Samgyetang

Not my picture; I stoles it from Wikipedia.
My school had 삼계탕 (samgyetang) for lunch today and omg, om nom nom. Samgyetang is Korean chicken soup. It's made with a whole chicken stuffed with rice in a broth seasoned with ginsing, jujube fruits, garlic, ginger and unicorn farts. It is amazing and, in my opinion, the perfect chicken soup. It can be difficult to eat, since there is a whole chicken in your bowl and while I'm pretty good at the picking-things-up-with-chopsticks thing, I am less adept at the taking-apart-a-chicken bit. The first time I ate samgyetang I nearly ruined my skirt by repeatedly splashing the broth onto it. Luckily for my limited work wardrobe, this time the chicken was already removed from the bone and I made way less of a mess.

Aside from being delicious, I'm really glad we had samgyetang since, three weeks in, everyone at my school already knows I don't like Korean food. My former co-teacher told my current co-teacher that I don't like Korean food and the current co-teacher must have sent out a memo, because by the end of the first week, the only thing my co-workers will talk to me about is if I'm unhappy in Korea because I have to eat Korean food. (Well, that and today my soldier buddy and I had a chat about why King Sejong was awesome on our walk to school today, but he is the only one of my co-workers besides my co-teachers who really tries to talk to me, so he's a special case.) The thing is, I don't actually dislike Korean food. Sure, there are things I don't like, but there's plenty of American food I won't touch (for example, anything uttered in conjunction with the words bologna burger) and being pigeonholed just because I don't eat kimchi drives me nuts. It's always nice (and delicious) when I get a chance to show my co-workers that see, I *do* like their fermented cabbage heavy cuisine.