St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!!

This week was our second week of teaching, and it was a fun week because we had St. Patrick's Day celebrations at school. I don't have any pictures yet, but hopefully I can figure out how to get those soon. 


Yesterday, Kyle and I went to meet Katie and her friends for breakfast. We made french toast, hashbrowns, and we had lots of fresh bananas and pineapple. It was a feast. We then proceeded to walk to the subway, decked out in green, ready for a day of fun.

We headed into Itaewon for the St. Paddy's Day festivities, and upon walking out of the subway station, this is what we saw....

The ratio of foreigners to Koreans was about 15:1. It was madness. Apparently there was a parade, but this was all we saw when we arrived. There was a stage in the middle where several Irish bands were playing, and people were dancing and singing and spraying beer around. The cook thing about Korea is that it is like Vegas. They allow you to walk around with open containers of alcohol, so it was just a big party in the middle of the city.


Warning: Graphic story follows...

Afterwards, I had an unfortunate food experience. If anyone knows me well, you will know that I love food, but that I am also very worried about food poisoning. If anything is past the expiration date, or near it, or looks questionable, or anything, I will throw it away. So street food has always been my enemy. It looks good (sometimes), it smells good, but I am always afraid because I do not want to get food poisoning again ever in my life. So....with that said.....after St. Paddy's Day in Itaiwon, my mind was very influential ( after some delicious libations) and I was somehow convinced to buy some street food. It looked good, and looked similar to Japanese tempura. So I tried it.  I tried some shrimp. I tried some pancake thing. I tried some thing that looked like a zucchini.....WRONG. It appeared to be the healthy and delicious squash, but upon cutting it into pieces, it looked to be a bunch of glass noodles wrapped in a sheet of thick seawood. Harmless enough, I thought. So I took a bite. It was very salty. The noodles were awesome. But salty.

This is basically what the food  cart looked like, but it was under a tent. And this is exactly what the food looked like....tempura...Am I right? Well, I was wrong.

Soon after I ate a piece and swallowed it, the person who convinced me to try the food asked me, "Do you know what you just ate?" I proceeded to tell him, "Yes, I ate some noodles wrapped in seawood. Like pasta sushi". He said, "Do you really want to know what you just ate?" I, naively thinking it was maybe not glass noodles but maybe those potatoe noodles or something, said, " Okay, maybe not glass noodles, maybe those vegetable noodles they make". To which he replied, "No, you just ate pig rectum...." My initial thought was to turn around and just start throwing up in the street. It was soon enough after I ate it that I was confident that I could throw it all up and be okay. But then I would not feel good, get a lot of stares from people, and be the butt of everyone's joke in my circle of friends (or FOES!!!) that night. So i stopped walking. Gave the guy a death stare. and decided I would never EVER eat street food again. At that point it was just a waiting game on whether or not I would get food poisoning. I was terrified. In the middle of the night, I woke up, and felt a wave of something come over me... I can't describe what it was, but my first thought was...."Is this nausea?? Am I feeling nauseous? Is this the food poisoning coming on?" Thankfully, it was not. It was just a rush of blood as I was coming out of a dream. But it was scary. And now, I can say that I have tried it, and did not get sick from it. But still....pig rectum is something that I would never have thought to be consumed by me. Never again, I say!

St. Paddy's Day 2012: The Day the Remember Forget!