Korean Cuisine and associated Scat

The last two evenings, I've been obliged to join the rest of my co-workers - in both English Town and Sangju Elementary - for meals at traditional Korean restaurants. As a direct result, I've got to spend some extended 'quality time' with my toilet. It may be the rainy season in Korea, but the only thunderous, torrential downpours I've experienced have come indoors, from my ignoble behind. A surfeit of Korean cuisine has given me, in Irish parlance, 'an awful case of the scutters'.

The Korean culinary novelty has pretty much worn off. They will eat anything and everything here, including seaweed, dandelions, silkworms, fish-heads, canines... pretty much anything that they can cook and consume without inducing serious liver/stomach damage. They justify consumption of these culinary abortions by claiming that they're 'good for health'. I've (just about) become desensitized to kimchi - the beloved national dish of (seemingly) petrol-fermented cabbage - and some of the spicy meat we get is good and tasty... But the side dishes are always exactly the same, consisting of unbearably strong red-pepper paste, whole cloves of garlic (with no way of cutting or grinding them) and bits of plant stems and grass that they pass as edible by simply dousing them in spicy shit. We also have 'rice cakes' with lots of dishes, which are basically rubber-ish balls of torrid blandness, which are incredibly difficult to chew and digest. But, of course, they're 'good for health' - despite the fact that many of these offending items have a consistent habit of lodging between one's teeth and taking up a long-term residence therein.

Soups are a mandatory part of most meals, a fact which has directly contributed to my anal ailment of late. Seaweed soup, which we get twice a week in the school canteen, tastes exactly as it sounds. The soups here have a tendency to exit the body in roughly the same form that they entered. Korean toilets traditionally do not flush with the velocity of their Western counterparts, so they are ill-equipped to deal with the good, sturdy logs borne of a wholesome Western diet. Maybe it's no coincidence that Korean society is supportive of the scutters.

(I know what you're thinking. Jesus Christ, Greg, enough with the diarrhoea already. I'm aware that this is more information than you need to know, but this blog is a 'warts and all' account, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Besides, who's actually reading this?)

Luckily for me, more 'sturdy' food is easy enough to find. Paris Baguette and Tous le Jours have some nice hot-dogs and pastries if I need to skip lunch, while E-Mart and Home Mart - both a stone's throw from my apartment - have everything I need to cook my own dinners. Chicken, pasta, spuds, noodles, carrots, broccoli, etc. There's decent pizza at La Dicello (shite pasta, though), and a take-away place that can provide the miracle of boneless deep-fried chicken, seasoned with spring onions. Unlike Bulgaria, bread, butter and milk are readily available, though not of the high standard of my extremely agricultural homeland. Good cheese, beef and tea are the only things I miss from home, but still hardly worth pining over. I think I may have found the basic necessities for a decent fry-up, too.

Some of the Korean stuff is genuinely tasty, but if I'm eating it every single day, lunch and dinner, then I do run the risk of a prolapsed rectum before too long.