Bulgogi beogeo

I had the weirdest dish at the school cafeteria today. At this particular cafeteria (not the one I showed a picture of earlier, which is in the student center and is pretty nice, but one closer to the language school and not as good) they have usually run out of one choice and are down to the less-popular option by the time I get there after class lets out at 1:00. Today it was bulgogi beogeo 불고기 버거, a bulgogi burger. Bulgogi, of course, is the Korean dish made of thin strips of fried seasoned beef. My lunch didn't seem to have any relationship to bulgogi other than the fact that it had beef in it. This is what it looked like:



What we've got here is basically a very unappetizing cheeseburger, with a limp beef patty, a slice of orange American cheese, and some sliced pickles and onion, all on a bun from which every last trace of flavor and texture had been mercilessly eradicated. It was accompanied by a breaded fish patty drowned in mayonnaise (but thankfully bunless), and a mayonnaise-dressed salad of shredded lettuce. This dish contained neither rice nor soup, so of CoURSE both had to provided on the side. I'd never seen rice served on a plate in this country before.

I had to eat the meal with a knife and fork, which felt utterly bizarre and disconcerting. This was probably the single most unappetizing thing I've eaten in Korea. Judging from the leftover food on the trays sent back to the kitchen for cleaning, my opinion was shared by the majority of cafeteria patrons.

Later in the day, as I was walking through campus, I heard a voice behind me say "Excuse me" in English. I turned around, and a nice-looking middle-aged Korean man said to me, in formal slightly accented English, "Are you not he?" I turned to where he was pointing, and saw this:


"No," I said, amused, "That's not me." "You look very similar," he said, and then turned and left. The banner is advertising some kind of upcoming event at the law school.

Was this a case of "all dark-haired white people look the same", or does this guy really look like me? What do you think?

Iphak

Today was the first day of classes at my new language school at Seoul National University. SNU is the flagship school of the Korean public education system, and the most respected in the country. Today was not only my first day of class, but also the beginning of the new academic year for all SNU students. (The Korean academic year begins in the spring.)

The main gate of the university was decorated with a sign announcing the matriculation ceremony.

The shape of the gate is quite unusual. It is meant to resemble Korean letters. You can clearly see the first syllable of 'Seoul', 서 (seo). I think the rest maybe is supposed to resemble the first syllable of 'university', 대 (dae), although I can't figure out how that could be. Maybe Erma can help here. [Thanks, Erma for pointing out in a comment that the right side is a small (apparently epiphytic) ㄷ, the letter representing the d sound at the beginning of the Korean word for university. -- note added by Lance March 4.]

SNU is a steeply sloped campus, set in the foothills of Gwanak Mountain. The views can be quite dramatic, although today it was a bit hazy.


There were a lot of banner recruiting signs all over campus. Since SNU has the country's brightest students, its graduates are in high demand. This sign is for the Boston Consulting Group. Most of the signs were announcing meetings with recruiters taking place later in the week.


Let's be sfersian!


There were a number of Pojang Macha like this one set up around campus, selling hot snacks.


I don't know if these are there every day, or if these were serving the large crowds expected for the opening ceremony. [It turns out these are not regularly on campus. I haven't seen them since. -- updated by Lance, March 7.]

As I walked up the hill, the sun looked eerie in the morning haze.


This is the Language Education Institute, where my classes are held. All SNU buildings are designated by a number. If you click on the picture to enlarge, you'll see that this building is number 137-1.


Just uphill from my building there is some major construction going on:


The feeling at the language school here is quite different from Yonsei. For one thing, the program is considerably smaller, so it feels more intimate. Whereas at Yonsei there were 14 classes at my level, with 12 students each, here there are 4 classes at my level, with 10 students each. And while it is a very international set of students, the ratios are more balanced than at Yonsei. This is because SNU, as part of their application process, considers nationality as well as academic merit in order to achieve a balance, whereas Yonsei automatically accepts all minimally qualified applicants.

