Appetizer!

Today I hung out with Loren. We went to a Vietnamese restaurant, had tea, and went grocery shopping. I gushed about Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth." I am really enjoying reading it. Thank God! It's such a relief to find great books. I've read a bunch of duds lately. "The Good Earth" is picture-perfect thus far. I'll talk a little bit about it when I'm done. For now, let me talk about the rest of my day.

I came home. I ran for a long time. I think I went a bunch of times around the track. It was a little scary. There were all these baseball players practicing pitches on the track. I thought I was going to be killed. I would get close to them, and then book my ass between them before a ball was thrown. A couple times people laughed at me. That's typical of Korea though, so I didn't think about it. (People could laugh at you for wearing a blue shirt, or something else that's less consequential, like your face. If you're a foreigner, you're a minority in Asia, and will get pointed at even if you're doing nothing at all.) I was a foreigner. I got pointed at. I kept running.

After a while, I got tired. I had bought this liter of water. Then I poured it on my head. It hurt a bit a t first. Like I had one of those headaches from over-exerting myself. Then I walked home. When I got home, my father-in-law told me it was too hot to go running. I told him I would go in the morning next time. He nodded his head. Then he got a bottle of Makoli (Korean beer). He drained the thing in three minutes.

"Another bottle?" I asked him, as he walked back to the kitchen where I was cooking some salmon.

"Appetizer," he smiled.

"Ha!" I laughed and smacked him on the back. Then I went back to cooking. I made salmon and a turkey burger. Then I ate them both. I went to my room. I wrote e-mails to friends. Then I started doing a power point on Greek tragedy. Then I wrote this. Now Sogee just walked into the room. I am going to talk to her.