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We are taking Korean classes and are having a blast learning the language--though you can get by without it, thanks to body language. Scott especially is picking it up quickly. My mind took longer to adjust to an entire new alphabet. And a new environment, i might add. I used to be quite good at getting around in new towns, but here, if I sense we need to go a certain way, we usually pivot and move in the other direction. This place has just pushed my mind in so many new directions. Dor Sot Bi Bim Bop. (Those of course are the Roman alphabet for the Hangul. The "r" might as well be an "l," and "b"s can be "p"s and few others are interchangeable as well. It makes for an exciting pronunciation guessing game.) For Scott and me, that phrase says it all. And we've learned how to say "Two of them, please" like pros. Pretty soon, we'll know the dish and its varieties and the best places to get it better than the locals. It's our latest food fetish. A hot stone bowl filled with rice and a forestfull of wonderful, stringy veggies scott and i never could have recognized, coming from the Western world. And the hot stone bowl keeps the whole dish steaming the entire 20 minutes it takes to eat it. And the chopsticks. They're starting to feel like fingers finally. After a year, I'll be wearing them in my hair, just in case there's a chance I might eat. I love them. Predating that fetish by just one week is the Grain Drink. Or the nut drink. Or the mushroom drink. Or the dried greens drink. We're really not sure what it is. We finally tried it at the grocery store, where they have bins and bins of all this healthy stuff (I do recognize sesame seeds and dried mushrooms, but that's about it), which they feed into a grinder, add milk and honey, and then serve to drink. We put out 18 bucks and bought a big bag of the ground-up goods. It was either out of extremely good intuition or panicked desperation that we took such a risk. But we love it. Throw in a frozen banana and some soy milk, and you have creamy Grain Drink (or whatever it is). We suspect it's healthy, and we know it's good, so we crave it and drink it every morning. We bought a blender the first day we were here (when we suspected we might be living off Oreos and Snickers while we were here), and it's proven itself every day since. Forest in a hot stone bowl and a frothy brown grain drink. I laugh to myself sometimes at how delightful and unexpected this all can be. a handful of forest, ck [2002-11-24]
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