Kawfee Tawk
It's always the little things, isn't it?
On my first day at the office, I was told to parttake freely of the coffee and tea there. I didn't see a coffeepot, but assumed that I'd figure it all out later.
On Saturday, under the tutelage of Myun-soo, I figured it out. Coffee in Korean offices is offered in long, slim wrappers -- like a candy bar, but thinner. One side is instant coffee and the other is sugar; you open the packet on the coffee side and keep pouring until you have as much sugar as you want. Then you pour in the hot water.
In this office, you can take your pick of regular, decaf and hazelnut packets. I'm not really sure what you do if you want cream; at school, there are vending machines that offer the choice of coffee with cream, coffee with sugar, coffee with cream and sugar, and coffee black. You put your 200 won in (maybe 15 cents), and the machine pours out your coffee into a nice little paper vessel, measuring maybe1/3 cup. At break times, students line up at the coffee machines to get their fix.
I actually like the school vending machine coffee, in part because it's about the strongest coffee you can get here. I haven't tried Starbucks yet, but in my first week I had coffee in a cute little bakery called Migo in the basement of the Hyundai department store, and lemme tellya, if I didn't know before that coffee is different here, I sure got to know it then and there -- what came out of that nice silver coffeepot was a liquid so pale I thought Aya had ordered tea. I tasted it and was stunned to find coffee-flavored water upon mine taste buds.
I had dinner the other night with Maiko, a Japanese woman from my first Korean language class here (I subsequently moved into another level), and the waitress apologized that she didn't have drip coffee just then, she only had instant. "Oh, that's all right," we said, little knowing that we were about to be treated to flavored water. Upon tasting our extremely weak, watery coffee, Maiko and I launched into a lengthy discussion of the socio-psychological ramifications of weak coffee in Asian society... okay, well, no, we didn't talk about that (how could we, in our broken Korean?), but we did agree that Koreans sure make their coffee weak. (It's not an Asian thing; in Japan, coffee is stronger - Maiko, Aya and Uchidashi all confirmed that.) Is it the moderation thing? How come the alcohol's so strong, then?
Well, at least now I know why mom always made coffee so weak. And why I once made coffee for John and Naomi that was so weak that even John, who is not a coffee drinker and indeed puts about a quart of sugar into a cup when he does drink it, said, "Uh, I'm really sorry, babe, but this coffee tastes terrible," to gales of laughter from the Nome. See, it was all cultural, you big booby!

One more thing about drinkage: you know how in the States you have paper cups at the big Sparkletts/Arrowhead water dispensers (if these machines have a name, please tell me; otherwise I'll assume that I'm not forgetting my English whilst learning Korean very slowly)? So here, I couldn't figure out how people drink from these dispensers, until I saw someone take a little flat envelope from a dispenser at the Grand Mart (a huge department store near my house), open it up on one side, fill it up, drink, and dispose of the envelope in the wastebasket.
Ohhhhhh!!!!
They really do look like little business card-size envelopes, and yes, they do hold water just fine, thank you. L'chaim.