I am proud to report that my photography will be featured in the DCist Exposed Photography Show for the second year in a row. Opening reception is March 6 at the Long View Gallery, 1234 9th Street NW. Get a preview.

Britney was one of my favorite students, and she was always coming into my classroom and asking me questions. She had chosen her own English name, ostensibly because of the somewhat mentally unstable American pop star.

“In English, how do you say…” and then she made a fart sound with her mouth. Her Korean faux fart sound was weak and flat, not strong and boisterous like an American fart. For a country whose entire population eats pickled cabbage at every opportunity—and so enthusiastically—I thought the impersonation would be a bit stronger, a bit more pungent. It’s times like this that I’m proud of my Americanism.

“You mean from your butt?” I knew what she was talking about, but I had to make sure. Foreign onomatopoeia is bizarre. One time I was teaching a lesson about animals and I made the mooing sound of a cow. This is how embarrassing my life was during this period, a period when I was reduced to making animal sounds in front of a bunch of kids who probably thought I was crazy. I’m glad that the only people who saw me teach were, for the most part, not paying attention.

One of my students told me, and I’m paraphrasing here, “That’s not what a cow sounds like.”

I asked the whole class to tell me what a cow sounds like, and the response was frightening, like hearing 40 cats being strangled. True, I’ve never heard a cat be strangled, but I was once in a friend’s car when he started the engine when a cat was, unknowingly, sleeping up underneath the manifold. I imagine the sounds are somewhat similar.

Britney laughed and put her hand over her mouth, like all Asian girls do. I still found this mildly annoying. Her friends didn’t understand, but Britney quickly translated and they all laughed, hands over their mouths.

“Yes,” she said. “From your butt.”

“It’s called a fart,” I told her.

“A part?”

“No, a fart. Say it with an F.”

“Fart,” she got it. She said it a couple of more times—“fart, fart, fart”—and that’s all it would take for her to remember it forever. She really was a bright kid. All of her friends tried to say it, but their pronunciation was off and, besides, they had probably already forgotten what it meant anyway.

“Why do you ask?”

“Eun Mi made a fart in class last period. It was very loud. Everybody laughed at her.”

Eun Mi was another student in the school, but she was also my nemesis—which is sad and somewhat pathetic for me to say, to actually admit I actually had a thirteen-year-old nemesis whose life I wanted to destroy—and I hadn’t broken her spirit yet. That would happen in a couple of weeks.

“You can just say she farted,” I told Britney. “It’s a noun and a verb.” She was one of my few students who understood the distinction.

“Eun Mi farted today. She is probably farting right now. She will fart again tomorrow. I think she farts very often.”

“Did it stink?” I didn’t really want to know what Eun Mi’s fart smelled like, but I always thought it was good to try to keep the conversation going with my students, especially if they were in the mood to practice.

“Stink?”

“Did it smell bad?”

“Oh yes!” She made face as she remembered it. “It was very terrible. Like bad kimchi.”

Britney told me a story about a type of kimchi her mother makes. Britney was always telling me stories about her huge, crazy, Korean family, and especially about her crazy mother. Her whole family seemed to be completely insane.

“But I won’t eat it because it tastes like a fart in a bowl. Sometimes I tell my mother that I can’t eat it because you can’t eat a fart with chopsticks.”

I thought this kid was hilarious. I don’t know if she was intentionally trying to be funny, but she must have realized by now that I thought all of these things she said were absolutely ridiculous, and I love things that are ridiculous. I guess that’s what I was doing in this country. Exploring the ridiculous.

Britney spent a lot of time complaining to me about Eun Mi and Hadrian, or, I should say, we spent a lot of time commiserating. Our student-teacher relationship was a little odd because Eun Mi was Hadrian’s favorite student, but she was actually my student—the same way Britney was my favorite student but she was actually Hadrian’s. If I could have I would have gladly traded Eun Mi for Britney—a sort of middle school prisoner exchange—and I think my life would have been much easier. I think Britney felt the same way. One time she even told me after one of his classes, “I don’t think Hadrian speaks English very well,” which I thought was poignant, sad, and accurate all at the same time.

