So last night one of the teachers here invited me out to eat "lahr pishee"--translation: raw fish. It turns out that I was kind of crashing his party....he teaches a bunch of middle-aged people who never graduated from high school through a correspondence course, and this was their big party to celebrate how wonderful he is. The only other ppl I knew there were the prinicpal and vice principal of my school. Major brass. Anyway, the whole thing was a little awkward, with people constantly making up little packets of what tasted like fish soaked in formaldehyde, fermented soybean paste and wasabi wrapped in sesame leaves and insisting on watching me while I ate them. Actually, that was that in addition to a HUGE amount of supposedly American style food. After the initial thrill of watching me choke down scaly shark ribs and something red and oozing with soft yellow spikes that I honestly think probably has no English translation, the teacher that invited me seemed really worried that I have enough "normal" food, which means that he kept ordering me more and more potatoes and eggs. Hm...when I say "eggs" I'm not refering to your standard, garden-variety AA eggs...these are much smaller, about the size of a quarter in diameter. Apparently they come from a bird similar to but not quite a sparrow. (Why is that so much creepier than chicken eggs?) Of course I spent like 20 minutes carefully peeling my not-sparrow egg, making a neat little pile in my soybean paste dish, into which I immediately dropped a honey-covered potato, basically coating it with little shards of eggshell. Twice. Argh, I swear I should never be taken out in public. i had to eat both of them because my teacher was staring at me like if I didn't I might actually shrivel up and die from lack of nutrition right there in the spot. Also fun: sucking little snails (I think either still or until very recently alive) straight out of their shells. Everyone around me seemed to be able to get them out by just sort of gently kissing the end of the shell, but I would suck as hard as I could and those babies would barely budge. I can't imagine I looked very good doing it, either, a fact that seemed particularly pertinent at one point when I CAUGHT MY PRINCIPAL'S EYE mid-suck, my cheeks pulled in and my eyes bulging out of their sockets at him. The principal and VP ducked out pretty early, but after dinner my teacher insisted that I join him and his students at norebang. So I ended up in a very dark, very loud, very small room with 10 Korean men, all of whom were singing passionately (I mean throwing their heads back and belting), shaking tambourines, or attempting to slow dance with either me or each other (they had better luck with the latter, which was pretty awesome to watch). I got wrangled into singing three American songs, because my teacher kept telling me how excited his students were to meet "a real foreigner." I mean, could I really let them down?

Hm, a teacher just walked over, gave me an orange and asked, "How is your physical condition today?" They're so sweet.