Korean diet and Korean lifestyle
The best way to describe Korean food is spicy and colorful. Also, It tastes strange but once you are used to it, it is really tasty and healthy.
We Spaniards tend to think that Mediterranean diet is the most healthy diet because lots of scientific papers said that. In my experience, that is not true. I mean, if you were following a 100% Mediterranean diet means that you are eating small quantities of meat and fish, and tons of fruits, fresh vegetables, grains and carbohydrates.
100% Mediterranean diet is very balanced. It’s common sense that a balanced diet is healthier than eating at the same fast food restaurant every night around the corner!
The problem is that we stop following the real Mediterranean diet the moment we start to eat meat and fish every day. Classical Mediterranean diet is fresh vegetables and carbohydrates based but since we have become richer, families now spend more and more money on expensive products like fish and meat instead of relying on cheap beans, potatoes and grains. Moreover Mediterranean cuisine is normally oily when cooking meat and fish and everything together means that we eat too much fat.
On the contrary, the diet in Korea is based on rice and vegetables. Rice is eaten steamed or fried or in forms of rice cakes or noodles. Meat and fish is expensive and usually there are small portions but there are few dishes where meat is the main part of a dish. The exception are the Koreans BBQ, restaurants where you are given the meat in raw form and you prepare and cook it by yourself.
In Korea there are hundreds, thousands of restaurants. Virtually every corner has a restaurant or a street food store. And all of them are extremely cheap.
These days I’m having lunch (a good meal) for 2 eur!
The food prices in the markets are almost the same price as in restaurants, so the Koreans tend not to cook at home and instead, have a great time having dinner with friends. In the evenings all the restaurants are full of people, normally in groups of 4 or 6 people all together enjoying food and soju. In Korea, social relationships are established during eating. Lots of food. And lots of alcohol.
In Korea every time your boss wants to go out, all the office is forced to go with him for dinner. But the boss (who is the boss because he is the older guy) treats all the people for food and soju. If you don’t want to be seen like a problematic guy, you are forced to go. I love this system, after a few bottles of soju, all the problems that you can have with your coworkers are diluted in alcohol. If someday I have my own business I’ll apply this principle (drink more!) to solve all the corporate problems.
Actually it’s common to see drunk executives in the subway and in the streets after 10 in the night. Some of them in very bad condition. In Korea it’s accepted to go drunk or with a huge hangover to work if the night before you went out for dinner with your boss.
