When I was teaching in Korea some friends told me about this famous stew called Budae Jigae, which roughly translated means, "Military Soup." Everyone prefaces the description by saying, "It sounds horrible, but," which is a fair assessment. When food was scarce in the Korean War period people improvised and came up with this fusion soup of traditional Korean red pepper broth and added the hot dogs and spam that were readily available. It takes something like this to make me touch Spam with a ten foot pole, but I have to admit, this is pretty good food. The items below are fairly standard, but people have been known to add bulgogi, baked beans and rice cakes. If the idea of spam and hot dogs is too horrifying, one variation is to omit those and use a can of tuna. This is basically called chamchi jigae, and is also very good. It sounds strange, but it is a nice dish. Serve it over rice of course.3 tablespoons Korean soup stock mix
3-4 cups water
2-3 tablespoons gochujang or more if you like it even spicier
2 hot dogs sliced up
2 slices spam
2 green onions chopped up
3 garlic cloves chopped
tofu
1 or 2 packages of ramen noodles
bean sprouts
leafy vegetable like kale
kim chi, of course
Out in the open in one of the most polluted cities on earth, Incheon, it might seem like a good idea to wrap up those chickens sitting quite close to the exhaust fumes on this pick up. It was cold as hell that day, I'm not sure ice was the most important idea to be had. 
And how many eggs exactly can fit on one motor scooter, which leads me to the Ja Ja Myeong problem as philosophers call it. In Korea, restaurants will deliver food to your place in minutes, and they'll give you real plates. They come around and collect the plates and silverware from your hallway an hour or so later. Tipping is also forbidden. If you try to tip them, they'll refuse. The drivers take their scooters on snow and ice and take quite a few nasty spills. If you screw up in high school, noodle deliveryman is pretty much your fate. Late bloomers aren't such a huge feature of Korean society. I'd pose the question to my students on whether these guys were nuts to deliver food for little money risking life and limb, or noble servants doing their duty. Most sided with the latter option.
I used to live in this little office tel in Incheon, and I do mean small. I never knew any of my neighbors. I'd just hear the click of high heels late at night. The only people who would live in that place were English teachers, a ubiquitous lot in Korea, and room salon girls, who were equally ubiquitous. Korean businessmen pay a couple hundred dollars to sing karaoke, eat fruit and drink whiskey with young, attractive Korean women. Supposedly that was all that went on. Around that apartment I would see several ajummas, the perm was the telltale sign, carrying off the cardboard in their rickshaws.
Now this is a warning sign. How many drunken, pregnant, old people attempt to ride a roller coaster?
Unrelated to Korean experiences, but I took this in the late 90s on the Staten Island Ferry. It still seems like some kind of bizarre movie idea that those towers went the way they did. 
On the baseball front, the Yankees are doing an even better job of giving money to rich people than the Bush administration. A.J. Burnett killed the Yankees, and the Red Sox for that matter, over the last several years, and if he stays healthy will probably be a good signing, but I have to wonder about 290 pounds of CC Sabathia in the August heat at Yankee Stadium. This guy couldn't close out the Red Sox with a 3-1 series lead in the 2007 ALCS and now gets seven years and $161 million. Yikes. I have more faith in Burnett at about half that price. The Yankees are going to be more hated than ever with this over the top spending spree. No one was bidding even close to what they gave Sabathia, and who still wasn't in any rush to be a Yankee and has a three year escape clause in his bloated contract. The ticket prices at the new Yankee Stadium will be completely off the chain.
