Shabu Shabu

There's this awesome food I love to eat, and I've heard it's actually Japanese. Everybody calls it shabu shabu, apparently based on the sound the meat makes when it's cooking, but I don't know the food's official name.



You get a big pot with soup, green “sticks” (onions? shoots? I don't know what they are), mushrooms, potatoes, etc.

You also get some heavy noodles and a plate (or more) of thinly-cut raw beef. When the soup is hot enough, you boil the meat and eventually the noodles.



When you finish eating all of that, they take the pot and pour the soup into a bowl for you except for one spoonful of the broth. Then they cook rice in the pot and bring it back and you can eat it with the soup.

I've never had rice as good as this. My favorite parts are the rice and the meat, though the potatoes and the noodles are good, too.



Even though it involves sitting on the floor, I have to say that eating at this place after a long day's work just really hits the spot.

A Fruit New to My Vocabulary

The other day I tried a new Italian restaurant out here, and near the end of my meal the server came and set this down in front of me:



Were they chestnuts? I had no idea. I attempted to eat one, and the white, fleshy part tasted a lot like an oversized, tough grape to me, except it was both tarter than I wanted and sweeter than I had expected.

The next day I was grading tests from a unit about food, and in a list of fruits one student wrote chestnuts.

Normally I would have marked it wrong and said, “No, chestnuts are nuts!”

But this time I thought, Huh. If those things I had last night were chestnuts, there's certainly an aspect of them that is undeniably fruity...

So, were they chestnuts? Are chestnuts fruit? Maybe so.

And if not, I apologize for setting loose a student who now confidently thinks they are.

An Aside About the Sides

Every “Italian” restaurant I've been to in Korea always serves two side dishes with your meal:



Pickles (I guess those are Italian?) and kimchi (that's definitely not).

(Just between you and me, I don't particularly enjoy either of them.)

Edible Ooze

Does this look like something you should eat?



I knew what it was so I had no problem eating it, but I had to stop and take note of how much it resembled some sort of inedible, moldy thing that had gone very bad due to negligence on the part of whoever should have cleaned the fridge (oh wait...that's me).

It's actually just kiwi yogurt. There's probably kiwi yogurt in America, but the first place that I've eaten it is here.

No-Name Student

One of my kindergarten students (no, not THAT student) is always eager to point something out to me.

All the students have activity books, colored pencils, “big files” (big binder-like folders with plastic page protectors in them, for keeping pages that they’ve colored and whatnot), and various other items that they keep at school and have had since they began the year with us.  When they graduated from scrawling things in colored pencil to learning how to write with real pencils, however, their mothers bought them pencilcases, pencils and erasers, and labeled everything using their English names.

Some time ago, I was walking around, making sure everyone had everything they needed to complete whatever their activity had been, and this student held her pencil up to me and said, “Teacher!  No name!”

Sure enough, her pencil had no name.

A few days later, she showed me another pencil that was new.  “Teacher!  No name!”

From time to time she’ll get a new eraser or new pencils, and every time she’ll eagerly point out to me, “Teacher!  No name!”

Almost all the other items of all the other students do have names, however, so it’s not really that big an issue, since I know the ones without a name must belong to her.

It’s interesting to me, though.  I wonder if her mother doesn’t have time to write her name on everything, or if she just forgets or doesn’t think about it, or if my student actually likes not having her name on her school supplies so much that she requests it.

It seems almost to be a matter of pride for her to announce, “Teacher!  No name!” about a new supply she’s brought.

Maybe someday she’ll be like the Nittany Lions, who pride themselves on their blank helmets.

Lately in my mind I’ve come to think of her as “No-Name Student,” because she tells me that so often, but I hope she knows that I will always know her name.

Emergency Numbers in Korea

For quite some time now I’ve known the emergency number in Korea is 119, and I’d tucked it in my head as the Korean parallel to 911 in the U.S.  I’d never had occasion to test this knowledge, however, until today.

From time to time I hear yelling and thuds coming from somewhere above my apartment.  Up until now I’d assumed it could be anything, ranging from hearty furniture revamping to heated discussion.  I can’t make out the words, and I don’t know Korean anyway, so really, who am I to say?

But today the sound of a woman screaming and crying was indisputable, and regardless of the reason why, she was very clearly distraught.  The voice of a man yelling—more loudly and more intensely than I’ve heard before—was also indisputable.  The thudding I kept hearing could have been from furniture or someone stomping on the floor, but considering the other factors I didn’t think that was a safe assumption anymore.

A lot of thoughts ran through my head.  I don’t know if domestic violence is a concern in Korea.  I don’t know if it’s something the police would handle or if there is another number I should call.  I don’t know if I could communicate well anyway.  I don’t know how to explain that I don’t know if it’s violence or that I don’t know exactly where the noise is coming from.  I don’t know if just suspicion counts as an emergency enough to tie up 119.

But in the end, I realized that it would be a pretty big deal for me, morally, to suspect that something bad was going down and walk away.  It’s one thing if there’s no reason to suspect anything.  It’s another if I’m totally oblivious to begin with.  But if I really think that something like that’s going on, and I don’t do anything about it, is that really okay?  Should that really be a choice that I could live with?

So I called.

And I found out something useful!  119 is actually the number that you call when you need an ambulance sent out.  If you only want to reach the cops, the emergency number for police in South Korea is 112.

The police came and talked with me, and checked the apartment above mine, but as I suspect is often the case with these things, they didn’t find much going on because it had died down by the time they arrived.  (The yelling, screaming, and crying went on for what I think must have been a good 20 minutes before they came, though.)  They left and told me I should call again if I hear anything again.

I still don’t know what number you would call if you needed firefighters to come save you, but, fortunately, I haven’t needed to know that one yet.

It Really Sucks

Since I moved here I’ve been sick with a variety of minor illnesses, but almost all of them have been somewhere in the specialty of Ear/Nose/Throat.  The ENT doctor I go to here is fairly good at English, never rushes me or makes me feel like I’m a waste of time, and is an easy bike ride from my work, so when I need to see a doctor and my symptoms are the ENT variety, I head over to his practice.

Sometimes when I’ve gone with severe congestion, he’s shoved this strange stick up my nose.  It always felt like maybe he was sucking the snot out of my head, but then I thought, “Eh, that’s probably my imagination.  It’s probably just some camera tool, or some other weird device that helps him see inside.”

Today, though, I finally asked him what it was, and what he uses it to do inside my head.  So he showed me a diagram of a person’s head and pointed to the sinus cavities.  (He had already given me a nice little explanation when I went on Saturday detailing what sinuses were, what the different ones were called, and what a sinus infection is and does to other parts of you (such as your ears).)

He reiterated what he’d said about the sinus infection, that the mucus membrane around your sinus cavity excretes some sort of discharge when you’re sick, and he said that yes, he uses that strange tool as a suction device to “vacuum” (my word, not his) the excess discharge from my sinuses.  Apparently it’s better for them to get “ventilated” (his word, not mine) that way.

Since I’d been wondering for quite some time if the tool really sucked the snot out of my head or not, this was actually quite a satisfying revelation for me, and I left feeling good because my curiosity had been appeased.

I’m still toting all those bags of pills, though.  You win some, you lose some.