I have been asked by several people what it is we eat here, and whether we're wasting away. To the latter question I can answer a definite no. This country has pizza, burgers, Haagen-Dazs, Baskin Robbins and Dunkin' Donuts just about everywhere, plus the occasional Cinnabon store, plus a wide variety of high-fat salty and sweet treats of every imaginable sort: squid crunchies, Pringles in flavors like "Wild Consomme" and "Crispy Curry" and "Funky Soy Sauce," quality chocolate called Ghana, and all the major American candy bars too. (Jenny looked up one day while eating a Twix and declared it bizarre and amazing that this Twix here in Korea tasted exactly the same as a Twix you'd get out of a vending machine in New York or LA.) So no, our jutting ribs are not about to go clinking like washboards down the bathtub drain.

Fortunately, however, our diet is not primarily junk food. While it's reassuring to be able to get a tub of Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice-cream and some Hershey's syrup to put on it, that doesn't exactly constitute a satisfying meal. When I was in India, I often found myself confronted with a barely edible dinner and ended up munching Cadbury's bars instead, and it's amazing how depressing chocolate can get when it's been your dinner for the last three nights.

But then what is it that we do eat?

We're the sort of New York City foodies who can tell you about every single Tibetan restaurant within the city limits. We think a good activity for a Saturday afternoon is wandering around Jackson Heights until we find a cuisine we don't know anything about and then diving in. So when we arrived in Seoul, we were of course excited to try Korean food just as soon as we could. But just as of course, the menus were in Korean. Which is why we ended up in McDonald's and KFC and Pizza Hut rather often during our first weeks. We actually walked into a Korean restaurant in our neighborhood, feeling brave, but after staring at the menu for several minutes, we couldn't find a single thing that we could identify in our various guidebooks. And while we were prepared for new food experiences, we wanted to avoid the ones that would involve mystery fish — or worse, the dreaded ojingeo (squid), or the even more terrifying live octopus. In the end we had to retreat from the restaurant, apologizing profusely but incomprehensibly, and we have never been back.

With time, patience and intense study of the Lonely Planet and Berlitz sections on food, however, we have gotten to know our way around Korean cuisine, or at least the safer parts of it. We know what we can order in which kind of restaurant, and what the dishes are that we like, and which restaurants to avoid (the ones with happy squids on the signs and the tanks of unhappy eels out front). We've made a few mistakes — there was the nice new restaurant near us where we ordered what we thought was chicken soup and got bowls of steaming ojingeo soup instead, which stunk so badly that we had to leave right away. But most of the time we do fine. We've even managed to figure out how to get food delivered to the house, which is fabulous: they bring us dinner on real dishes, we put the dishes outside our door when we finish, they collect the dishes, and at no point are we expected to tip. And at this point they don't even have to ask us who we are and where we live, because we're the only people in the neighborhood who phone up and speak pidgin Korean.

One of the most common Korean dishes is bibimbap, which is a bowlful of rice, seasonal vegetables, pickled fern bracken (way better than it sounds) and a fried egg, plus a large dollop of hot sauce. You mix it all up together, and there you are. It's a remarkably healthy dish, and you can get dolsot bibimbap too, which is bibimbap in a sizzling hot bowl that crisps the rice on the bottom. Another favorite is bulgogi, which is a sort of soupy stir-fry with beef and onions. You get it in one of those hot bowls, and you dump a bunch of rice in, and once again, there you are. There are also mandu (dumplings), served steamed, fried or in soup, and available for next to nothing at most little groceries, though finer varieties get served in restaurants; mild fried rice dishes; donkkaseu, which is fried pork cutlet in gravy; and chaeyuk-dopbap, which is a very spicy pork stir-fry over rice.

A curious thing about Korean food is that the people eating are expected to do some amount of work. With galbi (Korean barbecue), you actually cook your meal yourself, which always makes me feel a little sorry for the wives who sit there working the grill on their night out at the fancy restaurant. But even with simpler dishes, you play a participatory role. With bibimbap, if you just dig in as soon as it hits the table, you're doing it wrong. You are expected to mix it up yourself — which is a good thing, because it means I can scoop out some of the hot sauce. Then you can eat. With bulgogi, you get the rice in a separate bowl, and then you immediately take that bowl and dump its contents into your bowl of bulgogi. This lets you determine just how much rice you want, but it also involves scooping and stirring. And it's amazing how many dishes involve cooking at the table and/or snipping with scissors. There are dishes you don't have to do much with — fried rice, say, or donkkaseu — but those are Chinese and American food, respectively. If it's Korean and not a soup, prepare to do your part.

