Spicy Eyeball Soup

This nice Korean family had invited me to their house for dinner in a friendly gesture that obviously intended to say, "we know you embarrassed yourself horribly, and here are some noodles to show you that we don't hate you for it".  Noodles make stuff better sometimes.  All I had to do, I thought, was politely sit through it and then everything would be right in the world again.

The nerve-torturing noodles were floating in a broth of what may have been liquid electricity. Everything the noodles touched on my body ignited into an invisible fire that water wouldn't put out, but I ate it like a stoic soldier, ignoring how profusely I was sweating. Even my knees were sweating.  They complimented me on my use of chopsticks and I tried to explain that I practiced in Canada  but couldn't get it out. My spice-swollen tongue only slurred incomprehensibly in a way that they nodded in apparent agreement with.

Things were going fine until I noticed the silence. It was sudden and made me hyper aware of the slurping noise that had been going on just seconds ago. It was like slurpysllllllrrrpslurpslurpyslurrrrp...slurrpslrrpslurrrrrrrrrp  and then * s i l e n c e *

What had happened was this: they were all slurping their noodles in their Asian-y way and I was "politely" not doing anything like that. If anything, I was being extremely quiet (my dad's version of polite, which doesn't apply in Korea, at all). My silence had made them self conscious and they were eating quietly now.

I felt imperialistic, in a bad way. I'm didn't come to Korea to make people eat noodles quietly. So naturally, I start slurping the noodles.  My face was already incredibly red from the spicy food; embarrassment wouldn't make it any worse.  Slurp slurp slurp!  They were all looking at me and I was eating away like, 'what? I'm just slurping my noodles like I always do. wtf's up?'

Then one stray noodle lashed back and forth as I sucked it in my mouth and it nailed me like a whip in my unblinking eye.  Like a whip that is covered with the angry seeds of enraged chili peppers.

Now, your eyeball is a part of your brain, and you generally don't want food to touch your brain, and this is especially true for aggressive son-of-a-bitch food.

*sigh* I tried to pretend it didn't happen, probably because I didn't want to seem so unbelievably accident prone.  I politely excused myself and washed my eyeball under the bathroom facet for about five minutes before returning.  Red and retracted with a mesh of exposed and stressed out red veins, my eye twitched involuntarily as I tried to continue dinner and make idle small talk about how delicious the food was and how it certainly hadn't burned my tongue and eyeball like a chemical weapon.  It was spilling tears so profusely that I'd drenched a napkin, and I smiled and politely talked, wondering if I didn't actually need medical attention to save my eye.

The End (of this blog post).