Tuesday, September 26, 2006

pat wynne would be jealous

I lied about the cow foot soup being dead...we've since had it for breakfast twice. However, as I am pretty certain it will never actually die, I'm going to stop keeping track of it on my blog.

Although I genuinely enjoy the Korean system of communal eating (we sit around the little table with our own bowls of rice and use our spoons and chopsticks to eat directly from the soup and side dishes in the middle of the table. People often fish around in the dishes with their chopsticks, getting just the right piece of kimchi or trying to minimize dangling sprouts. They also often pick up something in their own chopsticks and give it to someone else, either chopsticks-to-chopsticks or chopsticks-to-bowl/spoon--this happens to me all the time since everyone is convinced I'm incapable of feeding myself. At one big teacher dinner, the school nurse basically hand-fed me the entire meal of spenzy saber fish stew: neatly pulling out bones with her chopsticks and passing me each little bit of fish. I felt like a baby bird), I have to admit I'm a little alarmed that sick members of the family aren't excluded from the eating pool. Kibeom and my host dad are both sick, but it hasn't stopped them from dipping spoonfuls of broth from the soup or, in the case of my host dad, offering me pieces of meat from the chopsticks he had just removed from his germ-infested mouth.

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