To everything there is a season / And a time for every purpose under heaven.

I don't know what it is about me, but I seem to give off the "I need the healing power of Christ!" pheromones. I have been approached on the street—rather aggressively—by evangelical Christians more times here in Korea than I have ever before in my life. I have quite the assortment of English handouts about the Heavenly Mother, "Comfort for the Depressed," and also a Watchtower booklet. Awesome.

The title up there is doing double duty, as it's about that time to note that fall is in the air. The weather hasn't really gone from boiling hot to gradually cooler as much as from boiling hot days and nights to boiling hot days and freezing nights. This makes dressing for work something of a puzzle, as I begin work during the hottest part of the day and leave well after the sun has gone down.

Last night was a farewell party for one of the Korean teachers, the first to leave since I've arrived and probably the one who's been here the longest. We went out for samgyupsal (the bacon-like-but-not-really-bacon dish) and tried to pretend that we didn't have to work the next day.


Mina, my partner teacher; Alex, Mark, and Michael, our manager


Krystafre and Irene. Scissors are cooking utensils here.


And there's me. And Brendan, tending the meat.

Earlier in the week I went out to dinner with my friend Jong-min. In need of comfort food after a major work crisis, he suggested 곱창구이 —gobchang gui. Stuffed intestines.

It was a bit unnerving at first, but really the thought of eating intestines is more repulsive than the actual act. It seems that there's a variety ways to prepare it (if a Google Image Search is to be believed); I had it in the form of a chigae-type stew with bits of cow gut floating around that you could eat or not eat at your whim. Kind of like this:



It's a bit fatty but otherwise pretty good. (Fat seems to be a recurring theme when it comes to Korean meat, unless of course it's SPAM. More on Spam in another post, though.) That's one bizarre food down on my checklist. The next is 보신탕: dog meat soup.