fellowship

When I was a youngster my family went to church in Philadelphia. After each service, a lot of people would go to a big room called "fellowship hall" to enjoy refreshments, like bagels and coffee. There would be a lot of people in the room, and I used to enjoy walking in a big circle throughout the room. I'd constantly be walking around, dodging around people and dipping through conversations, for no reason other than that I enjoyed dodging around people and dipping through conversations. I must've been annoying as hell.

But looking back now I can see that maybe there was a point to it. It was a sort of training for me, training to live in Korea.

Korea is a pretty congested place. If you're walking someplace you're bound to be walking amongst a lot of other people. I'm not exactly sure what it is about them, but Koreans have a real knack for getting in the way. When walking down a sidewalk, they have a tendency to take up as much of that sidewalk as possible, making it quite difficult to pass them. And then when you do try to pass them they seem to always unwittingly drift toward the side that you are passing on, and cut you off. Similarly, in a grocery store they also position themselves in the most frustrating places as they look at things they might want to buy, or they put their shopping cart in an place that impedes a potential passerby. I don't know if I'd say it's impressive, but it's pretty remarkable how good they can be at getting in your way.

I'm not really sure why I'm bringing this up; it just happened a lot to me today and I was reminded of walking around fellowship hall and it's been like 2 weeks since my last post so I figure what the hell.

I had dak galbi tonight. On Wednesdays I finish work a little earlier, at 8:40, and my wonderful girlfriend came and met me for dinner. Dak galbi consists of chicken, cabbage, sweet potatoes, rice cakes, onions, and the red sauce that is ubiquitous in Korean cuisine called gochujang. Most restaurants here that serve it specialize in it, so I've never seen in at the few Korean restaurants I've been to back home. But, if you're ever at a Korean restaurant and you see dak galbi on the menu, get it. If for some reason I had to choose one dish to eat for every meal for the rest of my life, I'd choose dak galbi.