Recent Adventures

Live Octopus

Last night I went out for a farewell dinner with the language teachers from the girls school. The menu: sushi and live octopus. Koreans are well known for their appetite for live octopus. The stuff we had last night was cut up in small pieces (though they still moved) but many people eat whole baby octopus. There are consequences though: many people die every year from eating whole, live octopus because the octopus will unravel on it's way down, crawl it's way back up and bock air passage to your lungs. It's the one dish that will always fight back!

Anyhow, I gave it a try for the first time. It tasted like snot with the consistency of Ju-Ju Bees. Ick. Here's a video of my co-teacher Mrs. Shin trying live octopus for the first time too.



First Birthday

A couple weeks ago, Jeremy and I were invited to his co-worker's son's first birthday party (I mistakenly said earlier that it was the 100 day birthday--oops!). The first birthday is a big deal in Korea and this family, like so many others, rented a room at one of the numerous wedding halls in Korea. The party was held downstairs along with about 5 other first birthday parties in other rented rooms on the same floor. Each party shared food at a centrally located buffet 9which had GREAT food by the way!). The party was a little uneventful for the most part. You came in, ate, greeted the hosts, gave them your gifts, looked at baby pictures, and listened to the parents give a speech. The one big event--the part everyone goes for--is the futures game. In this game four items are placed before the child, each one representing a career, and the one the child picks up first is supposed to determine who/what he/she will be. The items are string to represent long life, a pencil to represent scholarly aptitude, a stethoscope to represent science, and money to represent wealth (obviously). All guests placed bets on what the child would choose before the ceremony began by placing their raffle ticket in a cup marked by each item. I chose the pencil and horray! The kid is going to be a scholar! The hosts later drew numbers from each cup and gave away prizes (which I didn't get any). It was pretty cool but the poor kid was really cranky because they kept changing his clothes throughout the party. One interesting side note: no cake was served. Strange. Birthdays just don't seem like birthdays without cake. There was one on the front table but no one ate it. I guess it was for show... Overall, I had a great time experiencing yet another fascinating aspect of Korean culture and meeting J's friends and co-workers for the first time. Good fun!

Taxi!

Last weekend Jeremy and I went out with some friends in Seoul for dinner and drinks to celebrate my recent acceptance to UQ. We all caught and shared a cab later back to Incheon and had what I'm sure will forever be my most memorable taxi ride. The first problem: it was raining like nuts and our driver was driving like nuts! With lots of standing water on the freeway, he was cruising at 150 km/h or 93.5 mi/h. Um, yeah. A little scary. The second problem: our driver didn't have GPS which is not a good sign in Korea (Koreans are terrible with directions and seem to need a GPS locator to find the bathroom in their own house!). We took the wrong exit in Incheon and had to stop another taxi driver to ask for directions. The third problem: on our way to Jeremy's house we got stuck in the Incheon red light district where our taxi driver was more than distracted--he was a few seconds short of picking up a prostitute! He slowed down to a near stop, oohing and ahhing at the scantily clad women walking up and down their brothel fronts. He even shouted hello to some of them! All of us were cracking up inside! I'm pretty sure he had never seen a hooker before and like most Koreans probably assumed this wasn't a problem in Korea. The fourth problem: we passed a group of gang members at one intersection and our driver was equally fascinated with them as he was with the hookers. This time he really did stop to say hello (the weird part was that despite his inability to communicate in English, he said this in English and not Korean). I was a little nervous--I remember running into some bad crowds in the U District a couple times... They paid us no heed though. The fifth problem: once he dropped off Jeremy and I, his next job was to drop of Lisa, Jeremy's newest co-worker. Lisa barely knows where she lives yet and doesn't have a cell phone. Jeremy and I didn't have the Korean skills to tell him where to take her. Oh, and this guy hardly had a clue where he was going or where he was. We ended up asking some other Koreans to tell him how to get to the nearest subway station to Lisa's house but even then each person in the small crowd that was forming had a different way of getting there. Talk about mass confusion!! Lisa doesn't have a cell phone so we never heard how her trip home went but I assume it went okay. If she hadn't shown up for work Monday morning I'm sure J would have said something!