drinking vinegar?

today i drank vinegar for the first time ever.

actually, pretty tasty – the blueberry was a little sweet and a little zingy! plus, it kind of burned, but in a nice, spicy way!

my korean friend drank it at my old work and said it helped digestion etc. and since my tummy’s been grumbly lately, i thought i’d give it a shot! oh, and she had really nice skin and other korean ladies told me it’s tops for healthy skin, so added potential bonus.

little did i know…VINEGAR IS THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD!!!

see?

oops.

i swear, it’s not scary when it’s fruited up and diluted with water!

here we go:

(sorry i can’t post the video here)

i like when she talks about toxic crystals in your joints.
also, does she look like a potential cult member to anyone else?

i don’t know about these crazy-pants natural health things.
the guy next to me on the bus, a tattooed and bespectacled business professor from fargo, talked about some bizarre stuff like pumping oxygen into his water. he said it tasted weird and gave him diarrhea. which was not ideal for someone prepping for a marathon. so maybe sometimes health things aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. but vinegar? could lil ole vinegar really be that bad? i read that one woman tried to kill herself by downing a ton of really strong vinegar and her kidneys went nuts and she was in a loooot of pain, but didn’t have any real permanent damage.

hmmmm, oh blueberry vinegar. i like the way you zip in my mouth and warm my stomach and gross out my foreign colleagues and make me stop coughing and feel less stuffy in class. so i guess you maybe might get to stay in my life!

have you tried any natural remedies? do you believe in this kind of thing?

cafe korea

the coffee pots have BUILT-IN filters!!!
i can’t remember how many mornings i have groggily dumped grounds into the filterless abyss. or that someone used the last filter and didn’t replace!!!
but the only problem is that all the coffee here is instant! wtf. i ran instant coffee through the machine because i just thought it was grounds and it MELTED to the filter. ewwww.

my favorite korean food products

1.

the perfect coffee in a can. it’s 25 cents, delicious, effective, adorable, and it doesn’t make you pee or get a hurty tummy like regular coffee. you can’t tell by the picture, but it’s less than 1/2 the size of a regular can. there are many varieties of canned coffee (available in vending machines on the street!), but Let’s Be tops them all in both sales and tastiness.

2.
korean fruit and jello snacks that quench my constant thirst (due to the nonpotable water and my resultant hesitancy to constantly PURCHASE water). i never reeeeeeeally liked these kinds of desserts when i was young, but now i get cravings.

3.

enough said

4.

oooh so tiny and delicious! i literally have two a day.

have you ever traveled to another place (even within the u.s.) and become addicted to a certain food? did the addiction go away when you went home? did you stock up before you left?

kimchi

KIMCHI IS SO GOOD!!
I EAT IT EVERY DAY.
USUALLY TWO TIMES A DAY.

YOU LOVE IT.
YOU WANT IT.
YOU JUST DON’T KNOW IT YET.
BUT WAIT!

(i really like the part around 1:06 when the editing is like “BAM! KIMCHI!!! COMIN AT YA!” can you imagine anyone making this kind of awe-inspiring tribute to something like…ketchup?)

kimchi prevented SARS in korea!
kimchi eliminates cholesterol!
kimchi prevents yeast infections!
kimchi protects you from cancer!
kimchi makes you live forever!!!
and it’s the best food in the world!!

basically the chorus is just like “Kimchi! Awesome! Awesome!” and talks about how delicious and awesome kimchi is. well, duh!

sunday loveleeee

sundays are good days to have a boyfriend -

actually, i mean as an adult, when you’re not funtime competing with last minute philosophy papers.

today m-k and i both slept in late but then ate lunch together at this kickin korean restaurant where they give you so many small dishes that they have special table tops that they can wheel from the kitchen and slide onto ridges on your table! it’s amazzzinnnnggggg. ALL VEGETARIAN TOO. and only $10!!!