Likewise, dish-washing must be a national pastime, because whatever Korean meal you order, you always get a zillion side dishes, each in its own little plate. There is always kimchi, Korea's national food, which is a sort of crunchy pickled cabbage with hot sauce. Or if there's not the regular kimchi, there's some other vegetable pickled in exactly the same way, like cubes of radish. (When you order pizza or spaghetti, you get sweet pickle chips, which is apparently the kimchi of the West.) And there are often little piles of tofu, whole small fried fish, cold fried egg slices, acorn jelly, bunches of super-tiny fish in various sauces (what's sometimes called sakana zakana in Japan), vegetables even the waiters can't name (we've asked), and then just completely unidentifiable stuff. When it's not fishy, I like to try what my mom used to call a "no thank you portion" when I was growing up. She would tell me, "You never know if today is the day you're old enough to like lima beans," or whatever it was I said I didn't like. And she was right often enough, though I am apparently still not old enough to like more than a little bit of kimchi, usually with something else. Koreans tend to eat it for breakfast, or so my kids claim, but I couldn't possibly stand to face the stuff before noon. And as for ojingeo or boiled silkworm larve — a hideous vat of which seems to be bubbling outside most subway stations, to the delight of, well, somebody apparently — I don't think I'll ever be that old, so I'm keeping that no thank you portion at zero.

And then there's the dark secret of Korean cuisine. Some Koreans still eat dog meat — the brilliantly funny Korean film Barking Dogs Never Bite involves, among other things, an apartment block janitor who steals people's dogs and cooks them in the basement. Now, I personally have never actually seen anything to indicate that dog meat was available anywhere, and it's currently illegal, but it might not be for long. Under pressure from Italian and other animal rights activists, FIFA, the organization that manages the World Cup, warned Korea that it had better eliminate its dog meat problem before the games begin this summer. This justifiably outraged Koreans, who wanted to know what on earth dog meat had to do with soccer, and where a bunch of people from countries that eat cow, goat, sheep and pig get off deciding that Korea has chosen the wrong mammal for stewing. Korea is now considering the re-legalization of its underground dog-meat industry, and various merchants have announced that they intend to open dog-meat stands near the exhibition venues should the law permit. If this all comes to pass, it will be decidedly weird. I don't have any particular moral objection to dog meat rather than some other kind — I just don't see how killing dogs is meaningfully different from killing pigs, which are similarly intelligent — but I'll admit that it does sort of freak me out on a visceral level, and I can't imagine it will be good for tourism. But then my students were horrified that I would eat a duck.

I realize that I'm making Korean food sound like some hideous parade of dog, squid and insect, which isn't really fair. Most of the time Korean food is somewhere between palatable and excellent, and it's only rarely scary if you order correctly. And if you don't fear mystery fish as much as Jenny and I do, Korean food is probably not scary at all. In any case, our favorite Korean food is galbi, which is Korean barbecue. You can get various cuts of pork and beef, but the best is sogalbi, which is marinated beef ribs. There's a wonderful restaurant in our neighborhood where we go most Friday nights and splurge on sogalbi, and the family that runs the place now knows us. Partly we love it because the food is fantastic, and partly it's because the family is so nice to us. They always smile and help us out with new foods, and the father likes to show off his new English words with us — one night after I paid the bill, he gave me back 1,000 won (about 75 cents) and proudly announced, "Discount!"

So the deal with galbi is that you go in and sit on the floor at a low table with a grill in the middle. On cold nights, this is a very happy thing to have next to your legs. Then they bring a plate of raw meat, a pair of tongs and a pair of scissors (oh, and also a wet washcloth to clean your hands, which is just so eminently civilized for a meal that is largely finger-food). In a lot of galbi places, you're expected to do the cooking yourself, but at our favorite place they always do it for us, unrolling the long strips of meat from the bone, flipping them with the tongs and snipping them into bite-sized pieces. Once the meat is ready, you take a piece with your chopsticks, dip it in one of the sauces, put it on a leaf of lettuce or mint, add some other stuff — cucumber, kimchi, pickled or raw garlic, whatever — wrap it all up, and pop it in your mouth. It's fabulous. It's delicious and interesting, and you end up eating a lot of lettuce and raw vegetables, which means your meal is essentially grilled lean beef with salad. And after living on pizza and bulgogi for a few days, fresh vegetables can be pretty darn exciting.

The other best thing about our favorite galbi restaurant is the soup (which arrives at a different point in the meal each time, sometimes early on, sometimes practically as dessert). This was one thing where the no thank you portions paid off. At first I wasn't really into the soup. We don't know what the stock is exactly. It's reddish and full of garlic, and there's a crab leg or two floating around in there. The flavor isn't particularly fishy, and I could tell it was a well crafted soup, but I just wasn't into it. Jenny was the same way, but then one night she suddenly couldn't get enough of it, and the next week I was wolfing it down too. I don't know what happened exactly, but now that soup just rocks my world.

