Monday saw me trying Korean Pizza for the first time. Pizza here isn’t a completely different experience from pizza in other countries. For the most part, in fact, it’s pretty much the same. Inevitably at this distance, however, there are small variations. Previously, I have only tried Pizza Baguettes from the bakeries – pizza topping on baguettes. They’re convenient and small enough to be ideal for just one person. The only odd thing is that the tomato base includes what appear to me to frozen vegetables – little squares of carrot and meilies or sweetcorn. After a while, I’ve stopped worrying about why. Living in a foreign country is teaching me to accept the way things are without asking questions sometimes. Also, of course, the bits and pieces of low GI-diet information I’ve picked up over the years and far too many episodes of Jamie’s School Dinners, have taught me that adding random vegetables to things like the tomato base on a pizza makes food healthier. On Monday, I discovered that adding sweetcorn is a general rule, rather than a health-enhancing tactic of small bakeries. It’s considered normal for the pizza’s tomato topping to include sweetcorn. And Koreans are a little taken aback when someone suggests that it might not be the way it’s done everywhere.

Another discovery is that Korean pizzas are heavy on the potato. I’m not sure that I’ve ever eaten, or even thought about, potato as a pizza topping before. Here it seems to one of the standard toppings. Potato pizza right there alongside ‘salad garden pizza’ and ‘seafood pizza’. But it gets better. When the potato pizza arrived (I was with a group so we ordered a variety of pizzas rather than each person getting one), it was tomato base (with sweetcorn), topped with cooked potato slices (skins on), a few bits of green pepper and tasteless olive, and cheese, all on a sweet potato crust. The cheese here all seems to be an insipid, processed version of something very mild and soft like Gouda. The cheese on the pizza was no exception, so the cheese taste was rather mild. This meant that the taste of the pizza really was potato on sweet potato. I’m a huge fan of potato in most forms, but I’m not at all sure that I’m sold on the idea of potato pizza. Actually, given the standard reason for me to eat pizza is that I love melted cheese, I’m not sure how much of any pizza I’ll be eating here.

Yesterday I had another meal out, this time far from disappointing. I have the advantage over some first-time foreign teachers, in having at least one foreign colleague who has been here for ages and knows his way around the place, including knowing all sorts of delightful places to eat. Yesterday, he and I had lunch/dinner (what do you call a meal you eat at 4pm?) at a Vietnamese restaurant. The diversity of my culinary experiences in the past has been woefully limited, largely because I’m attached to steak and it’s a wretch to go anywhere else when out to eat. As a result, I’ve never actually eaten Vietnamese food before. So yesterday was a culinary adventure. We ordered beef noodles and lemon chicken. The beef noodles, for anyone who is as uneducated about foreign food as I am, consist of ‘flat meat’ (slices of beef) with rice noodles and some vegetables and herbs in a beef broth. To this you add bean sprouts and coriander (cilantro) and a squeeze of lemon juice. With this they bring you chopsticks and a spoon for the broth. It’s a little difficult to eat because the rice noodles are ridiculously slippery and the broth splashes all over, particularly if one is as inept as I still am with chopsticks. But quite yummy. Wonderfully meaty and savory without being too rich and filling. The lemon chicken was strips of tendarised chicken served in a sticky, sweet-tangy lemon sauce with little pieces of bread/toast. With all this was served some kimchi. It’s really quite terrible that it has taken me so long to taste Korea’s national dish. My colleague was rather shocked. I have now tasted it, however. It’s an interesting combination of experiences that is probably best described as spicy and crunchy. I think I liked the pickled radish better – it tasted a little like pickled onions.

It was really a very good meal but I fear that my uneducated palate, unused to quite such a wide range of flavours and textures, prevented me from appreciating it fully. I’ll have to make sure I go back and try Vietnamese again.