Travel Report: Daegu, South Korea

What and where do you eat?

Breakfast, from 7 to 9 am, and dinner, from 5 to 7 pm, are included in the dormitory fee. In weekends also a lunch is offered. A meal means rice, kimchi, spiced and cooked vegetables, meat and soup. Kimchi is the most traditional Korean food. It's cabbage spiced with chili pepper and it's difficult to eat in the beginning.

Soup can be interesting; you can find anything in it. Sometimes there are small bird's eggs, sometimes big crab legs or squid tentacles. There are often tofu and shoots. The soup can be spicy. Anyway, you will never be hungry, because there is always rice that you can eat :)

Korean breakfast is not different from dinner or lunch, but you can get bread and milk from "Western Section" table if you arrive early enough. If you arrive after 7.30 am you need to settle with rice and kimchi. They don't use fork at the dormitory but you'll learn to use chopsticks quickly.

On weekdays we usually eat in school restaurants. The most famous is a restaurant in Bauer Hall, which is located in the middle of the campus. The menu is in Korean and you have to order in Korean also, so in the beginning it's good to ask someone to translate. The price is about 2000 won, which is less than 1.5 euros. If you choose randomly you probably get rice, kimchi and scipy vegetables and meat. There is also a hamburger restaurant in Bauer Hall, which is quite cheap.

It's not very expensive to go to eat in a restaurant outside campus. Menus are in Korean though. A famous food is "bulgogi", fire meat. You have a grill in a table and you can fry meat, mushrooms and vegetables by yourself. There are also western restaurants, but they are more expensive than Korean restaurants.

It's interesting to go to eat with Korean friends, when there will be dozens of different kind of bowls in a table. Nobody has his own plate (except a rice bowl) and everyone eats from the same bowls of food with their own chopsticks. It's a good option to go to outside restaurants after you get bored with Korean food at the dormitory and school.

More food pictures