A Crash Course in Korean Culture

Wow.
What a week.
Tomorrow i've officially been in Korea for a whole week. I cannot believe that everything has gone by so quickly!! I cannot believe how absolutely amazing it is here, the people are ridiculously nice, even if they insist on stroking my hair on the bus...in the streets...in the super market...at school. I suppose someday ill get used to being a pet! There are soo many cool things that the people do here that I would never in a million years have imagined doing! For instance, iced soup. Sounds weird right? But it's absolutely amazing! There is some sort of broth, with buckwheat noodles, cucumbers and carrots, chunks of ice, and spicy chili paste. You mix it all up and eat it! Another one of the more interesting foods is called pot bean sou (no, i'm not missing the "P") the base is ice, than fruit (which includes tomato because *obviously* tomato is a fruit), a small dollop of ice cream and whipped cream, not to mention the beans interspersed throughout the whole thing. You mix it all up and devour! Delicious...in a very new way.

My first couple days of school have been amazing, the kids are really interested in learning about me so the billion photos of my family and friends that I brought coupled with the maps of america and utah have been really exciting and wonderful topics have sprung from them. I have been playing trashcan basketball with them, where the punishment for missing is unscrambling simple english sentences. I'm fairly certain they like this. It has been a fabulous opportunity for me to break down some of the newness barriers that are inevitable.

My co-teacher Eunyeoung (OOH-N-YONG) has been so helpful as I attempt to establish myself here that I wanted to bring her a present today, I asked another foreign teacher who has been here a year what a good gift would be, her response? Fruit. So I brought nectarines today!! They call them jaduu (JAH-DOO) and you pop the whole thing into your mouth (thankfully they are little) and then scrape all the fruit off the pit. Once that is done you spit the pit out. What a funny thing! It's moments like these that make my stay here amazing. Just like yesterday we were eating soup, always spicy with tofu and cucumbers and there was a two half a crabs in there, I asked how you eat it and the response was...exciting for me. You pick up the crab where the legs and the body meet, with your chopsticks, and than you squeeze the meat out with your teeth. How difficult! Especially considering my chopstick skills are dubious to begin with. Well at least my co-workers thought I was cute.

Ah! Class, more later!
Anyong! (AWN-YOUNG)