When 2% Hungry

Greetings. I just got back from a fun-filled adventure in the land of morning calm and of my heart: Korea.
I finished up another week of school, as normal, when I left you. Nothing to note well. I ended up not biking to the airport, sadly, but did get a ride to the train station from a friendly sucker at 5am. I landed and walked through the Seoul Incheon Airport wearing a T-shirt with Korean on it, to no one's reading. See, my foreigner friends and I always joked about how Koreans spend 5 hours a day studying English, yet buy and wear T-shirts with the funniest, least-sensical phrases on them. "How can they not spend the 15 seconds to try to decode their apparel?" Well, apparently they just see text as design, since they didn't take the time to read my shirt and it was in their native tongue.
I took the airport bus and got off right by my old house, then walked through my old stomping grounds, Shingal, to meet Hyeshin. It was fucking eerie. It felt like I had left 7 days prior - not 7 months... like my time in Minnie and Australia have been the vacation away from Korea. I don't know how to explain it and I definitely don't understand it, but for some reason I feel such a connexion to that, relatively, plain and unimpressive suburban-city. We met and then went out for a late dinner. This was one of the first of many, many, many meals, assuredly.
I fucking love Korean food. It's so tasty and varied and not expensive and interesting and don't make you feel bad if you eat too much of it. Plus my gf was paying for everything (what a champ), so I had no qualms of devouring every dalk, ddeok, and chigge in sight (chicken, rice cake, and spicy soup, respectively). The next week was a veritable orgy of food. I managed to gain about 6 pounds in the 8 days I was there, all of them done so with a smile on my face and a song in my belly.
Hyeshin and I went to some mountainous area and went hiking and dicking around for a while. Most people, when thinking about Seoul and S.K. think of it as being this concrete wasteland. Some parts of it are yes; oh, god, yes! But they have some great little mountains around there with some vistas that are quite gorgeous. We also spent some time lallygagging and literally dicking around:I also had some nice chances to meet up with some old friends from previous sojourns. Jason, YongJu, and Colleen from previous Koreanizing and Matt from Australia: 1st time. He had nothing to do this year, so I talked him into teaching English in the same program that I did. Unlucky for him, he got stuck in some rural shithole 30k south of North Korea.He's a champ, however and loves it. We had a rip-roaring good time drinking and eating our way around his tiny town. We visited one his favorite restaurants: the aforepictured and title of this post 'When 2% Hungry'. We had such a nice laugh since it is actually a cute name for a restaurant, but with a logic they did just not think through. Why would you go eat if you were only 2% hungry?! Oh man, what a laugh we laughed. We also did what is customary in any night on the town in this country: go to a Noraebong (literally 'song room'). This is the Korean version of the karaoke room and, in my opinion, much better. You get a small room (can comfortably seat 5-10ppl) for something like 10-15$ an hour. There are several tv screens, 2 microphones, and some tambourines and then you just rock out hard core. They have a big book of songs with enough in English to last you a long time. We really took home a couple Guns n Roses songs and kicked the shit out of "Dream on". The best part was that we paid 13$ for an hour when we walked in and immediately found a 1$ bill on the table. We started singing and saw a 10$ bill stuck to the TV screen! Also, the owners kept adding more time on our thing for free so we ended up paying 2$ for 2hours, what a deal!
I left Matt alone in his pisshole and went back to my sweet little town where I got to deal with another big highlight: revisiting Shingal Middle School: the birthplace of my Korea-centricism. It was so nice being back there, seeing all the little cute kids. Most of them whose names I knew initially, I still remembered and I even noticed when kids had different colour glasses or changed their hairstyles - an impressive feat when you had over 750 students (total) who all have the same uniform and hair length and colour. "And their reaction?" you query? Well, let this speak more than blog-words ever could:

It was amazing and awe-(and almost tear)inspiring to see all of them and how excited they were to see me. I asked them all and they assured me that I was a better teacher than their new English teacher.
Everything else was more or less plain, but in a good way. I cooked a nice meal for Hyeshin and her sister and we just spent a lot of time loafing, walking, and eating around. It's really quite strange that I have such an attachment to Korea but I was really fucking sad to leave last night. I haven't had a connection like this to Israel, my birth-country and place of youthful, sunlit summer vacations, nor to Minneapolis, the lake-ridden weather-forgotten formative-yearin' place of my family, nor to Brisbane, the sunburnt semi-tropical environmentally-friendly urbania I lived in once and decided to return to for a long time. I really was loathing leaving as after 10 quick days I felt like I had never left and I was so comfortable and happy with my surroundings that it was scary to leave that strange Asian country. The flight was sad and unspecial and passed quickly (thank you Ambien, pilfered from my gramma) and I landed in Brisbane at 6:45am and it was how I expected it: I was greeted with splendid weather but not with twang of joy and excitement in my soul. As I got off the plane and witnessed Koreans struggling with the language gap, I saw that I was back in my element. And that was no comfort. I took the train right away to school and made it almost on time for my 8am class.
Jesus, I didn't know that!1
I'll keep this one brief-ish:
- Equalizing your ears: people think that when you yawn or plug your nose and exhale to equalize, you're letting air into your ears, as that's how it feels. In fact, you're letting air out. When you go through a change of pressure (higher), air in your inner ear gets compressed and absorbed into blood; when the pressure drops back down (as in when you're landing in an airplane), the air decompresses and fills up your inner ear. This causes discomfort and by equalizing, you're contracting muscles surrounding a tube that connects the back of the very top of your throat (behind nose) to your ear (the tube is called the tympanicopharyngeal tube if you're curious) causing the tube to open and let air out. This tube is also very important in causing inner ear infections.
- Tattoos: you shed skin all the time, right? So how come tattoos are moreorless permanent and not sloughed off in a month or two? What happens is that when the ink is injected, your innate immunity organisms, called macrophages, come in and treat it like a bacteria or pathogen and eat it. Then they stay in the same place. They are fairly long-living and don't move after eating anything, so they stay there. Eventually they die and other macrophages eat them, in the same place; therefore, the tattoo hardly moves or blurs over time.