Day 59 -- Wildly Inappropriate Students, Eels, and Dog Soup

The students have gotten much more comfortable with me, leading to some cute situations and some not-so-cute situations. Example of a Cute Situation: three of my junior boys (including Swastika Boy*) giving me a little stuffed rabbit as a for-no-reason present out of the blue yesterday. But with the sweet comes the "wtf". Examples of Not-So-Cute WTF How Do I Respond To This Situations: my TOEFL boys letting me in on the reason why they always talk about hitting the DDR, TOEFL Student Maybe Cousin** unbuttoning his unform shirt to show his "sick pack" and rub a piece of paper on his chest (?), and TOEFL Wise Guy showing the split in his uniform pants from him playing soccer earlier that day.


So there's the weird classroom situations that happened to me. Now let's talk about the weird food I ate this week.

Seriously, how gross does this look? PRETTY GROSS.

Yesterday, I had another school dinner meeting with all the teachers, this time to welcome the new vice principal. On the menu: Jang-eoh. As we walked into the restaurant, I got a good feeling because we would be sitting in chairs for this meal instead of on the floor--score! But then we passed by large tanks. Oh noooo. That meant seafood. I'm not a huge fan of fish, but it turns out that's okay because we didn't eat fish. We ate eel. HINT: there is no way to make eel sound or look appetizing. NO WAY. ZERO METHODS. The picture is literally what I ate. That is what was swimming around in the tanks and then swimming around in my stomach acid. Later it was accompanied by the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I made myself as a small "Good Job on Choking Down That Eel Tonight For The Sake Of School-Jeong, Lindsay" reward.

Jang-eoh (Eel): C+

Today, I went out with the principal, my coteacher, and another random teacher to eat dog for lunch. When in Korea, right? I was concerned that I would have to look at a bunch of dogs in cages as I walked in to the restaurant, but luckily I didn't have to see the live-version of what was in my soup. The meal itself was pretty anticlimatic. The soup was really spicy and I found the dog meat to taste mostly like tough, low-quality beef. The pieces were small though and the soup flavors pretty much overwhelmed the taste, so I ate it all without complaint.

Dog Soup: B-

Needless to say, when I go to Seoul this weekend to visit my friend from college, I will be gorging myself on less adventurous foods, such as tacos and pasta. yeeesssss

*Swastika Boy is actually Buddha Boy. What I thought was a swastika on his wrist is actually a symbol from Buddhism. In my defense, that symbol is like the mirror image of the swastika.

**TOEFL Student Maybe Cousin is, in fact, a cousin. At least, my assumption grows stronger because his family name is the same as my host family and his name (Sae Kyoon) is so close to my host brother's (Sae Yeob). So I guess by "in fact" I actually mean "slightly stronger maybe".