Adventure!

Yesterday the wife and I had to go for our checkup. The head of the Englishee dept. took us to the hospital, after which she wanted to take us out to lunch. That would seem like a nice gesture to a normal person. However, my wife is not a "normal" person.

Not only is she is on a raw food diet right now, she is also a devout, militant, fundamentalist Vegan. She is the type of person who would strap c-4 to her chest and suicide bomb a McDonalds. The very thought of eating in a restaurant where the "juice of dog", or chicken is prepared sends her into a blind rage.

She wanted absolutely no part of eating any lunch besides the pureed raw turnip, garlic and yeast that she packed for her lunch, and smelled roughly like the bottom of a garbage can. So we made excuse, after excuse as to why we could not possibly go to lunch. The head of the English department did not want to go back to work and fought desperately to go out to eat.

"Its only 10am, and there will be nothing open."

"I tink, dat maybe your wife want go shopping until runchee?"

Unfortunately for her, not only is my wife nearly six feet tall, and therefore too large for either female or male Korean clothing, she also lacks the bargain hunting and fashion loving gene predominately found in females and gay men. Somehow, I posses the gene, I know its weird!

She suggested several more options for avoiding going back to work, but my wife was unrelenting. Eventually she out-koreaned my boss with her stubbornness and inability to take no for an answer born out her diet based fanaticism and was driven back to her school.

I however, do not posses my wife's unrelenting will, and also did not want to go back to work, so after she was driven back my boss suggested lunch one more time. I said OK, and figured if they did not have anything I would eat later.

The restaurant she took me to was a traditional place that served the "Juice of dog" and chicken in one building, and traditional tofu and noodle dishes in another. It also had incredible landscaping.







The served me a boiling hot bowl of one piece of tofu roughly the size of a babies head, and of course rice and side dishes. They were worried that it would be too spicey for me, but it only had a mild tang to it. It was pretty good, and the vegetable sides were good, but the kimchi smelled like low tide so I had no part of it.

Afterward it was time to go back, but my boss really did not want to, so she suggested going for a short walk. We ended up wandering around what looked like an abandoned shack, with giant woolly guard dogs on chains. It turned out to be a Buddhist temple that normally served tea, but was closed. My boss convinced them to let us in and look around and we checked out the shrine.





Then she convinced them to make us some tea while we sat on a heated mat watching Korean soap operas. When we finally left, it was about 1:30pm.

"Oh, it soo late!" My boss said in surprise. She had told the Vice Principal that we would be back by noon. So we rushed back to school, but when we got there, it was a ghost town. All the teachers had gone to lunch so no one even noticed we got back an hour and a half late.

After they all got back we went to the gym and played volleyball and basketball for about two hours. It was like the special Olympics in there. Not only was I not use to Korean rules volleyball (like a mixture of soccer and volleyball)I am old and mildly retarded at sports, luckily all the other teachers were too.