and then the weather was perfect and we walked up the lil mountain. a lot of people were exercising at the top on the rusty outdoor weight machines and they were all grinning so big while pumping iron in the great outdoors.

on the way down, i wanted to explore the library and GUESS WHAT GUESS WHAT !?!?!?!?!-

there’s an entire english floor!!! i almost lost it completely right there in the library jumping up and down and happy-dancing! NO MORE TRIPS TO SEOUL FOR LAME-O AND OVERPRICED BESTSELLERS!!! and this library has all new perfect nice-smelling virginal copies since it’s a new library – amazing art books, sociology, science, textbooks, new novels, classic novels, learnin korean blah blah blah all the latest and hippest choices i’ve been seeing in cool magazines but lusting over with no real chance of gaining access.

i checked out a korean book translated into english and m-k was like “…oh, that’s my friend! actually. not my friend! i hate him! all writers hate him!” haha…writer feud stories are my favorites! apparently the guy’s really arrogant and pretentious and his writing’s not amazing but wins all these prizes because he has a lot of university connections. i thought maybe m-k was just a tad bitter because his work isn’t judged fairly since he didn’t go to college (really, that happens here! even hundreds of years later, people talk about which college writers went to!) BUT i already read the flimsy little novel today and it was pretty bad. i was prepared to say it was terribleawfulhorrible for m-k’s sake even if it was good, but it WAS bad! it’s plot is about a dude who helps people kill themselves. wow, mind-freak(!!!!) it just seemed like a crap short story someone would write in college in their trying to shock their writing groups phase. i guessss it’s an interesting premise, but there was no actual reason for this suicide assistance and it just had that trying-too-hard-to-be-edgy vibe going on that is so tedious and reminds me of pretentious boys in college who would say things like, “it’s definitely harder being a black man than a white woman” or “this style is reminiscent of 1977 bolivian art cinema.” the book included some gems like,”people who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity,” which i thought was kind of intentionally funny, but when i told m-k about that line he said “oh, he said that about me, too! my friend told me he was rambling about how he hates my style. he writes a 100 page book and then says anything longer is overkill.” 

this writer gossip is just so nasty and juicy – i love it! m-k kind of sheepishly told a great story about how this other writer dude was the college professor of m-k’s ex-girlfriend. while professor-man was out with some of his lady students (he thought they were all single girls), trying to impress them with 300 dolla whiskey and bold pronouncements about the literary sphere, he started to trash talk m-k. so the girlfriend is like, “well, i actually think he’s quite talented! and really cool!” (i’m betting the “cool” part being the true stab in the heart for a middle-aged professor clinging to hipness). so the professor – probably drunk and also supposedly crushing on m-k’s girl – gets really angry, pounds his fist down on the table, knocking over a drink, and shouts, “BUT I’M SO MUCH BETTER THAN HIM! HE IS NOTHING! I AM THE ELITE!!!” well, at least according to m-k’s story; i don’t really care if it was wildly exaggerated or not. but i guess m-k won that one, cuz he already was dating the up-and-coming writer girl hottie the professor writer was trying to impress. m-k is quite possibly the nicest man ever (at least to me), but he has all these funny little writer battles going on! i never thought writers would be so weirdly competitive, jealous, and petty! it can be such a nasty world of spite and insecurity! (i think part of it has to do with pride and the other part is related to the awards system and how that’s connected to your earning potential. m-k said most writers aren’t even considered for prizes until they’ve been publishing for 10 years. there are a lot of strange rules and codes that when broken can cause a lot of controversy.)

sooooo, yeah, below is the nastyboy writer in question. he is wearing a black turtleneck in ALL of his photos. need i say more?

THIS IS NOT MY BOYFRIEND! PLEASE O PLEASE DON’T SCAN TO THE BOTTOM, SEE THE PHOTO AND ASSUME. THIS DUDE IS THE EVIL WRITER BOY IN THE STORIES ABOVE, NOT M-K!!