My place or yours?!

Thought a few pics of my place might be interesting... especially as we were invited to hold a house warming party at our apartments. Was in a bit of a dilemma as to what food to serve as it is well known that the Korean's don't like cheese (except in their Karaoke). Well, if I've got to eat fermented, pickled cabbage then it's only fair to offer curdled milk really... managed to find some Camembert, and also did some pasta in a red wine and tomato sauce, backed up with a few Korean delicacies... and... they loved it! Or at least they all politely ate it, but there was also a definite case of a few of the team really tucking into the pasta, so I think I got away with it.


Result of the day: a local who I have not had lunch with before said that I use chopsticks very well, if not better than him, and I don't actually think he was being sarcastic as I had perfomed admirably over lunch, without firing anything across the table or dropping anything down myself or anyone else.

It does of course help enormously over here that slurping is expected and celebrated and that you just pile as much as you can into your mouth whenever you can. Apologies in advance to anyone who has to eat with me when I first return to the UK, although there is one bonus, I have considerably speeded up eating over here... if I like it, I am so delighted I shovel it down, and if I don't, I find the best way to deal with it is to shovel it down! Managed to avoid eating whelks last night, but felt obliged to eat the fish eggs... mmm mmm.

Offence of the week: luckily not actually me, but Stuart mentioned that we were planning a tour to the DMZ (de-militarised zone /border between North Korea and South Korea). Not really a place they like talking about, or consider a particularly appealing tourist area. I can see their point... a day spent with a bunch of US squaddies is probably worse than a large portion of Gimchi.