Fusion dokbokki

I never got sick of eating dokbokki (rice cakes in spicy sauce) on the street. So much so that I even ordered it in a restaurant one night. Our friend Angus took us one of his favorite restaurant districts, Sinsa. Unfortunately the restaurant he wanted to go to was packed, so we walked down the street to an un-tried basement fusion pasta place.

First off, we were the only customers and we were escorted to a curtained "make-out" booth. Being an Asian female with two Caucasian males, maybe our waitress got the wrong idea about me....? Then we realized that the place had no picture or English menus. So the waitress begrudgingly translated each item. When she got to mine -- dokbokki with seafood, I said, oh, that's what I want. She warned me, it's really spicy... but I said that was alright.

It was like some Korean Mediterranean hybrid, full of mussels, shrimp, fish, calamari, crab, and boy was it spicy. The spiciest thing I had in Korea through our whole trip!

Now, I used to say the measure of a developed vs. third-world nation was in their toilet paper and ice cream technology. Well, South Korea is a developed nation and their toilet paper is fine, but what's with the cocktail-sized, single-ply, non-absorbent napkins? Like some sick joke, they have one of the world's spiciest cuisines, worthless napkins, and it's rude to blow your nose at the table! I didn't care, I couldn't help it -- it was a mouth-burning sinus-clearing 7 tissue meal for me!