Food and Rain

As you can imagine, there are definitely a number of differences in culture, and many problems can come up when you know very little of the language.  First off, I probably could have found my way home the other night if I knew Korean and could explain something to the cab drivers.  Instead, I was useless and turned into a long distance walker for one night.  I initially thought that eating in restaurants would be a problem, but most of the places have pictures in their menus, so you just point to something and hope its good.  For the most part, everything I've had has been pretty good, so this plan has worked out well. 

However, there are certainly some exceptions.  We have a cook at our school, who makes food everyday for lunch.  This allows me to try a lot of things before I try them in restaurants.  There are noodles here that look like rigatoni (long, hollow and narrow noodles), but they aren't hollow.   They come in a red sauce, that looks like spaghetti sauce.   The cook at school makes them, and I think they're great.  Most of the dishes here are pretty spicy, but nothing I can't handle.  Kristin and I decide to get a large portion of these noodles at a food court, assuming they will be good.  Kristin eats about 5 food noodles, I might have had a few more then that, and both of us were burning up.  I quickly looked like a tomato.  I felt like shit for a good while afterwards.  It certainly didn't taste like tomato sauce, and I later find out that its actually red pepper sauce.  Its not always that spicy but since I have no idea how to ask if something is spicy, I'm just going to avoid the damn things for a good while.  My first rule of life here is to understand that red sauce is definitely not spaghetti sauce and if I want to avoid a ring of fire, avoid it.

Apparently its rainy season here, something to do with typhoons (same as hurricanes).  Meaning it rains a shitload,  almost everyday it seems.  My first day of work it was pouring outside, so I'm forced buy an umbrella.  I think this may have actually been my first umbrella purchase of my life.   Days that start out sunny, soon turn to rain. Luckily, almost every store sells umbrellas, so when I get caught in the rain, I just buy a new one.  If its raining, its pretty damn hard to spot someone without an umbrella.  Everyone appears to be afraid of the rain. I guess that includes me because somehow I turned into a wimp and need to buy one for my two minute walk home after work when I forgot mine.  After one week, Kristin and I have three umbrellas.  I'm on pace to have about 150 umbrellas by the time I return to Canada.