(KC Teacher is so boring, even HE falls asleep during class)
Whenever somebody wants me to dog sit for them, I almost always agree and always ask, "Does your dog have any allergies?" I make a note, and once the door is closed and the canine's trusting owners close the door and begin their vacation, I raid the fridge and play a game I like to call, What will this dog NOT eat?
As I've learned, dogs will eat almost anything except: grapefruit rinds, bloody paper towels (usually my blood), and those plastic bags cheap ‘n shitty day-old supermarket sushi is packaged in. However, they will eat banana peels, snot-covered Kleenexes, and those paper bags microwave popcorn comes in.
Since nobody really has a dog out here in the ROK (except for the occasional meal) I turned to the next best thing: Korean children. They're sort of like dogs. Both understand a few English commands, like to sleep as you talk to them, chase shiny things, love stuffed animals and make odd noises. Unfortunately, people look down on you if children start humping your leg: even if it wasn't your fault. Also, you're not supposed to shoot children when they get sick, but this is Asia and the details about laws are always a little fuzzy.
My next creation is going to be peanut butter and instant coffee on cardboard. I'm hoping this will wake them up, yet keep them chewing for minutes (so I can get some peace and quiet).
While I think I'm being really awesome, I hold a sneaking suspicion that the kids sit back and do the same thing. During breaktime they constantly offer you Pringles, shrimp chips, weird Korean candies, or little squishy rice tubes with the same consistency of rubber cement.
Sometimes, you just know that snack fell on the floor or was shot as a projectile from a nostril. While it's adorable to receive any percentage of a snack from a hungry child, I spend hours watching them picking their noses, scratching their butts, and seeing how many eraser chunks they can mix with broken pen ink.
(This is actually a good Korean meal, but I don't have any photos of shitty food.)
So I started passing out food I didn't want any more. I started with rice cakes that expired during another epoch (how can you tell if a rice cake is bad, does it get staler?). Later, I started some more experiments and learned Korean kids will eat mayonnaise sandwiches, raisins mixed with baked beans and chocolate gummy bears wrapped in the sticky part of Post-It notes.
The key phrase to say is, "It's a very famous dish from America," and these kids will snarf anything up and say, "Mmm-mmm, very yummy." The process is so cute I almost feel guilty. Almost.
There's one snack they give that always makes me gag, run to the teachers' lounge, and spit it out. It looks like a caramel ball covered in sesame seeds, but it's not. In fact, I don't know what it is because every time I eat one I try to erase the memory far from my mind. So I repeatedly eat the same thing, cringe, and cough it out once my little darlings aren't watching.
I guess that makes us even.