happening in Seoul (wiki). If I had known, I would have totally gone there instead!

Myeongdong looking quite festive this time of year!

LINE Friends! This place attracted so much attention from people wanting to take pictures, they they set up a queue for people to line up for photos.

This is Budae Jjigae. It is probably my favourite kind of Korean food. It’s got a spicy soup base, meat, mushrooms, and other things with instant noodles. It’s so simple, but so good.

Street food stand with bacon wrapped sausages, and skewers? How could I say no?

I should have tried these lobster tails. They look so good.

Not a huge fan of dessert, but it looked really cool.

Myeongdong was bustling that day.

The thing I realized that day is that the street market people can haggle in at least 3 languages: Korean, English, and Chinese, as opposed to just the native language, and English like a lot of other places. Good on them for learning all these numbers in different languages!

Link to photo album: here

The day after going to Munich, some of my friends and I went to eat some traditional Japanese food.  We went to a restaurant called Tokio Dining (http://www.tokiodining.de) and at the time they had a deal (until the end of June) where the first 20 bowls of Miso Ramen served each day would be half price.  I actually went to this restaurant once before, but for some reason I never blogged about it the first time.  As I kept writing this, it sounded more and more like a restaurant review.  Either way, the food was so good the first time I went, I decided to go again.  It was the best Japanese food I’ve ever had.  And by Japanese food, I don’t mean sushi.

I’ve never had Japanese food in Japan before, but I’d say this place was the closest thing.  As we walked in, the chefs greeted us in Japanese, and if I knew how to reply in Japanese, I totally would have done that.  When we went in, we were the only people there and that usually says something about how good the restaurant is, but not for this place.

Jasmine Tea

Unlike Japanese restaurants in North America, they do not serve green tea to all their customers by default.  It might be a German thing where they like to charge for every drink – even water.  I ordered their Jasmine tea since it is one of my favourites.  They served it in a very traditional looking (at least to me) teapot with a teacup.

In addition to looking good, it also tasted good.  The tea had been steeped for the right amount of time for it to have flavour and yet not have taste that was too concentrated.

Edamame

My friend had this the first time we went and this dish was perfect for him because he is a vegetarian.  Edamame is a dish that has immature soybeans that have been boiled in water with a little bit of salt.

I tried a little bit and it was pretty good.  I can’t say that it’s super delicious or anything because I’m a huge fan of meat.  It was pretty fun trying to get the beans out of the pod though.

Takoyaki

The appetizer I had the first time I went was the Takoyaki.  It is a dish that has a ball-shaped pancake with grilled octopus meat as filling.  It is also served with Japanese mayonnaise, takoyaki sauce, katsuobushi (dried fish flakes), and green onion flakes.  The restaurant served it in a wooden boat shaped dish, which made it extra cool.

When I bit into one of the takoyaki balls, the pancake layer felt so soft and delicious.  The octopus part was even better, but I think I say that only because I’m a huge fan of octopus meat.  The sauce and the fish flakes made it even better.  As I’m writing this part, I’m craving more of it.

Ikura

Ikura is the Japanese word for roe, which are basically fish eggs.  The restaurant called it Ikura Oroshi and the word Oroshi apparently means a strong wind blowing down a slope (if I got the context correct too).  I guess it makes sense when considering how it was served.  It was served on a small mound of water chestnut with the caviar on top.  On the side of the mound, there were a few strips of sliced cucumber and I guess that would represent the wind.  I never realized how much sense the name of the dish made until I looked it up while writing this part.

The dish was really small, but that makes sense because roe is quite expensive to serve in large volumes.  When I bit into one of them, they just pop as my teeth sinks through the outer protective layer and when that happens juice comes out.  It had the coolest mouthfeel.

Miso Ramen

Our main dish was the Miso Ramen.  The noodles had a soup base made of miso (hence the name) and was served with a slice of pork.  It also had other ingredients such as bean sprouts, seaweed, half a boiled egg and corn.  All of that made the noodles so much more delicious.

The noodles were soft yet chewy in a way and that was perfect for my tastes.  Many people think that the instant ramen and this kind of ramen are similar, but their only similarity is that they’re both noodles with the same name.  They taste completely different.  Although the dish was kind of small, everything in it was so good that I ate all of it – even the soup.  While I was eating this, I faced a dilemma.  In Japan, it is customary to slurp the ramen loudly to show appreciation of the food, but in western countries nobody does that.  In the end, I just slurped it like how I normally ate noodles (something like in between the two extremes), while my friends were really careful about making any slurping noises.

Conclusion

Everything here was so good that I would want to go there to eat all the time until I get sick of it.  I never thought I’d be going out for Japanese food while in Germany, but I think this worked out really well.  On our way out, we said thank you to the chefs there in Japanese.

When I go back to Vancouver, I will try to find another restaurant that is on par with this if not better.  That shouldn’t be too hard since Vancouver does have amazing Japanese food.

Yesterday, I decided to give this a try.  I scooped two cups of rice into a bowl and then filled it with some water  to wash it.  After draining the water, I transferred the rice into the rice cooker pot.  At that moment, I realized that I could have just used that container to begin with.  I filled the container up to the line that said “2”, since I only used two cups of rice.  I plugged the rice cooker in and set it to cook.  It was that simple.  The rice I cooked would be for my lunch for the next day.

While cooking this rice, I helped my roommates cook lasagna.  There were three of us, so we delegated different tasks to each person.  My job was to cook the ground beef on the frying pan.  The last time I did this was in the cooking class in Middle School.  I took the spatula and broke apart the big clump of ground beef.  As I did that, my roommates would add peppers, and onions to the mix.  I then moved the bits around to cook the red parts of the meat.  Even I know that red is bad for ground beef.  I cooked it until all the beef turned dark brown.

While I cooked the ground beef, one of my roommates prepared the sauce.  All he did was pour some pasta sauce into a pot, fill it with water, and heat it up.  He also added some spices, but I don’t remember what.  Another roommate cut up some veggies to put into the frying pan with the ground beef.

Once the beef and the sauce was prepared, they poured some of the sauce onto a lasagna pan, then added a layer of lasagna pasta.  I grated some cheese for it too.  Grating the cheese proved to be more difficult than it should have been since the cheese was just taken out of the freezer, which meant that little chunks would break off while I was grating it.  They would prepare layers using a combination of the sauce, pasta, cheese, and veggies.  Once they filled the  pan to the top, they put it in the oven for about half an hour.

They said, “this is how you make homemade lasagna.”  Once it was done, we ate it and it was pretty good.  I guess this has taught me that cooking stuff like this isn’t that hard.  I’ll also need to get used to it, since I’ll probably be cooking for myself regularly once I move out.