Korea in Phoenix + IKEA

This weekend dh asked if I wanted to go to the huge IKEA store in Phoenix and I said yes, as long as we could go to a Korean restaurant while we were there. I've been to quite a few Korean restaurants . . . all in Korea. :-) I'd never been to one in the USA because our previous small town didn't have any.

We used our GPS to find a Korean restaurant and doing that is a little difficult. The GPS's data base isn't being updated anymore and restaurants come and go. IOW, we tend to run into closed restaurants. We found that out in Sierra Vista a few Saturdays ago while looking for a German restaurant. Eventually we found this Korean restaurant. I'll bet you would have known it was a Korean restaurant even if I hadn't told you. ;-)

A sign on the window said "Red Kimchi" so I assume that is what the Korean says out front. I hope one of my Korean friends will leave a comment to tell me if that is right.

It was kind of a Korean American restaurant. In Korea the table is set with a large spoon and metal chopsticks on a napkin on the right with a wet towelette of some kind (disposable or cloth, depending on how upscale the place is) on the left. Here we had a fork, large spoon, and Chinese bamboo chopsticks on the right and no towelette.

Being Americans, we ordered two kinds of bulgoggi, beef and chicken. In Korea you usually are brought a plate of the raw marinated meat and you cook your own on a gas-fired BBQ that attaches to your table. Our table had the plumbing for the BBQ but the meat was brought out to us completely ready to eat. No playing with fire.

Dinners such as ours always have side dishes that go with them and the side dishes are interesting and delicious.

I'm not a fish eater so I didn't try this, but dh said these little fish are spicy and salty and strongly flavored. Two of my Korean friends, Ji Hyung and Mrs. Na told me they are good for children because they have a lot of calcium in them. I'm guessing they are like sardines and since you eat the soft bones in them, you get a good bit of calcium. Behind the fish you can see the bowl of red kimchi. This is my favorite kind. The red is from red pepper paste and it's spicy and good.

I'm hoping one of my Korean friends can tell me what the dish on the left in the middle is. It was like chewy pasta and I'd never had anything like it. The potatoes on the upper right were our favorite of the six side dishes.

Here is C's take on the table:

And finally, the week's news that Kim Dae Jung (the second former president back) died:

After lunch we went to IKEA. The girls went to the playland for one hour, so dh and I hurried through the store. We needed three curtain rods and one set of curtains. We came out with those as well as these lights for the girls:

The picture above does absolutely nothing for the lamp. When it is lit is glows from the inside and you can see the veins on the petals and the dots in the center of the lamp. It's weird how much I like these lamps. We got one for each girl and dh put them on the wall next to each girl's bed.

So that was our Saturday. Once again, it was a great day.

P.S. Sorry not all the photos came out right. I couldn't get blogspot to upload after the first picture and had to host the others on photobucket. I love photobucket, but the picture sizes didn't come out well for this project.