lotus

There's a new Korean teacher at my school. It's a guy in his mid 20s. He was raised in New Zealand, which means aside from being fluent in Korean, he's also fluent in English. The thing is that he has a strong New Zealand accent. Most Koreans have the same accent when they speak English, so it's kinda off-putting to hear a Korean guy speak perfectly, but with a New Zealand accent.


He's only been working here a couple of weeks, and only part time; Tuesdays and Thursdays. Today being Thursday, our bosses took all of us out to dinner after work, as they are wont to do. Once again I spent the bulk of the night looking off into nothingness while the Koreans all spoke to each other in their own language. Except for once, the new Korean guy tried to keep me abreast of what was going on. He's a pretty cool guy. I'll probably hang out with him a lot outside of work. The bossman, he, and I drank more than a few bottles of soju over dinner. Dinner was pig's feet.

This was the first time I've ever had pig's feet. It's sliced up into bite sized bits, similar to most Korean food, except that it looks like the cross section of a pig's foot. The taste isn't bad, but it's not good enough for you to forget that you're eating a foot. I quickly realized that the best way to eat it is to smother it in sauce and every available vegetable. It's not something I'd order again on my own, but I wouldn't shy away from it if it was offered to me again. It's better than pig intestines, which I've also eaten recently. Koreans love their pigs.

We were eating out on the porch of this restaurant. We sat there for a while, eating and drinking soju. Toward the end of the night some Korean guy stumbled out of a restaurant across the street and promptly threw up about 10 feet away from us. It was a ton of puke. The new Korean teacher and I looked at each other in horror, while the rest of the Koreans tried to pretend like nothing happened. Then shit got real.

The recently puking guy saw me, a foreigner, and decided to approach me. At first he just wanted a high five, which I hesitantly obliged to. Then he drunkly tried to hop the railing and promptly fell on his face. He stood up and tried to hug my new New Zealand-Korean friend. After about 10 seconds of my friend trying to shoo him away, I decide that now's the time to show my coworkers just how adept I am at dealing with drunken and overly-affectionate Korean guys. I stand up, give the guy a hug, tell him it's time to go home, and walk him away from our table. I get him a few steps away from the table when he decides to hop back over the railing, and promptly falls on his face again. He eventually leaves us, and the Koreans give me a round of applause for handling him with such aplomb. Soon thereafter we called it a night, and now here I am back home, telling this story to you, my dear reader.

You know, sometime it can be difficult to title these posts that I write. If there's a solid topic that I write about, it's easy enough, but often, like now, it's just some stuff that happened recently. Sometimes I just title them with words I've used a lot in the post, so perhaps "promptly" would be a good option, but I don't like it. I've been thinking for 5 minutes what to call this one, but I got nothing. So I'm going to just put my iTunes on random and title this the song that pops up. So that's the story of how this post got its title.