hae jang guk [hangover soup]

where to even begin today. i woke up around 2am after a damn mosquito bite my foot. when i went down stairs to put some aloe on it i look out the window and all i saw was white. the entire city was covered in thick fog. it was actually quite beautiful to view at this early hour. kind of reminded me of the movie the fog. all i need was some mysterous monster to start wrecking havic on the city.

i got up again around 7am and went out to call my parents. the fog had thinned out since the early morning. chatted with my folks for a bit which was nice. its also nice to talk to people because it makes you feel like your not so far away.

at school they told me i had to go shopping for halloween stuff with christine and jane. this was going to fun. 45 minutes later the plans were cancelled and i was in the kindergarten class teaching sara and kelly. after class jk brought in the mail. how excited was i to see three pieces of mail for me. YEAH! one was from my mom which included the newspaper clipping about my friends death. it was pretty sad to read. especially when i found out that she was a mother of two. it seems that she died from a head injury when her and the girl she was with jumped out of the trunk while the car was moving. its so sad. i also got mail from my sister which include pictures of paige and davis, my niece and nephew. it was so great seeing the pictures. i can't believe how big they are getting. i'm really going to miss seeing them this year. i decided to hang the pictures of them in my classroom. that makes me happy. the final package was from lisa jann who sent me a jem tshirt. how great is that. i love the shirt and can't wait to wear it around korea. thank you lisa. you made my day.

sammy heard about some soup place that she wanted to go to so her, horace, and i went. the resturant serves two things: soup and bib bam bop. sammy told us it was some kind of meat soup. we asked want kind and all she said was meat from the inside. ok. she didn't even give a choice and before i knew it this soup was infront of us. horaoce was poking around the soup when he pulled out some glucinous subtance. it kind of looked like purple tofu. sammy said that was the meat. horace thought it might be liver. my favorite. sammy told us that this is called hangover soup and is very poplular. seeing that i'm living by the philosphy of when in korea… i started to eat the soup. i made sure that ever time i ate this mysterious beef thing that it was surrounded by tons of rice. i couldn't even imagine what it was but i was so hungry. we finished lunch and we never found what what this "meat" was.

after lunch we headed to the stationary store because horace and sammy needed to buy a gift for their student who just finished her first workbook. before hitting the store we saw a bunch of art on the sidewalk so we took a look at it. it was all children art from the art hagwon. some of the stuff was very cool. i asked sammy to see if it was available for sale but it wasn't. the lady was out promoting the school. too bad. i really wanted to but a couple of pieces.

once we were back at school we asked julie the new teacher what hae jang guk [hangover soup] was. she laughed and then said blood. i thought i was going to barf right there. even now as i'm typing it makes me sick to think i just ate blood soup. i really wanted to gag. i guess it sort of like blood pudding, which for 34 years i managed to avoid and now i just ate a whole sick load of blood tofu like crap. all horace and i could do was laugh. i ate a pear, drank a soda, and had a chocolate cake thing but i could just feel the blood soup sitting in my stomach. i've never felt so ill.

during class with sally she got up and walked over to the corkboard where i had the pictures of paige and davis and asked me who they were. i explained that they were my sisters children. she said oh. she talked me out of giving her a spelling test on monday but i still gave her homework. my orange b class which now has 6 students was pretty uneventful. i tried to explain to them about using a dictionary. not sure if it took but we'll see since i gave them words to look up. my orange a class with the three boys was crazy. those boys are so full of hell. i had to yell at them three times. while we were reading the one with the rat tail kept flipping his eyeslids. i tried not to laugh but it was pretty funny. after that class i had to teach laura and anna who had missed three days. basically i crammed three days of work into 40 minutes. they're pretty bright so it wasn't a problem. jk, our dictors was acting as the korean teacher today. i'm sure that class was interesting. when it was time to go i went back into my class where laura and anna had one more class with jk and they asked me who the pictures were of. i told them that they were my niece and nephew. then they asked if i had any babies. i said no and they giggled along with jk. i haven't quite figured out the korean humor yet. go figure.

tonight was tae kwon do. he made us do handstands which i just couldn't do. towards the end of the class he has a sparring with the other students. that was fun. the funniest was when horace and i had to spar. i'm sure we looked like fools. tb, the tall boy, kept doing all these back kicks which i barely blocked each time. it was really fun. i'm so glad we are taking classes.

after class horace and i went to manhatten for some beers. it was pretty dead but that didn't stop the staff from putting on a floor show. they juggled bottles, poured some kind of drink which they set on fire then passed out some free coctails. i got something that tasted like blue kool aid. i have no idea what was in it but it was good.

tomorrow we have korean lessons and on sunday we are going to try ot make it to the mediation class. it should be a good weekend. we also discovered these korean character called dalki. dalki is a girl, sort of a rude strawberry shortcake and she has a group of friends. one the characters dongchimee had a turd on his head and does dung art. how great is that. a dalki theme park just opened up here so you know we are going there. i can't wait. check them out at www.dalki.com. they rock. all right time for my bed time. until next time. thanks for stopping by, stay tuned for more adventures in ketv…