敎職員食堂

IE 교직원식당
IE School-employment-person-eating-place
IE Faculty Cafeteria

My daily schedule leaves me a ginormous lunch break - from 11 until 1 - each day that I'm at work. Initially I thought this meant that I'd be able to go home, whip myself up some awesome vegan concoction, enjoy a relaxing munch, and come back to work. But it's been quite chilly lately (we even had about 4 inches of snow the other night), so I've been opting for the more convenient...options.

There's a subway (restaurant) downstairs in my office building, which I am totally boycotting in favor of the 敎職員食堂, which serves up a pretty nice buffet full of Korean food every day for less than two dollars. In addition to rice and kimchi, there are usually 3 dishes, a soup, and some fruit all laid out at the buffet, and it's always at least 75% vegetarian and 50% vegan. Not for any particular reason. It's just that Korean meals generally include 5 to 10 different dishes, and back in the days when Korean cooking was taking shape, I suppose it was easier to procure lots of different vegetables than it was to get meat.

I've been trying to convince my coworkers, who have the same lunch break, to join me at mealtime, both because I want some company and because I think the wrapping-free food in the cafeteria is less taxing on the environment than the heavily wrapped and bagged stuff served at Subway. I also have an inkling that the cafeteria stuff is more likely to be local, but it's mostly unsubstantiated.

Anyhow, my peeps tend not to go with me (4 solo lunches this week!) because they don't know the menu in advance and don't want to wind up being forced to eat something fishy. Thus, I've procured the week's menu (in English) in advance in an attempt to make my officemates come up with yet another excuse. Presented below are some of the tastier translations:

Bean paste soup w/ styela clava
Hard-boiled fish paste in pepper paste
Hord boiled yellow corvina
Maximowiczia Chinensis
Salted viscera
Stir-fried seaweed stem
Multi grain powder slush
Roasted hairtail w/ curry
Stir-fried wiener & cultivated mushroom
Winter-sown greens
Sliced-jelly soup
Stuffed derma
Seasoned dropwrot

So now that they can see the menu in advance, what excuse could they possibly have for not going with me?