Mouth-Watering Barbecue

A bunch of us in my class wanted to have a post-test celebration, but since the exam was on a Monday we had school and lab obligations all week. Thus, our Post-Test Party was a kind of extended lunch at the creatively-named “Korea House,” a Korean barbecue forty minutes away from Loma Linda. I’d never had Korean barbecue before, so the experience was new for me. Your table has a grill set into the center of it, and they bring you plates of raw meat. Your job is to combine the two along with various toppings to make delicious bites.

Did I mention that there is a grill in the center of your table? The restaurant did an “all you can eat for $9.99” special for lunch, so being grad students we rolled in with a ten-person crowd thirty minutes before “lunch” ended and started ordering meats like crazy. I was a little confused at first, but lucky for me we had several Experienced Asians with us to act as Wise and Helpful Guides.

Although I don’t really have anything to compare it to, I thought the food was delicious and had a great time. Parking, though, was terrible. There’s a whole shopping plaza with maybe one or two spaces per storefront, so we just parked at the much larger shopping center across the street and walked. Space is such a premium that the stores use cones to barricade those spaces for their customers. I suppose the cell phone store expects potential customers to run inside and request that the spot be opened?

The biggest faux pas of the trip was finding out that our one friend and her boyfriend were vegetarian after we got there. There was salad for them to eat, at least, but it was definitely an “oops” moment.

I thought my car made good time on the way back, but it turns out the other car recovered and used some kind of “back streets” voodoo to bypass all the traffic jams. Around here, something is apparently considered “close” if it’s under an hour drive, but until I learn these dark traffic-dodging arts, a lot of things are still mentally off-limits. What can I say, I was living in Baltimore where I was routinely either very close to my destination or traveling against the flow of traffic, and I got spoiled.