Before I took my placement test, I jotted down the listed nationalities of the students taking the test with me. (These are only the students entering the program fresh, who need to have their Korean level evaluated; the numbers don't include continuing students.) I'll list the numbers, I found them quite interesting:

Holland: 1
Taiwan: 2
Russia: 4
Germany: 1
Malaysia: 2
Mexico: 1
Mongolian: 13 (!!!)
USA: 16
Vietnam: 1
Brazil: 1
Sweden: 2
Spain: 1
Singapore: 1
United Arab Emirates: 1
Uzbekistan: 2
Japan: 19
China: 15
Hong Kong: 3
Chile: 2
Tajikistan: 1
Thailand: 3
Poland: 1
France: 2
Philippines: 2
Korea: 6
Australia: 5

I was startled to see that one of the people taking the test was an former classmate from Yonsei, a Japanese woman. We'll call her Mayumi (not her real name). Mayumi was a very serious and successful student, but she disappeared without a trace a few weeks before the term ended. We were all worried about her. She told me that she'd had some sort of health problem and had to go back to Japan. Like me, she had spent the winter quarter at home, and was now planning to take spring term classes at SNU. I asked her why she picked SNU this time instead of returning to Yonsei. She said that she wanted to try SNU because it had fewer students and they weren't as young.

From what I could tell she's right -- the average age (and presumably maturity level) of the SNU students appeared to be higher.

In my class there were two students from mainland China (one of whom is of Korean descent, but knew no Korean before), one student from Taiwan, two from Mongolia (one of whom is of Korean descent and speaks Korean), one from Uzbekistan, one from France, one from Australia, and one other American.

[We've since added another Mongolian and a Japanese, for a total of 12 students. I was mistaken about one Mongolian being of Korean descent. They are all of Mongolian ethnicity. Two are from the capital Ulan Bator, and one is from the countryside. It also turns out that both of the mainland Chinese students are of Korean ethnicity; one grew up in a Korean-speaking household, and one didn't. -- Added by Lance, March 7.]

The class seems to be right for my level; from what I can tell, the curricula of Yonsei and SNU are structured very similarly. Some of the students spoke better than me, some worse. I knew pretty all of the material we were given for review at the beginning of class, and I know very little of the material that we'll be learning, judging from the contents of our textbook.

The classroom building is older, more run-down, and cramped compared to Yonsei's language institute. Yonsei runs a huge operation that rakes in a lot of money, which is probably why they could afford to put up a brand-new building. But I actually found the facilities inside the classroom to be better at SNU -- there's a computer built into the teacher's desk, for example.

After class I went over to the Student Union's main dining hall for lunch. I've posted before about student dining halls, but I don't believe I've ever shown a picture of the post-prandial section. Koreans generally don't drink with their meals (unless it's alcohol), and as far as I can tell don't use napkins either. Those are after-meal activities. So after you drop off your tray of dirty dishes, you get in line for a drink.


This is a particularly fancy water dispenser. You grab a clean cup, and then you choose either near-boiling hot water from the left-hand-side taps, or cold water from the right-hand-side taps. I like hot water, but let me tell you, a fashioning a cup out of metal is a pretty stupid idea if you want to drink hot liquids from it. A lot students mix hot and cold to get the right temperature.

You sort of stand there and drink quickly, trying not to slow the line down too much. Then you drop your dirty cup into one of the blue tubes at the far end of the dispenser.

In every dining hall I've been in, right near the exit are some napkin dispensers and a mirror. (They are against the far wall in the photo above.) So you can wipe your face, and then check to see if you've done it right. (It's really a pretty civilized idea to be able to look in a mirror after the messy business of eating.)

One last photo -- this is for Erma. It's Gate #8 on campus.

Shikdang 2

Erma and I continue to eat at the dining hall frequently. And we continue to take pictures, especially to illustrate the Conservation of Ubiquitous Rice and Soup Edibles (CoURSE) law.

In the dining hall that has "The Pizza's Pasta" in it, one of the counters serves dishes in these great plastic trays that have compartments in them. I'm not sure why I find these trays so appealing, but I do. They remind me of the stiff cardboard disposable plates we sometimes used for picnics or barbecues, which also were divided into little sections so that your macaroni salad wouldn't cohabit with your corn on the cob.


The main dish, in this case, is the fried breaded cutlet thing with the white sauce on it. Since it is inherently neither rice nor soup, both rice and soup are served with it.

In the picture below, I've got a fried rice dish, which comes with soup, while Erma has a hot stew dish, which comes with rice.


Erma's dish, incidentally, came from this counter:


A closer look at the sign


shows that the name is Ppogeul Ppogeul 뽀글뽀글, which is just an onomatopoetic "burble burble" reminiscent of the boiling-hot stews that are served up there. It reminded us of the similarly-named Korean restaurant on Telegraph in Berkeley called Beogeul Beogeul 버글버글, which was cleverly Romanized as Berkel Berkel.

