Caveat: Unknown Stories; Ad Hoc Recipies

My laziness continues.  I felt no desire to go out on a Friday night – so I've decided on skipping the Friday foreigner gathering in Yeonggwang – it's less appealing now, given it's a 30 minute bus ride away, than it was when I lived there in the town. 

So I came home, turned on the "radio" (streaming BBC), and cooked the most amazing ad hoc pasta dinner.  Very simple:  mushrooms, onions, garlic, stir fried in olive oil, with spices (including red pepper, oregano, basil, rosemary, ground bay leaves and coriander).  Add Korean-style tomato juice (which comes across as diluted tomato sauce since it's unsalted) which I let boil down for thickness.  Instant tomato mushroom onion pasta sauce.  Dinner – all ingredients bought in Hongnong (except the dried oregano and basil).

I was kind of off my game, teaching today.

You can tell I'm not having a good day, when the highlight of the day is finding a crying child in the courtyard, late in the afternoon.

How can this be a highlight?  Yu-bin was crying, some other kids were standing around.  She told a story, in Korean, that I didn't understand – something about sports and anger.  And then she pointed at a boy holding a badminton racket.  And cried harder.  The boy shrugged defensively.  I got the picture.

Some other kids came around.  But there were no other adults around.  In bad Korean, I ordered the boy to apologize to Yu-bin.  I didn't know what for, although I suspected some mild violence with a badminton racket was involved.  He bowed and apologized, mumbling.  I insisted he do it again.

Yu-bin stopped crying. 

Life has small, strange victories. 

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