::A Geek in Korea::

My wife and I have the least interesting food proclivities most of the time. When we order out, our diets are both restricted to the less spicy side of the Korean menu. This is a very, very small side of the menu. There might be a place or two that caters to our particular tastes in any restaurant book that gets left on our doorstep. Sure there is always the strange variants of pizza Korea has invented, but we don’t like to do that very often. If there is a “kids flavor” spice, we’re going to be able to handle it, but when we order out and see flames and people faking hot foods like they were from a cartoon and just swallowed a hot pepper we get nervous. One of the best expressions I ever learned from my wife in Korean was, “Please, don’t make it too spicy.”

Sometimes we just need to discover something new to eat. After looking through the last dine out restaurant brochure, we decided nothing was striking our fancy. I was dispatched to E-mart to find some Bennigan’s (Market O now) Pork Ribs. The last truly stomach busting meal I had was prepared by my wife after I had brought home a half-rack of ribs from the store. She had mashed pumpkin, rice, salad, and all sorts of other side dishes to accompany the meal. It was good enough to get me out of the house on a cold winter day to track down the ribs again in the store. We were both looking forward to it, and she had started preparing the side dishes she could make while I went out to buy the ribs.

When I got to the store, I headed over to the meat and store-prepared meals section. There was a problem. No RIBS! They were there the last time I was at the store, but not today. There were only buffalo wings, which my wife thought were totally awful the last time she had them at the restaurant. Via cell phone she asked me to find something else as I walked around the store picking up the rest of the ingredients for a salad she was working on. We didn’t want to do any actual cooking that evening. That’s why we were attempting to order out in the first place before we had settled on ribs.

I settled on some pre-cooked duck. The last time we had duck we had purchased it sliced from a butcher and had a nightmare of a time. Cooked duck is ridiculously oily when being prepared. I love eating duck, but we vowed at that time to only eat it at a restaurant or a barbeque from then on because the oil was dangerous, popping and getting all over the floor. This duck had already been smoked, and all it needed was to be warmed up. Solution found.

I told her about the duck, and she suggested the rest of the sides for the salad and dishes to accompany the meal. When I got home she warmed the duck on the fry pan and I was put in charge of watching it. Amazingly it was still shedding oil off even after all of this, but since we were only warming it, not actually cooking it, we were spared the disaster in the kitchen. It was simple, cheap, and very easy to prepare.

My wife’s side dishes and the duck were really good together. It’s the best meal I had at home in ages. We both were stuffed, and were happy to not have a mess on our hands compared to the last time we had duck. She and I both agreed we had another great meal idea for whenever we couldn’t decide on what to cook.

It’s only because my class schedule lightened that I was able to eat at home anyway. I do miss meal time a lot because of my new job. When I am home on vacation I hope we can spend more time eating together.

In my final children’s class of the year, I played a game of Uno with students. These particular boys are really troublesome, so I took to playing with students for the last few minutes of class each day. Stars, stickers, points, and punishments didn’t really keep their attention, but the promise of a new game or an art project has improved their behavior to at least a tolerable level for the past month. They appreciate the immediacy of the bribe, because they learn a new game each time. The only problem is that eventually even I will run out of games to play with them.

We played the standard “Crazy 8″ style game at first to warm them up to the rules. The students couldn’t say “Reverse” properly, didn’t know about wild cards, etc. Anyway, the first time we played the game lasted a few minutes. I know that with these particular students, if one of the boys doesn’t win IMMEDIATELY he will sabotage any game. If we continued playing short, rapid fire games we’d never be sure he would win fast enough to sate his competitive dickishness.

We started tweaking the rules. We added the “draw till you can play” rule, as well as the “Draw two/Draw four” defense, where you can block a Draw Two or Draw Four wild card with one of your own, passing on the draw to the next player. Soon there were situations where we were drawing twelve cards, then if we couldn’t play we’d draw a few more cards on top. We’d have a third of the deck in our hand at one time, and were never in any serious risk of finishing the game. The benefit of this game is that it almost never ends, but I was sort of running on a time limited budget.

I only play these sort of games after we finish all our work on the last day. Most of the time the games are more structured and finite in their duration. This was burning more time than I am usually comfortable with, but the students were enjoying it so I didn’t mind too much. I never play Uno in class because students will want to play it over and over again, but these students never see the same game twice, so they won’t get into that habit with me.

This was the same style of Uno my brother and I would play when my family was driving to Alaska and had hours upon hours to kill. As nice as it would be to play a game for a few hours at work, I needed to call a time limit and count the cards at the end to declare the winner. The kids have a month’s worth of vacation, and I have a few months to think up a few new ways to entertain them when we start the class again in January.