Work in Progress

Today at lunch, I reminded myself that it's a work in progress.  Adjusting to culture takes time.  Lunch today reminded me of this.  I eat school lunch everyday.  The only utensils available are metal chopsticks and a spoon.  The spoon is more like a tablespoon in size, a little larger than standard spoons in the US.  I usually have NO clue what I'm eating and I don't ask.  If I don't ask, I'm more likely to eat it than if I know what it was.  Therefore, I've tried a lot of interesting things including seaweed soup, some kind of sweet fish skin something or other, duck meat (I think it was duck...), and several different side dishes of vegetables.  I've also eaten crab out of the shell that was in my soup, shrimp with tails still attached also in my soup, and fried fish with some kind of sweetish brown gravy with maybe onions in it.  If you can't tell from all the maybe and interesting descriptions, I honestly don't know what I'm eating.  I eat the rice and try most of the rest.  I don't like kimchi so I never eat that.  I did try it...3 times.  I gave kimchi a shot.

Anyway, lunch is always interesting to me.  Yesterday at lunch, one of the teachers was commenting to another teacher and obviously about me and my use of chopsticks.  They eventually translated loosely to me that he was saying I use chopsticks right and the teacher he was talking to does not.

All the good, proper chopstick technique did for me today!  Today we were served a large bowl of soup with noodles.  It looked really good.  It had shrimp it it too.  I tried the broth and it was good and not spicy which was excellent.  And then I tried to eat a noodle.  Fail.  And fail again.  I was having so much trouble my co-teacher went to ask if they had a fork I could use.  Guess what?!?  There are zero forks in my cafeteria!!  They brought me this tiny little thing.  I don't even know what it would be used for.  It has 2 prongs and they were the size of a normal fork.  The handle was slightly smaller in length. no clue.  But the noodles were so long and thick that it didn't help.  But after SEVERAL tries, I eventually got a noodle to my mouth.  Then I did not use a lot of great manners while trying to eat more of the noodle without it dropping back into the bowl.  By the end of lunch, I managed to eat about half of the noodles.  I definitely improved with time but will need to work on that some more for sure!

The whole time I just laughed in my head about it all.  It's all just part of learning to live in a different culture.  Good thing I have forks at home!