I'm an angel

Last Friday my director asked me if I used Chapstick. I said yes. And she looked at me disbelieving and asked, “You know how to use Chapstick?” I assured her I knew how to use Chapstick, and I in fact had Chapstick at my apartment that I used all the time. She looked pleased and said, “Good, then next week we go out to eat and we’ll eat with Chapstick.” I then realized she meant chopsticks. So on Wednesday, the director took everyone from work out to a tofu restaurant. What makes it a tofu restaurant is that when you sit down they give you two dishes of tofu. That is all the tofu you see. Just two lumps of unflavored, squishy stuff. The rest of the food was delicious. There was octopus, pork, fish, kimchi, and about 20 side dishes. There was a delicious persimmon and cinnamon drink afterwards that was amazing. In Korea it is considered polite if you make noise while eating. So with the director and the two Korean teachers, there was plenty of slurping and open-mouth chewing. And you are also supposed to eat with the ferocity of someone who had not eaten in a month. I eat quickly by American standards, and I was the slowest eater there. Chopsticks were flying from dish to dish faster than my eyes could follow. And they eat a lot here in Korea. Since the food is so healthy, you have to eat a lot to get enough calories. My stomach hasn’t expanded yet so I was struggling to keep up with the pace of my coworkers. One of the Korean teachers even said, “If you don’t eat more you are not a man.” I guess I’m not a man. I can’t remember the last time I got out-eaten by four people, but it happened that night and the four people were all women that are about half my size.
After, dinner we went to a bar. Now, Korean bars are very different from American bars (even though this particular bar claimed to me and American bar). We had milkshakes, fruit and ice cream sundaes, and coppee (this is the Korean word for coffee; they have no “eff” sound). A Korean teacher named Erin told me that the mother one of my students told her that her daughter came home from school and told her that her heart burned for a boy, and that boy is me. The other Korean, Marie, told me that the same student told her that I looked like an angel. Marie then asked, “Well am I a demon?” And the student said, “No, you’re more like a witch.”
Oh, and the director told me that I use Chapstick very well.