We went to Mokpo this weekend. We slept in a 500 year old Buddhist temple! We meditated with monks before dawn! We went back to sleep! Then other things happened. We’ll catch you up this week. School starts again tomorrow which is a goodbad thing. We’ve been slow to update the last few weeks as a couple of other projects have consumed our free time. I’m not going to talk about them yet- The best way to make sure a project never gets finished is to start talking about it to other people and then it’s like INEEDTOGETTHISDONEOREVERYONEWILLBEDISSAPOINTEDINME and you get to a point where the PRESSURE IS OVERWHELMING and you get to that “Whatever, dude, I don’t need your approval!”/”NO DAD WHAT ABOUT YOU” point and then you get to the “I’m an adult, I do what I want!” phase and you’ve CANCELED YOUR PROJECT over an imaginary concern.

Does anyone else do that? Chew on this, gnarly finger-tapping action around the 2:00 mark:

This is not my picture. Oh, I had pictures, but in a piqued fit of self-preservation, my unconscious mind led me to delete them from my camera. What you see there is not a delicious cinnamon roll, but instead a ghastly minon of the pastry Satan called ‘Garlic Olive Roll’. Take that in for a moment. Garlic. Olive. Donut. Sugar. It sounds like the losing ambition of a particularly batty Top Chef contestant. Have you parsed it yet?

Our very first morning in Korea, something like 10 hours after getting here, we popped into Dunkin’ Donuts because we could read the sign and we knew what it was. One of the truer delights of going abroad is seeing familiar things go utterly weird and in that regard D&D delivered. Sure, there were old favorites like the plain glazed and the ‘Bavarian Cream’ (What, you don’t know where Boston is, Korea?), but there was also a whole new spectrum. There’s something called a ‘Chewisty’, which is 8 small, rice flour donuts bonded into a ring. It’s my new favorite donut.  The rice flour gives it a chew so that the total effect is Donut Bubble Gum. There’s also a segmented heart filled with both jelly and cream.

And the there are misfits. Originally there was just the First Sin, Garlic Olive Roll. But then something called ‘World Donut Festival’ rolled into town and it was like. Let me paint a scene: There’s a new temp at Dunkin’ Donuts Korea HQ. The big boss says, “Larry! Get these rejected donut ideas down to the incinerator!”. Meanwhile, a pretty young secretary is bringing up a folder full of Good Donut Ideas. Larry leaves the office and is SMITTEN with this pretty lady and bumps right into her. In the commotion that follows, the papers get all mixed up. The result is World Donut Festival.

Now, it’s not all bad. There’s an ‘Olive’ Chewisty that tastes exactly like the regular Chewisty. There’s also a yogurt filled Greek donut. The one that made the headlines on food blogs was a ‘Kimchi Donut’, but it’s actually a Kimchi Croquette and you can get them 3 for a dollar at any self-respecting Korean bakery so BACK OFF WHITE DEVILS. But there was also something called ‘Lentil Cacao’, a chocolate frosted donut speckled with raw lentils. And some kind of baked bean thing from the country of Hell.

But none of them could muster the kind of audacious horror of Garlic Olive Roll. It’s a permanent fixture at D&D, this is not a seasonal item. This donut stands with the Pink Frosted and Toasted Coconut Thing. It’s a real deal. 6 weeks after my first sighting, I finally picked it up. I figured, “Hey, it’s here everyday. And maybe it’s a mistranslation thing. After all, who would put garlic and sugar on a donut?”. Had I bothered to be more critical, I would have remembered that this is a county that studs it’s cakes with tomatoes.

So I bought this thing and I bit it and I never want to tell you what it’s like because it is HORRIBLE FOREVER AND EVER BE GONE YE DEMONS. I’m not averse to the concept, but the execution is putrid. It’s like someone made the regular glazed donut and rolled it though the trash pile at the Olive Garden. It tastes like every low-rent Chinese food meal I’ve ever had. Who did this and why?

Point being: It’s not even a novelty, like those banks shaped like boobs or the pot bellied Batman I spent 7000 won prying from a crane machine. It’s a bad idea in Korea, it’s a bad idea on the Moon and it’s a bad idea on every plane of the Multiverse.

You're CRAZY.

So, this is a feature I’ve been really excited about: Stuff You Can Drink. My favorite part of heading abroad is hitting up the grocery store. The Anthroplogist-Smarty Pants in me wants to tell you that you can learn sooooooooooooo much about a culture by hanging out in their grocery stores. But the unabashed truth is that I just like to eat. And I like to eat things that are weird and unexpected. In this regard, Korean grocery stores are a revelation.

I’ve started with beverages because I love beverages. Those of you who spend time around me might be surprised by this- I’m largely a Water-tarian when it comes to drinking liquid. This is because most everything in the United States comes in a grotesque size that’s been absolutely stuffed with some of the world’s worst-for-you things. And part of that is a personal problem: If you hand me 16 oz, I will drink 16 oz. Again, Korea has been a revelation. The vast majority of drinks come in 8 ounce and under sizes. Most of them are not a whole lot better for you, but they’re half as big and sensibly portioned and most ring in under a buck. Hence, I cannot help but try everything once.

With that in mind it’d make sense to start off with something I’d suggest to people I like. But sensibility is not my strong point and so I bring you Pine Bud Drink. 10 words or less: This is something you’d crave if you were insane. Like, literally insane. Not “Haha, George you’re so crazy mixing all the sodas!” insane. Kill little boys because the freezer told you insane.

It tastes like it promises to. It tastes like someone made tea out of a Christmas tree. And not just the good pine-y part, but the tar-y, earthy bark part, too. It is nothing so much as a liquid tree, roots and all. It’s a deep, verdant green. It reeks. I don’t know who would drink this or why. Is pine a commonly requested flavor? I’ve never in my life even thought: ‘This could be improved with the taste of pine’. This is on the same plane as PVC pipe tacos.

As an addendum, I brought this can to class as part of a project. Most of my kids speak barely any English, but at least one of them mustered the skill to say: ‘Teacher, you DRINKED THIS?!’. I did.

Something I did not know before coming to Asia: Asian bathrooms are terribly pragmatic. You may be familiar with the concept of a shower stall- Asia is not! Our bathroom has a toilet and a sink and a shower head that’s connected to the sink. The expectation is that you enter the bathroom and turn the shower on. And just pour water all over the bathroom.

Try this. Go ahead. Go walk into your bathroom, hook up a garden hose to your sink and just spray water all over the place. The obvious complications of this have already been addressed by a team of Korean engineers: One is a metal shield for your toilet paper. The other is a drain in the floor. But the floor’s not sloped and the shower head is positioned to flank the shield, so it leads to an enduringly amusing game where we pack all of our bathroom supplies into the medicine chest before showering. It’s also lead to the practice of keeping two old t-shirts on the floor by the bathroom door because anytime you need to use the bathroom for the next 4 to 6 hours, you gonna get wet feet, yo.* The light switch is also outside the bathroom and around the corner (Which baffled me until, haha, I realized the danger of having a light switch inside the room you wantonly water every morning), which makes me feel like I’m on a Korean version of Candid Camera every time I stumble into a dark bathroom and slap at the walls.

Otherwise, it’s just like showering at home.

*Sorry. Mary started playing Solitaire, which in Windows 7 has gotten a whole library of cute sound effects that mostly make me wanna poke my eyes out. I had to listen to Ghostface at max volume to keep from DYING, LADY.