Kimchi and Snowflake Ice

I wonder how many of my blog posts are named for food items. I would speculate at least a good 10 percent...Anyway, just a random thought. Expect plenty of those from me tonight, as it is currently 1am on a Friday night and I am afflicted by three things: end-of-week exhaustion, planning-ahead befuddlement, and food-induced coma.

So let's talk about that last one.

Tonight, my lovely host family took me out to dinner. It'd been planned a few days ago, as Emily Facebooked me and invited me to go eat Italian food with them. "Great!" I thought. "Italian food!" Tonight, they picked me up, as promised, at 6pm, and announced that we were not, in fact, going to Italian food, but would rather be sampling Korean fare, a first for all of us.

And it was great! We went to a Korean BBQ Buffet at Dream Mall (largely patronized by Koreans tonight, Margaret pointed out to me, which may have explained the stares), and had essentially a DIY BBQ/hotpot device in the middle of the table which I promptly filled with beef and veggies--yummm. Kimchi was soon summoned and found to be a most willing compatriot to the beef, and side dishes of kimchi pancake and (very spicy) hot rock rice followed.

Cooking in progress

Kimchi pancake

This was 太辣的 for me...

Despite the epic fullness this meal produced, Emily, James and I cured our burning mouths with some ice cream, and then we moved on--to get more food, of course!

We set out for Yangchengpu, to eat at Kaohsiung's most popular shave ice place--popular, as I learned tonight, for a reason. It's absolutely scrumptious. Emily and I split a strawberry milk ice, done snowflake style (wispy bits of ice, just like snow), while James grabbed a red bean one and Margaret, as always, opted for a hot option of jelly and sweet glutinous rice ball soup.

Before we ate, we also paid a little visit to the gold street--so called for its vendors and, based on this picture, anyway, its lighting. :)

Yummmmm

So now, with all that food resting lovingly in my tummy, it's time to give in to the forces at work against me and sleep off all that good food.