I want.... that

Garnish or meal? We weren't sure...

Our first meal in Korea was an experience. We were both starving after traveling for nearly 24 hours and only having airline food in our stomachs. We walked down the street about a half block from our apartment and decided to try the first restaurant that we thought looked promising. We figured we could mosey in, take a peak at the menu and get an idea of what they serve. Well, as we entered the restaurant this elderly Korean lady eagerly waved us to come in and gestured us towards an open table, so we decided to go for it. We opened the menu and were greeted with all Korean text and few pictures... The lady came over with some tea and we asked for an English menu. She didn't speak any English, nor had an English menu. She grabbed the menu and started asking everyone in the restaurant if they could help us, or so we gathered that's what was going on. Turned out nobody spoke English. But then, one gentleman came over and opened the menu with us, he tried to explain it to us but everything we heard was Korean. We then resorted to pointing to 1 of the three tiny images we saw at the bottom of the menu. He nodded his head a few times and then went to deliver the message to the lady. So far we had little idea of what we were doing but agreed that the restaurant was being very helpful for us. A minute later three tiny dishes were delivered to our table. We weren't sure if it was what we ordered or if it was a garnish. After looking around at other tables and seeing many other people having identical dishes we decided that our main dish was yet to come. And so it did. The lady came out with two large bowls of pasta and an even larger bowl of a black sauce with shrimp, octapus pieces, onions and other things in it. She poured a bunch over Amanda's noodles and then mine and proceeded mix it in to our noodles for us. She spent a good couple minute ensuring we had a good mixture of noodle and black sauce stuff. She also brought out a fork and spoon for us so we didn't have to use the chopsticks. She showed us that we could stick the fork in and spin it around in order to eat. All this was a very nice gesture of assistance. We were really impressed, even though we still had no idea what exactly it was we were about to eat. The highlight of our meal was when after a couple minutes of eating, the lady came back to our table with a pare of scissors and went right into Amanda's bowl and started cutting her food with the scissors. Either she just assumed we never ate pasta noodles before, or our form was so atrocious she felt the need to jump in with scissors. We said no no, that's ok! And she smiled and left. All in all the food was good and filling, we couldn't finish all of it because we got quite full, and we didn't do much with the small plates of garnishes. After going to the counter to pay we attempted to say "Thanks for the delicious meal from our Korea book, but after a couple attempts resorted to just pointing to the Korean text in the book for the lady to see. That worked pretty good and we were on our way.