Starbongs
The popularity of Starbucks in Korea has certainly left its mark in my home city of Yongin, inspiring the knock-off Starbongs. Despite the seemingly suggestive name, this place isn’t a Korean head shop, though when I visited there with some friends last night, I did notice a suspicious-looking door near the back. My suspicions rose when I noticed that the store directly beneath it was named Bong Ganji... But no, instead, Starbongs is just another of the hundreds of coffee shops littering the Korean peninsula that sell exorbitantly priced coffee and tea. Starbongs might be a copy cat, but it still charges upwards of $5 for coffee and $4 for tea. (Order the green tea and be dazzled by the vivid fluorescent color shining from your glass pot: truly green!)
After experiencing the tea drinking mania of the Chinese, I was pretty surprised to land in a Korea so incredibly obsessed with coffee. Forget thousands of years of Chinese influence on this small peninsula; bring in a bunch of foreign soldiers for 56 years and watch how a little Starbucks will change the populace. (Or maybe a lot of Starbucks considering there are 168 in a country only slightly larger than the state of Indiana.)
Though many of the coffee shops seem to know how to do it right, the everyday Korean home is still lacking that indispensable western appliance: the coffeemaker. While many in the States have moved beyond the standard Mr. Coffee to the high end espresso machine, the coffee bean suckers of Korea prefer using instant packets: powdered coffee, powdered creamer and more sugar than coffee and creamer combined. Needless to say, I drink tea in Korea. Green, green tea.
it's a another copy of these undrunkable coffee from starbuck.
and it cost so expensive !
but starbuck is not sheap too and it s difficult to understand why they are
this brand everywhere in the world.
my korean friends when they came to europe they can't drink our short
expresso, because they drunk sox juice everyday !!
have fun