Classes

On Friday, I was reading a passage from a book to help the kids figure out an answer, and one of the girls said I didn't have any intonation. I thought that was quite funny coming from a seven year old ESL kid. I apologized and said that I always speak in a monotone. What she really wanted was for me to change my voice when I switched from the narrator to spoken words, but the only personal speaking out loud in the story at that time was the narrator herself, so what was I supposed to do?

Today I started my new schedule. It was grueling. I had seven classes. The first four were completely back to back, then I had a twenty minute break, during which time I scarfed a cup o' noodle. I was almost faint from having gone five hours without food and expending all that energy trying to fill up those little cups of knowledge. After my fifth class I had a fifty minute supper break, then two classes back to back from 7 to 9. Now I have about three hours of homework to correct. At least the kids don't suck.

Someone Else's Blog

I found this blog while trying to look for the local Science Channel's website, and there are some good articles in it. I found the entry on December 7 particularly interesting slash funny. Czech it out:

http://blogs.discovery.com/good_idea/2007/12/index.html

Chopsticks

I wasn't very good at using chopsticks when I got here. I could get the food into my mouth, but not very skillfully. I thought that the chopsticks here would probably be made out of acryclic or porcelain or something, since disposable wooden chopsticks didn't seem like a good idea for everyday use. I was wrong, though. The chopsticks here are metal, and flat. That made it really hard for me to get used to them. They kept slipping, and I kept crossing them instead of grabbing the food. And as I found out the first night I was here, you're supposed to hold the chopsticks towards the top, not in the middle, where I always held them. I notice that small children hold them almost at the bottom, so I'm thinking your hand position could be a reliable indicator of your skill at using them.

I've gotten a lot more practice since I've been here, so now I'm pretty good at chopsticking. I'm developing a chopsticks callous on my middle finger, actually. And now that I'm correcting papers and writing out my lessons every day, my writer's callous has returned on my ring finger. Oh, boy.

Korean Food Part Two

The last entry is not to say, of course, that I don't like Korean food. There's a lot of stuff I like.





Had I written this a couple days ago, I would have said that every Korean food item presented to me in pattie form was great. This was until yesterday, when one of the side dishes at work was some sort of deep fried oyster pattie. The first time I ever had oysters was on Thanksgiving, when they were added to the stuffing. That was okay. But the two times I've eaten oysters since I've been here... Eating oysters makes me feel deeply violated.





But oysters aside, so far I like everything that comes in a pattie around here. This includes meat patties, fish patties, egg patties with vegetables, deep fried potato patties, and a number of patties I couldn't identify or can't remember.





Another Korean food I like is called mando. It's kind of like Korean raviolo. Circular pasta is overstuffed with vegetables and/or meat and folded over. I got a huge bag of it when I first moved in a month ago, and I'm still working on it. I finally got myself a steaming tray, so I can cook them properly. I've been boiling them. I don't recommend it. Wet.





Bulgogi is also good. It's just seasoned (with sesame, soy sauce, garlic, etc.), shredded meat. It means "fire meat." Wikipedia says over a quarter of foreigners in 2007 claimed it as their favorite Korean food. I might agree.





I've been greatly confused about the vegetables here. They seem to use a lot of leafy greens, but not spinach, and sprouts, which I know nothing about anyway. A popular sprout is pictured below. I don't know what it's called, but the end looks like a corn kernal, and the sprouty part looks like a noodle. These are okay. Sprouts, whatever.





A popular Korean food is pibimbap (aka bibimbap), rice mixed with vegetables. "Bap" means "rice," and I don't know what "pibim" means, but it doesn't mean "vegetable." It wasn't in my dictionary. The vegetables include the sprouts above, carrots, some leafy greens that I can't identify, and variable others. Scrembled eggs are also usually included in strips. It's served on a plate all separated, with a container of that stupid stupid red pepper sauce, and you're supposed to mix it all together, adding as much sauce as you feel right about. I actually tend to like it without the sauce. The natural flavor of it all works well. I think it's the eggs that really bring it all together.

Korean barbecue is great, as we all know. A couple times I've gone with Heather and her family to this barbecue joint by her apartment complex. As with all barbecue joints, there is a large grill in the middle of the table, and you cook your own meat. The servers bring a bunch of slabs of pork (I'm not sure if this places specializes in pork, or if that's just what the fam prefers), along with the perfunctory side dishes. This includes kimchi, zuchini, and squash, which are also cooked on the grill, plus sauces, cucumbers in vinegar, shredded lettuce with some sort of strawberry yogurt topping, and these large translucent leaves in water. Koreans like to take leaves of various sorts and wrap them around things. It's cool.

It occurs to me that after I've actually learned all the names for these foods, I'll look back at my descriptions and think myself silly.