My Spaghetti Has a Secret Ingredient

Or, well, at least that's my suspicion.

I washed the pot and lid before I used them, then let them dry for a while, then dried them off myself with tissues. Then I boiled water and dumped in my spaghetti sticks.

A while later I glanced at the pot and was immediately alarmed - there were suds piling up under the lid!

Maybe this is natural, but maybe I didn't rinse my cookware thoroughly enough or didn't let it sit to air dry long enough. My noodles felt slick and oily without any oil, and I'll admit I was a little wary about eating them.

But I had some with some import sauce and they tasted fine to me. I guess time will tell, though, if I've ingested any lethal doses of dishwashing detergent...heh?

More Culinary Exploits

Maybe not as impressive as the omelet, but awfully delicious:



Grilled cheese and cereal with sliced banana. Yum!

I Must Be a Real Grown-Up Now

...'cause I made myself a perfect omelet, and my breakfast includes a healthy apple that no one told me I should eat!



Ladies and gentlemen, I have arrived.

Radioactive Rain: 1. Umbrella: 0.

Today the rain was coming hard again, so I agreed to take a cab with my coworker instead of cycling to school. It had been called for us already, so we were waiting by the door of our apartment building, eager to be neither wet nor late.

As soon as it pulled up, I pointed my umbrella out the door and pressed the button to unfurl it.

The head of my umbrella shot into the rain, unopened, and hit the ground outside. It had popped straight off of the umbrella shaft.

We weren't about to miss our taxi or be late for work, so I dashed into the rain and picked it up. I managed to open it and hold it like an upside-down flower over my head, but once inside the cab I had a revelation with some horror: normally to close my umbrella I'd just pull it down the shaft. But now...there was nothing but the flimsy flap.

Realizing I was letting rain into our taxi, and not immediately recognizing any better options, I yanked it in and crushed it with my arms.

Needless to say, the ride to work was interesting, and not entirely lacking in comic relief for our taxi driver.

When we arrived, I held my failing flower like a hat over my head again, but it was clearly useless. One of the desk teachers immediately cried out, “Teacher!” and a whole slew of other things (but in Korean) upon seeing me, apparently astounded by my hilarious predicament. Observing the futility of my attempts to beat my bad umbrella down, she took it from me and threw it on the floor, then began slamming her foot down on it until she had stomped it into submission.

Then, just as suddenly, she took both it and the shaft that I'd been holding and vanished into a back room with them.

I wasn't sure if they were coming back, and decided not to get as bent out of shape about it as my umbrella had just been.

Later, I found out from my coworker that she had caught a glimpse of it stuffed into a trash bag.

I didn't mourn for long. In fact, I bought a replacement for it tonight. We'll see how long the new one can survive...

Steamin' Noodles (or: Mop This Up!)

My kindergarten class is rarely capable of coloring their pictures nicely in the morning before class without dashing into the teachers' room to harass me with their drama. Usually the urgent matter at hand is spawned by one or more children's obsessive need to rat out their fellow classmates. As such, usually their very important, pressing complaints go something like this:

Student: “Teacher!”
Me: “Go finish coloring.”
Student: “Teacher! [Name of most-likely-innocent rattee] is Korean!”

Why, yes...aren't they all?

Me: “Go finish coloring.”
Student: “Teacher! [Rattee] is 똥!”

똥 (ddong) is most frequently translated into English by my Korean co-teachers as “dung,” which sounds almost the same, so I usually remember it means poop.

Usually my students are not calling someone dung, but are informing me that someone has said this word out loud. (As I'm sure many of you know, the topic of poop has been an almost infinite source of humor among children for generations, no matter where you go.)

So today when my students rushed into the teachers' lounge with that pained look of urgency and dire importance on their faces, I just assumed it was because someone, somewhere, dredged up the age-old humor trump card in Korean, the infamous word 똥.

Little did I know.

When I went in, there was a heap of oozing, glistening worms on the floor. Or at least that's what it looked like to me.

In fact, it was a pile of undigested ramen, freshly liberated from my student's gastric acids.

As if this weren't already gross enough, there was no easy recourse for us teachers. We had no kitty litter. No handy contraption to suck it up so that we wouldn't have to. Alas, all we had were what all mouths were wiped and all messes cleaned with: our trusty box of Kleenex tissues.

So, what did we do? We heaped a huge percentage of the box's contents on the kinderspew and picked it up by hand - no gloves - and dumped it in the nearby trash.

I have to say that I'm relieved I don't have children of my own heaving in my living room just yet. But by that time I trust I'll have made sure to have an ample stock of kitty litter saved.

Cucumbers on Subs

The Subway in Gunsan finally reopened. I loved going there when I first came but then it closed indefinitely, rumors hinting that the owner had temporarily shut it down so he could battle cancer. I think I first saw its doors were shut in March or maybe early April.

In a country where salads aren't particularly prevalent, and where much of your vegetable intake is either pickled or from the same stack of leaves you eat your pork and beef with, a place with fresh, crisp lettuce of the variety I'm used to brings quite a refreshing taste to the table.

As I've mentioned on this blog before, I'm a notoriously picky eater, and I'll admit that the vegetable deficiencies in my diet are 90% my fault alone. But since coming to Korea, I've discovered I like cucumber, which I had never really been able to eat successfully back home. Whatever the cause of my new tastes, I'm thoroughly enjoying them. Tonight I ordered cucumber on my honey-oatbread sub, and did it ever hit the spot. I plan on crunching down fresh cucumbers more often from now on.

The Jinpo Maritime Theme Park

Today I went to the Inner Harbor of my “hometown” in Korea, Gunsan. There was an interesting park there with military vehicles on display.

At the entrance there was a long line of flags.



Between the UN flag and the South Korean flag there was this plaque. I don't know what it says except for the last line.



I got to climb up on and in some of these fascinating things:





There was a cool decommissioned Coast Guard ship I got to climb all over and explore.







It had a pretty heavy-duty gun on board. I spun it all around and moved it up and down, trying to catch things in its crosshairs.



The ship also afforded a great view of the whole park itself.









From the top I could see the lush green field that had grown over the three sets of - apparently extinct - traintracks I'd crossed coming in.



And the military lamp post...



They closed while I was there, so I didn't get to explore the other cool things on display. But the whole park was free, and not too far by bike, so I think it's safe to assume that eventually I will go back and finish what I started.