Work and New Year's

Okay, first blog of the new year. Started our Winter Intensive term today. Seems good so far, though it's a lot of classes. Also, there seems to be a lack of material for some classes, so I'm going to have to work hard to provide filler. Previously, I didn't like having to rush through books, but they do provide an easy, if sometimes artificial, structure. Mainly, lately, I've just been sick. Normal flu. Didn't work last Wednesday and Thursday. I'm at about 95% now, but I got really depressed being stuck in my apartment, and also not being able to taste much of anything I eat. I did manage to give my apartment a thorough cleaning which was pretty nice. I'll try to post some current pics of my apartment soon. Also, I'll be moving to a new, bigger appartment in a couple months. The biggest benefit of the new place will be having two windows, as opposed to my current one, and therefore some nice airflow.

Let's see, New Year's I did go out a bit. I met a nice girl named Ann a few weeks ago. She came to visit me, and then we went to her mother's restaurant and ate a kind of beef sumgyupsal - basically cuts of fried sirloin, some marinated in a delicious garlic* sauce. It was delicious. The other specialty of the night was cow's small intestine, which I hadn't really believed when Ann first told me, although in fact I'd recently seen an advertisement of "intestines cooking" at a restaurant in Busan. Nope, it was for real, and one of Ann's favorite foods. After we ate sirloin, they heaped a big pile of cow guts onto one of the griddles, and fried them up. Really, once you got past the fact that it was guts, it wasn't too bad. Ann was just delighted to have some, and was surprised when I told her I was surprised how good they were. I just told her I wouldn't normally eat that back home. I just couldn't really see a way of explaining to her that it was even more strange for me to have eaten "chitlins" than the san-nak-ji (still-moving octopus tentacle) side-dish we'd had at our last meal.

After that, we went to JRock for a little bit. We were both recovering from flu, so we didn't stay out late, just long enough to wave sparklers (IN the bar), and drink a little champagne. Typical New Year's.

*Interesting footnote:"Korea is the largest consumer of garlic, ahead of the rest of Asia (particularly China and Thailand, excluding Japan) and the Northern Mediterranean (mainly Spain, Italy, and Greece)." (from Cuisine of Korea on wikipedia.org)