Assimilation

Well, the assimilation is almost complete. Excellent. What a Mr. Burns kind of thing to say.

Saturday I took a guided tour of the GS Supermarket with Victoria and one of her co-teachers. I now know what everything is in the market, given it would have been more helpful 7 months ago.

I bought kim-chi, tofu, and hot red pepper paste. Oh my God. I never thought I'd live to see the day that I bought kim-chi to keep at home. Was this the goal of all of those teachers insisting that I eat kim-chi at lunch? Was it just to boost the sales of kim-chi at the supermarket andmake one more person eat this not incredibly tasty item? And what made me feel compelled to buy some for home?

I also cooked my first wholy Koreay meal. I made bibimbap. This means that I used my rice cooker (for the second time in my life, the first time was to make rice pudding), stir fried some garlic shoots (which are amazing, we need to start eating them in the USA) and bean sprouts. Cooked up some merinated tofu. Put it in some rice with red pepper paste. Voila. It was pretty good. I also threw in a couple of kim-chi filled dumplings... just for variety.

Clearly, something is wrong with me. I'm cooking and eating Korean food by choice. The assimilation is nearing completion. Anyday now I will be obsessively text messaging from my $800 cell phone or staring mindlessly at myself in the mirror. Maybe my assimilation will come in the form of spitting on the floor continually or being violent towards everyone. Who knows. I may need some deprograming when I return home... the kind where you hire some guys in a van to kidnap me in the middle of the day, blindfold me, and take me to some undisclosed locale and grill me under a solitary hanging light until my spirit is broken and I start sobbing for my mommy. That may be necessary. Maybe you should start scouring the want ads for such people.