A more authentic taste of Korean food

Tonight one of the girls I in processed with invited me to dinner. It was her, me, and a couple other people she knew. Well one of the guys has been here for almost a year and has this favorite seafood place that he took us to. Of course, I had no idea where we were going or what my eating options were going to be. I was secretly hoping for chicken or something. When we got there, we took our shoes off and sat on the floor with the table only about 2 feet above the floor. He then orders a meal for the 4 of us (only $10 for each of us) and says its fish bibimbap. OK, so I'm not much of a fish person (those of you who really know me know that I don't like most fish unless it doesn't taste like fish). So the first things brought out is a seafood porridge (pretty tasteless), a mussel soup, a big bowl of garlic cloves (pickled or something), a salad of some sort and some creamed corn and peas. The porridge, not my thing, the soup, I tried not to look at the mussels at the bottom, but it just didn't taste good, I didn't try the garlic or the salad, but the corn was good. Oh and there was cabbage kimchi. This kimchi though, was really spicy and pretty good. I was hestiant to try it after the stuff I tried with Ben, but I tried and I'm so glad. Then we get our bibimbap. Because of the risk of avian flu over here, what normally would have been topped with a raw egg was thankfully not topped with any egg at all. What I got was lettuce, rice, red bean paste, cucumbers, carrots and a bunch of white raw fish. From a person who barely eats cooked fish, I was pretty scared. But, I didn't come to Korea to just eat Americanized Korean food, so I tried a couple pieces (with plenty of red bean paste) and it didn't really have a lot of flavor and was kind of rubbery. Not a fan, but at least I tried it. I ate around the fish and the rest of the meal was pretty good. After wards you had a choice of coffee or juice. I went with juice which tasted and looked like a purple grape juice. All in all, I am still hungry, but at least I've gone out of my comfort zone and tried something new.