Another delightful if labor-intensive cuisine is that of the traditional tea house. Tea is one thing that East Asians really get: it's not just about a cup of something hot, but about relaxing and refreshing the mind, body and soul. Korea has a traditional tea ceremony similar to Japan's, but I'm talking about simply going to a tea-house and ordering tea. You can get various medicinal (and delicious) herbal teas that usually just come in a mug, but if you order green tea, there's a whole process. You get a container of dry tea leaves, a thermos of boiling water, a tea pot, a bowl with a pouring spout, and cups. First you take the tea leaves and dump them in the tea pot. Then you pour in the boiling water. Then you wait for the tea to brew. When it's ready, you pour it into the cooling bowl. Then you wait for it to cool. Then you pour it out into the cups. Then you drink. Then you do it all again. Oh, and if you ordered the powder tea, you do something with a bamboo whisk, but I haven't gone that extra step quite yet. It's surprisingly pleasant to sit quietly and focus on performing each step in the process. It brings you back to yourself and focuses you intently on the present moment, and all the noise and confusion of Seoul seems to fall away by the time you've got the tea in the cup.

But life is not all galbi and tea houses. We eat plenty of Western food — there are some pretty decent renditions of Italian food around, and we end up with pizza or burgers or fried chicken somewhat more often than I'd like to admit. And we cook at home pretty regularly too. We've been able to gather most of the things we need — spices from a shop near the embassies, good jam from a French megamart called Carrafour, salsa and olive oil from a different megastore called E-Mart, etc. For coffee we've been going to Starbuck's, though we're newly converted devotees of a modest little shop called Apgujong Coffee — but I'll tell you about that some other time. Black tea is mysteriously rare here, but we found a giant box of Lipton, a small tin of better stuff, and a packet of chai masala at a Pakistani shop in Itaewon. The one thing that I most miss and can't seem to find anywhere is black beans, not to mention refried beans, or even a steady supply of kidney beans. But we do okay. As for beverages, there's everything you could want: Coke, 7-Up-flavored soda that they call "cider," Fanta, gatorade, a wide variety of juices (even a kind of rice juice!), beer, whiskey, wine (7-Elevens, which are everywhere, carry good wine). Our life here is not one of deprivation, and I've been enjoying cooking and steadily expanding my repertoire.

Frankly, what we miss most is not American food but other foreign cuisines. I miss pad thai and Thai curries. I miss burritos. I miss Indian food. I very much want a plate of shogo fried momos (dumplings) from Tibet Shambala on 84th and Amsterdam, with a good dollop of that fantastic hot sauce they make. (For devotees of Tibetan food, by the way, you will be amused to know that there is a cartoon character here called Puppy Momo, which brings up that whole FIFA situation again.) There is Indian food to be had in Korea, and we've actually had a bit of it, but I miss it simply being there wherever you go. Likewise, you can get Japanese food like ramen and soba noodles, but it's difficult to know what you've ordered to go on them, and often it's chewy mystery bits in a gelatinous brown bean sauce, which is not really very compelling. There's also Japanese sushi and sashimi around, but Koreans have their own version of sushi, which is called kimbap, and which has ham and egg at the center of the roll instead of raw fish. Kimbap is apparently what you take on picnics, and we get kimbap for lunch whenever the kindergarten goes on a field trip, and we really don't feel the need to eat it more often than that. And you can find other cuisines if you're willing to travel and pay a lot, but it's just not ... well ... I mean it isn't ... Okay, I'll come right out and say it like the snob I am: It's not how they do it in New York!

New York has spoiled me. It's a place where you can conjure up some ethnicity in your head and then go eat its food; where you can sample Ukrainian, Georgian and Russian cuisine, Burmese, Thai and Cambodian food; where there are always at least three ethnic cuisines within easy walking distance of where you are (although, as my friend Lauren has several times pointed out, there is no Uighur food). You just don't have that variety here, where foreigners still make people (including me) turn their heads to look, even in Seoul. The third-largest city in the world (1. Mexico City, 2. Tokyo), Seoul is bigger than New York, but it doesn't feel that way, and in part that's because every neighborhood is a Korean neighborhood. For all its hugeness, Seoul lacks the cosmopolitanism of a truly international city. And like the cuisine, Seoul tends to repeat itself to the point of blandness. Outside the pockets of interest right at the heart of the city, one neighborhood looks very much like another, with pretty much nothing to distinguish them. Koreans know about the outside world, but they know it through their own emigrants who send back reports of life in Los Angeles and New York. The rest of the world has yet to come here and settle, and I don't expect Korea will be encouraging such openness anytime soon. So the next time you walk into a Thai, Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Vietnamese, French, German, Irish, Cajun, Colombian, Venezuelan, Japanese or Korean restaurant — hell, the next time you order the Swedish pancakes at IHOP — give a little thanks for the immigrant society you live in. It's what makes the cultural landscape so varied and keeps New Orleans from feeling exactly like Cleveland.