I would like to recount a story that happened not long after we arrived in Korea.

One balmy Friday evening, we decided to go out for Chinese food. We selected the most crowded restaurant in downtown, and waited for a little while. When we were finally seated, we shared a cosy table with another couple in the close-quartered restaurant.

Sitting around us was a table of burly teenage guys and a most unusual couple, where the woman looked like she had undergone a botched eyelid surgery. This means that it looked like her non-existent eyelids had been super glued to her eyebrows. When she looked down, her eyelids did not move. When she looked sideways, her eyelids did not move. When she blinked, her eyelids did not move. When she gazed lovingly [assumed] into her spouses eyes, he looked back into her exposed optic nerves. She looked like a sleep-deprived lemur.

Everywhere around us, people ordered plates of luscious, colorful, delicious dishes. Though I'm not sure what we were going for, we ended up ordering plain, dry, fried pork. Nothing else. Just a huge brown plate of it. Many of the pieces were quite large and needed cutting. But, we were not yet skilled with the chopsticks, and as it happens, cutting is one of the most difficult skills to master. We made many skillful incisions that night, but one false move with the chopsticks, sent our evening awry. It also sent a massive piece of fried pork shooting across the restaurant, incidentally, right past lemur-lady who, of course, couldn't blink, and as such, could not possibly miss the wayward pork.

Seeing as her eyes were almost 360, we could not escape her scrutiny as we stifled our laughter and debated whether we should pick up the gigantic pork piece before someone tripped on it and drove their chopsticks into the unguarded eyes of our neighbor.