Let's Talk About the Food

When people first heard that we were going to Korea, the comment we heard most frequently was, "Oh you two should have no problems eating.  The Asian peoples hardly eat ANY meat".  Well that may be true in SOME countries, but certainly not in Korea.  They probably consume more meat (pork and chicken mostly) than almost any country in the Far East.  And they seem to enjoy fish in virtually every dish...needless to say it's very weird to taste shrimp flavored Cheetos.

Nancy and I are struggling to find food that we like (or can eat) when we are out.  And even if you think you are purchasing something like a delicious homemade candy, looks can be deceiving.  Example - we were out in the local street a couple of blocks from school and we saw some candy-like items for sale that we thought were bon-bons.  The lady who sold them to us them assured  us that they had no meat (you never know here) so Nancy bought a package.  We opened the it up and she took a bite...surprise...tofu coated dried peas!  Yummy!!

The do have pretty decent pizza here.  There's a place not too far from DIS called Pizza School (?) and one Sunday evening all of the teachers and staff had pizzas delivered to the school.  The pizza was really good even though the cheese pizza had CORN AND POTATOES!  Seriously, potatoes on a pizza is very strange...but better than shrimp Cheetos or dried pea candy.

Where is a Veggie Burger when you need one?

Thoughts after Three Weeks

It's been just over three weeks that we've been in Daegu.  School has started and we've pretty much become accustomed to life at DIS.  Nancy and I both have had emotional highs and lows since our arrival but we've settled into a groove/routine.  Here some random observations on our experiences so far...

School has been awesome.  The kids are (for the most part) great.  They are respectful - particularly the girls - and they are very good in math.   It's pretty cool to teach kids who work hard, understand and appreciate the math and have zero attitude.  My AP Calculus class is really amazing.  The students are so smart, motivated, personable...pretty much every positive attribute you can think of.  And they have no trace of arrogance...it's very,very cool.

In Daegu there is not much English spoken when you are out and about.  It's not a very diverse city especially for a city of 2.5 million people.  Maybe we all expect to hear "American" spoken everywhere but that's not the case here.  We manage to communicate but there have been some interesting occurrences.  For example, do NOT separate a bunch of bananas at the grocery store.  We were at the store and decided we didn't really need to buy 22 bananas (the smallest bunch we could find) and I broke off a group of 6...BIG MISTAKE.  We brought them to the checkout and you would have thought that we had committed a major crime.  Needless to say we were NOT allowed to buy any bananas!

The Korean people are very fashion conscious and apparently absolutely LOVE coffee...or coffee shops.  They are literally everywhere.  Think we have a lot of Starbucks in the States?  Think again.  The sheer number of coffee shops in Korea is staggering. As for fashion..we're walking around the grocery store in our typical Florida outfit - shorts, t-shirt, flip flops the Korean women look like they are going out to a club.  Black dress, high heels, perfect hair and makeup...not that I'm complaining but it's a little disconcerting. The men (especially the young men) are very metrosexual...almost androgynistic.  it's not unusual to see them looking like Justin Bieber with a man purse...except Asian.  Is that racist?

There's a typhoon coming (am I still in Florida?) so that's all.  More to come and I will try to post more often.