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계정을 잊어버리셨나요?

by 컬쳐커넥터 김도희 Nov 11. 2017

티니카의 시련:수돗물과 아메리카노가 뭐길래(Eng)

티니카 당연한 것과 당연하지 않은 것에 익숙해지다

1. Drinking tap water in Seoul

Tap water in Sweden tastes great!

In order to survive, we need to drink water. Humans, animals, plants are all the same. Without water there is no life. Even such a basic thing as drinking water can be quite different depending on where you live. When you enter my home town you drive by a huge sign welcoming you, as well as letting you know about the activities or events that are happening in the town. The sign also proudly declares that our town has the “Most delicious tap water in northern Sweden”. I don’t mean to brag, but the tap water is freaking delicious! The water doesn’t come from a water treatment plant but instead it comes from the ground, where the water has naturally been cleaned by passing through layers of sand and gravel, and therefore there is no need to add chloride to clean the water. The water does not taste like it has been through any process at all, whereas bigger cities with less access to groundwater may get water from lakes, and in doing so they have to clean the water using a bit more force. As a result their water may taste like chloride.

Sorry, evian

There is nothing strange about drinking the tap water in Sweden, on the contrary it could easily be seen as a huge waste buying bottled water (sorry Evian, Sweden is probably one of your worst markets). It happens that people buy carbonated water, often instead of buying soda packed with sugar and artificial colour. The carbonated water comes in a huge variety of flavours, but in my opinion - tap water tastes better!

Travelling to other countries sometimes I have had to buy bottled water simply because e tap water wasn’t clean enough to drink. Showering, brushing teeth, washing hands was fine but not drinking. Before I went to Korea I did a quick research and found out that the tap water was clean and drinkable. Now, the water being clean enough to drink does not mean that Korean people actually drink the tap water. I had gone a good few weeks before this came up in a conversation with a Korean friend. They were shocked to hear that I had drunk the tap water. “You drink the tap water?? Do you drink right out of the shower too???”

My friends' horrible mental picture about me

Of course I had only been drinking from my kitchen tap, but seeing their face I freaked out! 'Was the water not actually clean? Had I been slowly poisoning myself over the past few weeks?' I admit, the water had not been delicious, but drinking the tap water was such a natural thing for me I had never questioned it. My friend admitted that, yes, the water is fine to drink but they urged me to buy a few big bottles of water and store it in my fridge. Somehow the image of me drinking the tap water just seemed too… sad? Off putting? Or simply wrong? I bought water and it tasted way better than the water coming out of my tap so I abandoned the tap water for the rest of my stay in Korea.

2. AmericanonononoNo! YesYesYes!

Next to water, there is one more beverage that the average Swede cannot live without; coffee. The Telegraph mapped the world’s biggest coffee drinkers, and Sweden came out as number six, the average Swede going through an impressive 8,2 kg coffee a year. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/maps-and-graphics/countries-that-drink-the-most-coffee/)

<노르웨이와 핀란드 사이가 스웨덴이다>

If you are a coffee drinker, you might know what happens when you don’t get that much needed daily dose of caffeine. You feel tired, cranky, perhaps a headache? I have been drinking coffee for many years (I don’t know exactly when it became part of my daily routine) and coming to Korea i quickly noticed that there are cafes everywhere. Perfect! I wouldn’t have to go through those horrible withdrawals.

Bryggkaffee / https://www.nestleprofessional-nordic.com

In Sweden, it is very normal to drink your coffee black and strong. People will tell you that “rather the coffee be too strong than too bland”. Indeed, serving bland coffee is a big nono in Sweden. Though we love going to cafes with our friends as much as any other person would, it is perhaps more common to invite your friends over to your home for coffee and fika. When I have friends over I cannot offer them a latte or a cappuccino because I, like most people, don’t have an espresso machine. Instead we will have bryggkaffe (드립커피). This is what “normal coffee” means to me.

I ordered an americano when I had just arrived to Korea, because it looked a lot like the coffee I was used to at home. I expected a rich coffee flavour but instead I was met with bland, brown water. It may sound ridiculous, but it tasted so bad I could not finish drinking it. I did not know americano meant espresso and added hot water, giving it a very mild coffee flavour. After the initial shock, and after having come to terms with the fact that strong, rich coffee was something I just would not find in Korea, i opened my eyes to the various kinds of coffee that I could find, mainly iced coffee. It was summer when I arrived in Korea, and thus the perfect season for iced coffee (drinking hot beverages during Korean summer is basically suicide). Ice latte became the replacement for my Swedish bryggkaffe. Hot or ice - you can’t really go wrong with a latte.

The longer I lived in Korea, especially during my year and a half of language studies, I started to notice that the majority of Koreans I saw tended to drink americano, especially iced. I remembered my first encounter with a hot americano and it made me very curious as to why everyone ordered americano. Was it because of the price (so cheap!!!990원, 1000원, 1500원) or was it because drinking americano is kind of trendy (Koreans are very sensitive to trends). I was intrigued. In fact, my Japanese friend Ayako and I were so intrigued that we actually committed to only ordering ice americano during the spring of 2016. “한국사람처럼 살아봐야겠어~” Neither one of us liked it, but we figured that if we drank it enough times we would eventually get used to the taste. As a bonus we would save money by not ordering ice latte. When it wasn’t delicious we acknowledged that it at least was very refreshing. “시원하다!!!(Not 맛있다!)” we would exclaim. It actually worked, and by summer I didn’t mind an ice americano at all. For us, it meant we had adapted a little bit more to Korean society.

If anyone from Korea has visited Sweden they will have found out, perhaps to their great dismay, that there are no americanos in Swedish cafes. No hot americanos, no iced ones either. Some cafes offer iced lattes, but definitely not all cafes do. As much as I love the simple bryggkaffe that I can easily make at home, now and then I find myself wishing there was a good Korean cafe nearby where I could go to enjoy a refreshing iced coffee. Maybe if enough Swedes travel to Korea they will realise that there are more ways to serve coffee, and they will start to demand more Korean style coffee in Sweden. Until then, I am strongly considering buying an espresso machine...