Mandu and Milkis

Last night, my aunt and I went out for some delicious mandu (Korean dumplings)! Before I get into that, though, I’d like to talk about Korean parking garages.

One constant struggle in Korea is parking. There’s almost nowhere to park, and sometimes people park in the strangest, most inconsiderate places. Now, I have been in Korean for a week and been in multiple parking garages, but I had never seen anyone parked how these people were. Obviously, you park vertically into a space, and all the spaces were full. So, in order to park, several people had pulled their cars horizontally in front of the other cars!

Because I feel like I may not be explaining myself properly, I have taken the time to create this beautiful diagram for your viewing pleasure:

Hopefully it’s obvious that the blue things are cars… anyways, you can obviously see that the cars in the actual spaces are now blocked in! I asked my aunt how they were supposed to get out, and she told me this: the cars that are parked horizontally are left unlocked and in neutral, and you have to physically push them out of the way of your car, kind of like playing tetris. If you would like to see a video of this, I found one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM17qREnNyM

After my lesson in Korean parking, my aunt and I left the parking garage and walked to a mandu restaurant just outside of it. I don’t remember the name and neither does my aunt, so we’re going to refer to it as “The Dumpling House”, per my aunt’s request.

We ordered a smorgasbord of mandu. Don’t they look delicious? We got deep fried mandu, shrimp mandu, kid’s mandu, generic mandu, and kimchi mandu. The deep fried mandu was definitely my favorite. It had very crunchy, deep-fried-type dough. I love dough, and I love deep-fried food. I did not try the Kimchi mandu, because I cannot tolerate any sort of spiciness. The shrimp mandu was good, I just wish that it had more than one piece of shrimp in it 😂

After we left the restaurant and ran a few errands, we came back home to watch some TV and enjoy some desserts. Earlier that day, we had found a box of soda belonging to my aunt and it contained a drink that I have wanted to try for a long time: Milkis.

I was very excited to try this drink along with my dessert! This drink is like soda mixed with milk, and supposedly, it is super popular and everyone loves it. I popped the lid, and it smelled like carbonated dairy. I took a sip, and it originally just tasted like a slightly thicker, blander version of Sprite, but then you get the aftertaste of milk. It was actually really good! However, I do not recommend drinking water immediately after, because it will taste disgusting.

Before finishing this blog, I would like to just say that Korean cake tastes like healthy cake. I like my desserts to taste like desserts, not like someone is trying to trick me into eating vegetables. It wasn’t terrible, I still ate it, but cake back home is ten times better. Just don’t get your hopes up when eating cake in Korea!