Today's Lunch Menu

--Rice, of course, always rice, even for breakfast;
--Two kinds of kimchi, always kimchi, even for breakfast.  It's the Korean "staple" food.  It's cabbage, and they usually fix it with a spicy sauce that is so hot it would melt all of Antarctica if they dropped a pound of it on the continent.  Today they had a non-spicy kimchi (as well as the spicy).  I don't eat kimchi because I can't stand cabbage.  But they have dozens of ways to fix the stuff, all of them designed to kill the taste buds, I'm sure.  Or kill Westerners;
--"Young cabbage vegetable dish," as if one kind of cabbage wasn't enough, and I guess they couldn't find any old cabbage.  Or maybe that's what kimchi is made out of;
--"Fusilli salad," which is a twisted pasta noodle with crab meat;
--"Stir fried seaweed," which wasn't bad actually, as long as you eat it with rice to dilute the flavor;
--"Welsh onion pancakes," which, if this is the stuff they ate in the U.K., then I understand why they lost their empire;
--"Fried pork coated with millet jelly and spicy sauce."  How many of you knew you could make jelly out of millet?  For that matter, how many of you even know what millet is?
--"Soybean sprouts soup," which was pretty good.
--And they do always have a salad bar with lettuce mixed with some bitter green and white stuff, and fruit (usually canned, but sometimes fresh) and some slimy black stuff for desert that looks like something is swimming around in it.  Top it all off with "Fermented Plum Juice" (they don't know what "fermented" is, and I don't know what they mean by "fermented," so I always drink water), and you have the complete Korean meal.

Before I moved to Korea about two months ago, I bought some pants without trying them on because I thought I knew my size.  I couldn't even button them around the waist, they were so small.  Today, I wear those same pants and have to tighten my belt to keep them from falling off.  Well, at least I'm eating fairly healthy when I can get some of that Korean stuff down my gullet.