what I'm thinking now...

The silverware here is pretty awesome! Knives and forks are pretty hard to come by; Koreans eat with a pair of chopsticks and a long handled spoon...all of which are metal. That means that the chopsticks are much more slippery than the wooden ones I used before crossing the Pacific. Had I not had a spoon, my first meal here would have consisted of...water. That's how bad my chopsticking was, but since there was a spoon, I was able to 'enjoy' my first bibimbap experience. [Enjoy is in quotes because the raw egg in the middle of the bowl was rather intimidating...at the time I might have preferred Korea not use spoons in addition to chopsticks. Since then, bibimbap has become one of my favorite foods!]  

The typical Korean diet is slightly very different than the typical North American diet. Most foods leave the kitchen in bite size[ish] pieces, so there really is no need for a knife. There is one exception though: fish. It is served still very much in fish form, and chopsticks are used to de-bone/pick apart/eat the fish - they seem to work much better than a knife and fork would. 

When eating with a group, Korean style is family style. There is usually a main [meat] dish in the middle and then many different side dishes around the table. Then, chopsticks are great 'grabbers.' Rather than scooping up a whole lot of mushrooms, one can just grab a couple now and then a couple more later. Haejung 이모 also explained how Koreans want to figure out what people like to eat, not just ask. Somehow the family style and the bite size pieces and the chopsticks help accomplish this.    

[In case you are wondering: everybody double dips with their chopsticks...and spoons.]