Travel Story

I have a story from a couple of Fridays ago and coming home from Chicago.

Our flight out of Chicago is scheduled for just after 4:00 in the afternoon. Since we leave so early, we usually don’t stop working for a “lunch” break and end up stopping for some kind of fast food on our way to the airport.

Last Friday, someone got a wild hair and decided that Wendy’s wasn’t good enough for him this Friday and wanted something different. We pulled into the plaza that Wendy’s was in, and he looked around and saw what he thought was a Chinese restaurant in the plaza and said let’s go there. Well, I’m here to tell you, Korean food is nothing like Chinese food!

It started with the fact that the three of us were the only non-Oriental looking people in the place as well as the only three that spoke any English. Being in an adventurous mood, we decided to stay anyway.

The menus again were only subtitled in English, and this time I had my reading glasses on me. I picked something that said beef with various vegetables. How can that be a bad thing? I should have been able to eat that. One of the guys ended up ordering the same thing and one of the guys again just pointed at something.

The server brought us each out two water glasses, one of which was filled with ice water and the other was filled with a warm amber colored (ok, it looked like pee!) liquid. The water was mighty tasty. No, I didn’t taste the other.

Lunch was served and this is where the confusion really began. I’m sure it was good food to anyone that knows anything about Korean food. But, being a hick from the United States, I didn’t have a clue what the hell was served, and neither did anyone else at our table.

First, I had my bowl of food. What I think was the beef in this dish we were guessing was actually pickled beef and it was cold. The veggies (not swearing to that) were julienned and absolutely nothing was recognizable. There was white stuff, yellow stuff, brown stuff, red stuff. As I usually do better tasting new things when I don’t know what they are, I tried them all. Yuck is the most family friendly word I can come up with now.

Aside from my big bowl of food, it came with a smaller bowl, of soup looking stuff. I recognized a few mushrooms in there as well as two little pieces of tofu. I ate the mushrooms and tofu. It was my suggestion that this soup mixture should maybe go into the big bowl as the stuff in the big bowl was kinda dry, even with the gummy rice. So we did that.

Also on our table, the server laid down six small bowls in the middle of the table that had absolutely nothing recognizable on any of them! Well, one bowl sort of looked like a really small piece of lasagna, but from what I heard from one person that was brave enough to try it, it was nothing like lasagna. I don’t have a clue! We tried to ask the server what to do with these bowls, but she just looked at us and smiled and backed away.

Needless to say, two of our lunches went uneaten. It’s not just that I couldn’t recognize anything, but it all really tasted bad! VERY bad! Sort of like poop on a platter. It was so bad, it made the McDonald’s I bought at the airport taste good. You know if anything makes McDonald’s taste good, it has to be bad in comparison!