Hungry and lost on dark empty streets without a cent of local currency to our name was, not surprisingly, a familiar sensation. In our travels, my fellow editor and I have had our share of rough starts to new cities. Québec City it seemed, was no exception. And though I was confident we would eventually find what we were looking for (a working ATM), I was less confident that we could find that which had brought us Québec: the sense of boundless adventure that accompanies international travel. Instead, we found a city that wasn’t the “Europe of North America” that we’d expected, but a unique city unto itself.

Arriving in Quebec City days earlier we had sought something unique and unfamiliar, to capture the sense of discovery in a foreign land despite our relative proximity to home. What we found was something else, not the detachment of internationalism that we had expected, but a uniquely Québécois appeal. Leaving behind Quebec City’s francophonic charm for the modernism of Montreal then seemed bittersweet, having breached the apex of our northern venture, it seemed we were being drawn back toward the familiar, and everything ahead was literally, figuratively, and culturally closer to home.

Korean food is tricky. Rarely have we experienced such a fine line between the bliss of consumption and the discomfort of over-consumption. It’s largely under appreciated on the world food scene, but while Korean cuisine lacks the regional diversity of Chinese or the Michelin-star-count of French, what it does it does exceptionally well, and without pretense. Here we look at a cross section of the Korean diet: from fast food to traditional dishes, from spicy to more spicy, the food in Korea is uniquely its own, as minimally tainted by external East Asian or Western influence as any contributor to Korea’s cultural identity.