they were galloping through the water like little horses

Turns out that, thanks to the generosity of the vice principal, I get to leave for winter break a few days earlier than my contract stipulates--I finish on Friday instead of the following Tuesday--which means I get to spend eight days instead of just five in Thailand, where I'm going to meet Amanda. So I'm excited about that. And I got to finally purchase my plane ticket, not a moment to soon as the prices would have gone up by about 300 dollars as of tomorrow. I do have to go to Busan tomorrow to pick up my tickets and pay for them in cash, because for some reason the tickets I reserved can't be paid for electronically. But it's not even clear whether my debit card would have worked anyway. I'm actually excited to go to Busan, since it's a big city nearby that I've never been to. Again, thanks to the serendipitous generosity of the vice principal, I don't have to go to school tomorrow, which is the last day of midterms (so I don't have classes anyway). In way of accomplishments, I also got a birthday package mailed off to my mom today. Hopefully it will get there in time.

Even though I probably could have gotten most of this week off if I really wanted to, I think it's good that just I stuck around. The school days are only half, and today and on Monday I went out to lunch with a bunch of the teachers. I've been feeling lately that I need to be more social with them--I didn't really realize how much it mattered to some of the teachers until my host mother and co-teacher started hinting around about it, that I should smile more and bow more and say hello.

Monday we went out for 'mudhopper soup' with some other female teachers after school. My host mother believed I was interested in mudhoppers, because a few weeks after getting to Suncheon, I saw a picture of some live mudhoppers and asked her, I thought with apparent horror, what they were. The pictures was zoomed in, so I had no sense of scale. To me they looked like something prehistoric--large bulbous eyes breaking the surface of the water. Turns out they're actually only a few inches long. I became well-acquainted with this fact on Monday. Originally, we were going to have the form of soup where the meat of the fish is ground up. I was actually comforting myself with this fact on the way to lunch, relieved that I wouldn't have to be confronted with those bulbous eyes, when my host mother informed me that because I was curious about mudhoppers, they'd decided to order the kind of soup where 'the form of the body is visible.' Ultimately, the fishes were headless, and I actually enjoyed the flavor of the soup, so I passed through that education fairly painlessly.

Today we went out for shrimp. I really like shrimp, so I was excited. I saw my first live prawns in a large tank at the front of the restaurant. They were oddly elegant. Then I saw my first live animal cooked to death. A kilogram of prawns were brought to the table and placed in a pan with a bed of rock salt. Then the propane was turned on and the writhing prawns began to cook in their own juices, and I could actually see their grey shells turning pink while they struggled. Even though I know that lots of animals are probably cooked alive behind kitchen doors in America, I was a little uncomfortable. But I got over it pretty quickly, and got the knack for the most efficient way to behead a prawn as we got down to eating with our hands. And it was really good of course. Eating out in Korea is often a sort of surprising experience, but I've never found it to be one that I ultimately didn't enjoy. Except for that time I ate a piece of shellfish that definitely had some kind of liver-like shellfish organ inside of it. I just didn't like the taste of that, and it tasted exactly as I was expecting it to. But when your host mother chopsticks something over to your plate you sort of have to eat it.

I've decided that it comes down to taste over aesthetic every time--like today when I noticed at first that there were prawn brains or intensines or something on what I was eating, but when I realized I couldn't taste it, I stopped trying to scrape it off. But that doesn't mean I intend to try dog.