Blog Post #3 Culture & I: Eating Best Experienced Together

How does it feel? Does it make you a wholly different individual? Travel is a transformative experience, a metamorphosis of thoughts, expectations, and personal reality. It is simple to be confined in one’s personal realm of familiarity, to be held within mindsets of how the world operates or how expansive it realistically is. Travel, in my life, has been a means of bridging cultural boundaries and developing a sympathetic and cosmopolitan composure. Coming from an area where sociopolitical tensions and education is succinctly different, South Korea formulates opportunities to gauge differences in culturally sensitive pragmatics behaviorally and linguistically. Many of the behavioral and interactive aspects of culture that may have startled me previously were solved in advance by the advice of Korean students and friends. What has most intrigued me, in the last few days, is the importance of social food culture – comparable to Spain’s. My particular experience was one that involved three separate restaurants for one dinner. From Korean BBQ to eating Korean-style pigs feet to eating patbingsu, the conversation and laughter was unbroken and in many ways exhilarating. To be a part of a culture and not feel out of place, rather to enjoy the value of a moment, is an inexplicable sensation.

Eating is important, and best executed with many friends or colleagues, an innumerable amount of shared dishes, and preferably shared beverages like soju or makgeolli. It is not a sociocultural behavior that in any way deters me from enjoying my experience, in fact I believe it is a valuable asset to individual betterment in cultural understanding and provides linguistic learning opportunities. A particular cultural pastime that I hope to continually engage with during my stay in South Korea.