안주 (anju)

안주 is the Korean term for the food/snacks you eat while you're drinking. I went out the last 2 nights with different cousins and had some interesting things to eat. I found out that you spend about half of your nights money on drinking, and the other half goes to food. So unlike in the states, if you go out and spend $140 in 8 hours drinking, you spent only about $70 of it on actual alcoholic beverages.

I think the concept is fun and very tasty of course. Food always tastes good when you're drinking, but I do feel the guilt when I wake up in the morning and think about the 3000 calories I swallowed the previous night before I went to sleep. There's no way that I'd be skinny in this country if I actually lived here. There's just too much food available to me and I can't control myself.

So what did I eat?

2 nights ago I went out with my mom's youngest sister's son, his name is Jae Hwan. We had only beer that night. For food we ate a breaded dessert with ice cream and butter on it, a spicy fried popcorn chicken dish, and takoyaki (breaded fried octopus bits). It was the best tasting takoyaki I had, which probably means it was really unhealthy. It didn't have a lot of octopus in it compared to takoyaki I've had in the states.

Last night I went out with the first & second sons of my dad's oldest younger sister (Yong Dae and Yong Jin), the second son of my dad's older brother (Ki Baek), and the first son of my dad's middle younger sister (Dae Woo). I know all this sounds confusing the way I'm describing people but this is how everyone in Korea thinks about relationships. They have names for every type of relationship between 2 people. I'll go into that in another post later. I'm serious, it's crazy how detailed the system is.

So anyway, last night we drank mostly soju (rice wine). It's 40 proof, so 20% alcohol. For food we had bbq'd sea snake, bbq'd boneless chicken feet, and pan fried spam with tofu.

The chicken feet didn't even look like chicken feet really. They just looked like boneless pieces of some kind of meat with skin on them. They were bbq'd and flavored pretty hard so it would be tough to recognize even if you ate it without knowing. They look nothing like the chicken feet when you eat dim sum.

The sea snake was interesting. You cook them long ways after you flavor them, and then before you eat it you cut it up with scissors in bite size pieces. When you do that, the intestines expand and fall out on the side. My cousin told me that that's when you know they're ready to eat. haha

My cousin shared a couple of drinking customs with me as well, but they're too hard to really describe here except it involves soju glasses stacked on top of glasses of beer and also throwing beer wet napkins at the wall to see whose falls first.

I have a video of that part, so someday you'll get to see it.