Korean Quirks

Hello,
I'm still doing the orientation thing. That means, I wake up in the morning and decide if I want to go eat shitty cafeteria food or read the news before going to class. They're trying to make western accomodations to the menu. So usually they have two options, one is a western-Korean fushion and the other is straight Korean. This means that we get hamburgers and hotdogs for breakfastsome times. Then I go to lectures from 9:00 - 1:00 and learn about Korean society and educational theory. Then lunch, either at the bad cafeteria or walk around in Seoul until someone shouts at us in English from their food shop. For instance, today for lunch I had barbacue octopus with rice and it was glorious. I wish i had a picture because I'm sure that you'd squirm. I do have a picture of what I ate the other day, so have a look. It was a bean curd stew, kim chi, spicy pickles, bean sprouts, and rice. It's not bad at all. Often, it's a lot of different tastes that you wouldn't normally put together. For instance, I had a sort of quiche earlier that tasted like soggy rice crispies. It takes an open mind, but msot things are very good. I've been eating a lot of really spicy foods but I'm getting used to it. I've been disapointed that I've eaten no garlic yet because I heard it was a mainstay.

After finishing dinner, we only had 45 minutes before a group meeting and didn't really have time to go back to the dorms so we just wandered around. We ended up finding a band setting up across the street from us on campus: two guitars, one bass, keyboards, drums, and vocals. The singer couldn't speak English very well, but what followed was several cover songs by Muse, Radiohead, and Oasis. After that, it was a short open mic session for any Korean that wanted to try out their English in front of a lot of foreigners (about a hundred people from orientation had crowded around the street). Then, someone got up to the mic and announced that he was going to serenade his girlfriend. Cue, "Why do birds, suddenly appear," and then they started passing out roses to us whiteys and we all went an handed his girlfriend a dozen roses and then he bent down at the end of the song and handed her an elaborate flower. Also, this whole time a child of 3-4 years old sat in the middle of the street on top of a bike. Cars and motorcycles were zipping around him while he sat there covering his ears to blocking his ears, oblivious to all the traffic nearly missing him.