Eat together, Pray together, Love together

So I recently read an article about Middle Eastern airlines offering a GPS system on airlines which allows passengers to always know where they are in relation to the holy city of Mecca. They can just roll out their prayer rugs and pray in that direction if they need to during the flight. I thought about how difficult it must be to center your entire life around the fact that you have to pray 5 times a day in the same direction every day, but then I realized that it must come naturally to a Muslim person who has been doing this his/her entire life.

It made me think of how Koreans center all of their activities around eating 5 times a day with other people. I was surprised when I first arrived in Korea, because everywhere I looked, the food always came in giant portions. I thought Americans were the only people who drank and ate more than was necessary, so I was confused to see pictures of large bowls of rice, meat, and vegetables on the signs outside the restaurants, and to see 2-liter bottles of soda on the shelves in the supermarkets. I soon learned, however, that those were all meant to be shared, because Korean people would never consider eating alone.

This means that restaurants don't serve single servings and that it's impossible to buy a single piece of fruit at a fruit stand: you must buy an entire bowl of fruit and then find people to share it with before the fruit goes bad. When a Koren person buys what we would consider to be a single-serving bottle of coke at the convenience store, they also buy small paper cups and then they pour a little bit in each cup for each person to savor the one or two gulps they might get.

I'm not gonna lie, I have found it difficult to only drink two sips of coffee when we have break time at school, and I have found it even more difficult to plan my schedule so that my hunger coincides with another person's hunger every day. But if I eat alone, it's considered to be rude or sad, so I keep trying.

I've often wondered: what does a Korean person do if they become hungry while they are out running errands? So far as I can tell, they do one of three things:
1) they never run errands alone (duh)
2) If they must go somewhere without a friend/colleague/family member, then they starve until they can return home to eat with someone, or
3) they eat at one of the many snack stands that dot the streets everywhere here. Pretty much anywhere you go, you can find a stand with a counter and a vendor behind it boiling or frying one of the many traditional Korean snacks: gimbap (rice and anything else you want rolled into seaweed, a favorite of mine), dokpokki (cylindrical rice cake covered in a sweet red pepper sauce), fried sweet potatoes and vegetables (just like Japanese tempura), fish cake on sticks, hottak (a fried dough thingy filled with nuts and brown sugar), etc. If you must go to the snack stand alone, at least you're likely to be in the company of another stranger eating at the same counter, or you can chat with the vendor while you eat.


Kerk, eating hottdak









I've also wondered: How do you find someone to eat all of your meals and snacks with if you live alone? So far as I can tell: Koreans don't live alone. I have never seen or heard of a Korean person living alone, which means that the children always live with their parents until they are married (even if the child is 40 years old and doesn't plan on marrying anytime soon), and if you get a divorce, you move back in with your parents. Since it's considered to be depressing to see a person eat alone, I can't imagine what the stigma attached to living alone is: completely pathetic? mentally handicapped? shunned from society? I have no idea what they think of me. Sometimes the students ask me if I live alone, and I say yes, but I quickly add that my best friend and 7 other friends live in the same building as me. If they still look like they pity me, I tell them, "Don't worry. We eat our meals together."