Just to beat the point into the ground, here's Erma yet again with a spicy hot stew.


It's important to note, however, that there are some important corollaries to CoURSE. One is that if a soup is primarily a noodle soup, then the noodles count as the equivalent of rice. That's the case with these two noodle soup dishes:



Oh, and we saw this guy in the dining hall. Your guess is as good as mine.

Shikdang

Today was rainy. Erma and I took our placement tests at the Korean Language Institute. All of the new students gathered in a large auditorium where we received verbal instructions in, serially, Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese. (A guy sitting near me, looking at a Russian text, was presumably out of luck.) Then we all separated into small classrooms where we took a written exam and had one-on-one oral exams with instructors. The whole process took about two hours. Our assigned class levels will be posted tomorrow.

After the test, the two of us went over to the main student center on Yonsei campus to have lunch in the dining hall. The student center was pretty old and run down. The dining hall itself was large and grimy. Most of the space was filled by long rectangular tables with white plastic chairs. At the back end of the room were a number of windows where you could pick up a brown plastic tray and some silverware, and get served a meal. After looking at a few of them, we chose this one:

We each helped ourselves to a small bowl of radish kimchi and a small bowl of bean-sprout broth. The worker behind the counter brought over, and put on each of our trays, a sizzling iron tray of kimchi fried rice.

Then we looked around to try to figure out where to pay. It wasn't obvious. By this time it was well after 1:00, and there were not too many students getting food, so there was no big line that we could just get in. The few other people we saw getting food were just sitting down and eating. The meals couldn't possibly be free, could they?

Finally, we spotted a woman sitting at a wooden desk in a far corner of the dining hall. We approached her with our trays of food and asked if this was the place to pay for our meal. "You didn't pay yet?" she said in surprise. We were, it turned out, supposed to pay her first, get a little meal ticket, and then use the meal ticket at the counter to get our food.

I took the two meal tickets back to the counter, where I found a plastic bucket at the bottom of which a whole bunch of similar tickets were forlornly clustered, and dropped them in.

The meals cost 3000 Korean won each. At current exchange rates, that about $3.25.

While we were eating, we looked around and realized how the system is supposed to work. When you enter the dining hall, you should immediately turn left. As you walk along the wall, there is a menu of today's dishes, and a glass-fronted cabinet in which you can see samples of each of the meals available, with prices. Here's the meal we got:


The sign says "철판 김치 볶음밥 & 후라이". That's kimchi fried rice and "hurai". "Hurai" is the Korean pronunciation of "fry", and means the fried egg. (This is a case where the English "F" sound, absent in Korean, is replaced with "H" rather than "P".)

The more observant of you will have noticed that the counter where we got our food has an orthographically bizarre name. Here it is up close:

There are three scripts involved here, and a trilingual pun. Let's start with the last two elements, 토랑. This is written in the Korean alphabet, Han-geul, and spells out "torang".

At the beginning is a Chinese character, 世. Chinese characters aren't used much in Korean writing anymore, but they are still used occasionally in signs or in certain formal settings to write Korean words that have historically been borrowed from Chinese. This Chinese character writes a word meaning "world", pronounced "se" in Korean.*

The middle element is, of course, the English "apostrophe s".

So what does the whole thing mean? Well, it appears to say something like "World's Torang", which has the look of a name of an establishment. But "torang" is not a Korean word, as far as I know. The trick to understanding it is to pronounce the whole thing in Korean. Then you get "Se + seu + torang". (The vowel transcribed here "eu" is a very short, whispery vowel. Its presence is necessary because Koreans cannot pronounce an "s" sound at the end of a syllable.) This pronunciation differs by only one consonant from "reseutorang", the Korean word for restaurant, which is borrowed from French.

What we have, then, is an establishment name that puns on the French-borrowed word for restaurant while incorporating a Chinese character meaning "world" and an English possessive form.

I wonder if any of the Korean students who see the sign ever think about this?

[Footnote added September 28]
*I've just discovered that the 世 is the Chinese character used to write the second syllable of Yonsei University. In this context it's got nothing to do with "world". So "Yonsei's Torang" is a better interpretation than "World's Torang".