Unexpected Diet

FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD.

This is something that we are all constantly thinking about here. When I wake up in the morning, starving, I dread going to breakfast. Why? Because I'm about to eat white rice (I calculated, and I eat rice 21 times a week. Awesome.), chicken broth, kim chi, and maybe chocolate cereal.

Then for lunch I'm going to have white rice, some sort of soup, sometimes with fish, some sort of meat: fish or chicken, kim chi, and then other things that I cannot even possibly describe. At least one thing will be so spicy that your nose will run, or sometimes make your eyes water.

For dinner I'll have the same type of thing that I had for lunch. The biggest problem here is that you can't drink water during the meal, so if it tastes gross, too bad. The other problem is that the fish tastes like it just jumped out of the ocean. There is a cafe and a store on campus, but thats like going into a land mine. Our students, whose parents are sometimes twice as rich as my own parents, always ask for us to buy them candy, ice cream, and drinks. I've told them over and over that I'm a poor college student, but they don't seem to get it!

I'm really not trying to complain, or dwell on the whole food issue. Its just that my students spend their day asking me about food such as pizza, mcdonalds, macaroni and cheese, cheese in general, pasta, and taco bell. In the classroom sometimes I joke and say "what did you say? crunch wrap supreme?" "Huh? Cheese? Where?" and while I'm joking, I really do randomly think I hear them talking about food. And sometimes they are. At the dinner table they will say, "is this as good as a hamburger?" and I just can't lie to them, so I say "Well, they are good in different ways...." and for different people...Koreans really really love Korean food, and really really don't! Besides ramen :)