Korean Dinner

I was invited to a Korean dinner last night…which was pretty odd.  I don’t mean the food was odd but the circumstances were.

One of my neighbors in PFA is this guy named Brandon.  He’s 1st generation American, both his parents having moved here from Korea.  He speaks perfect English and has a History degree from UCLA or UC Riverside.  He’s in freakishly good shape (like one of the most cut bodies I’ve ever seen) and a down to Earth nice guy.  He was the guy that invited me.

Molly is a girl in my Management classes who worked on the Project with me.  She’s in her mid 20’s and has been going to Les Roches for the past 3 years.  She actually met her husband here and got married last year.  She’s Korean and speaks with a fairly thick accent.  She’s very intelligent and an excellent student.  She invited me also.

The other guest was this girl…I forget her name…but she’s Korean too.  She’s nice but tends to speak more Korean than English.  I’m not quite sure what her story is but she’s lived in South America for some time now and speaks very good Spanish (with a Korean accent…which is REALLY hard to describe).  She’s Andrea’s (the Norwegian/New Zealander) roommate so I’ve met her once or twice.

It was a really cool meal.  Brandon and I just sat there talking and drinking wine while the girls prepared everything, cooked everything, and cleaned up everything.  I tried to help…but got a rather shocked “no!”…cultural I suppose.  We all sat on the floor with a big bag of lettuce and they cooked up some pork bellies, eggplant, onions and mushrooms, and we’d make little lettuce wraps with the different things along with salt and this amazingly good spicy chili paste.  It was a blast!

But what made it really strange was that, as the night progressed, it turned into Neil Talking About Everything.  They were all enthralled by my life, my thoughts, my decisions, my knowledge.  I was told, repeatedly, that I was the most intelligent person they all knew.  They kept asking me about all kinds of things…politics, science, education, the world, everything…and it was really surreal.  I didn’t quite know what to make of the whole thing.  I felt like…I don’t know…it was just strange.  Very cool but very very strange.

At first I thought they were trying to set me up with the other girl…but she has a boyfriend and they are really serious.  It seems…and this is so bizarre, but it seems that they just wanted to hear my thoughts on…everything.

This place gets stranger and stranger every day.

Note:  I really am not trying to sound cocky here…but it was seriously like that!