School lunches – the good, the bad, and the ugly

When I move back to the states, I will never complain about a school lunch.  Amazing the things you appreciate when you move to a foreign country.

Every day is a crap shoot.  You never know what you’re gonna get.  And no, it is NOT like a box of chocolates.

Here is an average lunch: rice (every. single. day), kimchi (fermented vegetables), other goodies, and soup.  This particular day the soup was the main course.  It was mandu guk, or dumplings soup.  You get your two chopsticks and a spoon.  Nothing to drink.  There is warm water at the tables with little cups, but Koreans only drink a small cup of warm water after they finish eating.  So I’m the weirdo who brings her water bottle to lunch every day.  And I’m the weirdo who sometimes takes pictures of her lunch.  

This is the good: bibimbap.  It’s rice mixed with vegetables, egg (sometimes cooked and sometimes runny), red pepper paste (Koreans LOVE their red pepper paste), and sometimes meat.  It’s good.

Now for the ugly.  My LEAST favorite lunch.  Yes, that’s a whole fish.  With scales, bones, and the eyes.  And you have to use your chopsticks to pick out the meat.  But watch out for the TINY bones!  Good grief.  I teach at a blind school.  Students and teachers are blind.  Why would you do that?

Here’s a close up…

I kept feeling like it was looking at me.  Ugh.

Now for the bad.  I have no pictures because pictures would just not do it justice.  Every day we have soup.  On certain days, we have soup with tiny little shrimp.  Well…let me tell you….

The shrimp bodies come apart in the soup.  So you might have a head floating in your soup or a body.  There was a leg floating in my soup.  Literally.  A leg.  Now have you ever had that happen?  It’s a once in a lifetime experience, let me tell ya.  I don’t particularly like fish soup.  But especially when there are body parts floating around in my soup.  Just can’t do it.

Don’t you want to move to Korea and teach so you can have lunches such as these?