I Don't Get... Eating at Outside Temperature

Quite commonly during these harshest of winter days in Korea you can find a student on a snack break eating ice cream.  Six degrees Fahrenheit?  Time for ice cream!  Though its just not students, its adults as well.  You may not to be able to feel your hands but hey, why not freeze your mouth too.  However, I prefer students to eat ice cream rather than dried octopus.  Wow.  Remember that guy on the team that sweated the most and never washed his practice uniform.  Its like that.

The same goes for eating hot things during hot times.  Take Belize.  People here drink their tea hot, thanks to colonization, and put some hot sauce, Marie Sharps or otherwise, on everything.  Even when its 1,000,000 degrees.  Though with this custom I find that the tea is more for relaxation, a cultural mainstay, than for temperature balancing.  Not much A/C anywhere and you are sweating anyway so why not feel relaxed?  Also,  it is said in regards to the hot sauce, that if you make the food hot and spicy and raise the temperature in your mouth then the temperature outside your mouth is more bearable.  

As Anderson Cooper says, "You just have to see it for yourself."  Or taste it.

Watch, then Chew

          The morning after my stomach is unsure of itself.  "What was that!" it gurgled.  Simultaneously my breath said the same thing maybe it was the clove of pickled garlic, I think, that I ate.  It is the morning after a fellow teacher's going away dinner at a sushi restaurant where the tall, moderately inflexible, and novice chop stick fumblers struggle.  Kirsty and I joined our Korean counterparts to a meal where dishes were many and compact much like the housing in the country.  The seemingly endless courses were accompanied with seemingly endless questions of; 

What is that? 

And this is? 

Wow that's hot. 

I dip it in which sauce?  

Its OK to spit it out?

The latter question was in regards to this piece of 'food' that had odd tiny purple cone shaped somethings jetting out in various directions along its periphery.  It was kind of crunchy for a moment and then it was like chewing on a rubbery piece of wood.  I tried to man up but maned down when the look on my face garnered looks of defeat.

So, I now have a rule when eating abroad with country nationals - Wait till something is tried before trying yourself.    

Too, I learned that one is not allowed to pour their own glass of XYZ alcoholic drink and that you are to use two hands.

Another question was, "What do I do when I go to the bathroom?"  My shoes were left at the door as is custom.  "Man, I hope Koreans are not sprayers."  Funny the things you don't consider until you are in the situation.  Luckily the bathroom was quite tidy.  However,  it was only when I was leaving the bathroom that I noticed the complimentary shower shoes.  Which upon a return trip were worn and covered all but a 1/3 of my foot.

No doubt I am still vary gracious for the wildly cultural meal and drink, but my stomach left the restaurant, and continued the morning after, with mixed feelings of fullness and uncertainty.