Eun Mi and Britney hated each other, and in a way they were complete opposites. Britney was smart and popular and everybody loved her. Although it sounds kind of lame, she won first place in a poetry contest sponsored by the school, and I was under the impression that it was a pretty big deal. Eun Mi was lazy and difficult to deal with, the worst possible student in the entire school, and worse, a complete and total asshole. And, apparently, she had terrible gas. Even though I hated Eun Mi, I could almost understand why she despised Britney so much. She was an ass-kisser.

Britney, who was only fourteen, had also managed to bypass the awkwardness of adolescence that most of us have to suffer through, and she was still adorable in the way little girls are. In a few years she would probably be undeniably attractive—which I’m sure infuriated Eun Mi, whose face was brutal, like a troll.

Of course, like a lot of middle schoolers all around the world, Britney wasn’t very happy most of the time, and she would often complain to me that she wished she didn’t live in Korea anymore. Korean students, even those in middle school, often go to afterschool instruction until as late as midnight, and then come home and study more. To me it seems unnecessary. Britney told me once that she felt like a slave.

“You can always leave,” I suggested, and, even though it ran contrary to how she felt and I wasn’t even sure if it was true, I added, “It’s a free country.”

“I’m only fourteen!” She brought up a good point that I hadn’t even considered. She just seemed a lot older. She really was a lot smarter than me. It was pretty humbling.

The only thing Britney and Eun Mi had in common was that neither one of them was very athletic, but even in that regard they were opposed. Britney could write poetry and was approaching fluency in four languages—she was also excelling at Mandarin and Japanese, in addition to English and her native Korean—but she was delicate; I doubt she could have lifted more than ten pounds over her head. Eun Mi was just an oaf, plain and simple, and very uncoordinated. She was constantly falling out of her chair. Sometimes I wondered if she had an inner ear problem.

There was one girl in my classes, Sang Hee, who was the undeniable queen jock of the school. She was kind of androgynous—when I first saw her I honestly thought she was a boy from the high school next door—and she wore her gym uniform every day, all day, a habit that I thought was very strange. She had bad teeth and this really goofy laugh that was very deep and manly, like Santa Claus. But, she was nice and never disruptive, so I never had a problem with her, though I’m pretty sure her soccer ball probably could have learned English faster than she could.

On Sunday afternoons I would often go to this dirt field near my apartment and play soccer with a guy I had met at the corner store—he insisted I call him Dragon—and his friends who were all physical education students at the local university. I’ve never been good at soccer, but it was a way to get some exercise, learn some curse words in Korean, and drink beer with the locals.

Anyway, Sang Hee showed up one afternoon unexpectedly and worked us all over, scoring three goals in a row against a crew of guys eight years older than her who were all majoring in soccer. Naturally when something like that happens—I think Sang Hee was somebody’s sister—the Neanderthal in all us men wakes up and thinks he’s being emasculated, that his balls are being cut out from underneath him.

Sang Hee was very strong and didn’t mind getting pushed around a little bit—I’m sure she liked playing up to the competition—but one guy, Jin, took it a little too personally and slide tackled Sang Hee with a maneuver that was clearly illegal, and then said something to her when she was on the ground that Dragon refused to translate for me. Jin was probably trying to get inside her head, but Sang Hee wasn’t fazed by things like that. She just got up, didn’t even brush the dirt of her shirt, and eventually stole the ball back. When the time was right she planted her foot and kicked the ball as hard as she could, striking Jin in the face and splitting his lip open. I remember there was a brief mist of blood in the air, like when someone gets shot in the movies.

Sang Hee went up to Jin when he was lying on the ground. “Sorry about that,” she told him, “but next time, if you don’t want to get hurt, then it would be a good idea not to put your face between the goal and one of my shots.” After that Jin didn’t slide tackle as much.

I didn’t score any goals that day….0 out of 100,000.

Ron and I met when our girlfriends started living together in 2004, which was also an election year, but we met in the summer when nobody was talking about voting yet. Both of us ended up spending a lot of time at their new place, partly because our own apartments were in such shambles.

My real apartment, the one I actually paid rent to inhabit but never spent any time at, was shared between me and two other guys who were pretty big slobs. I don’t think I ever saw the bottom of the sink the entire time I lived there since no one ever washed the dishes. It was the kind of apartment where if you opened up the fridge, the only thing edible inside would be some ketchup and, maybe, a couple of cans of beer—Burger Beer, probably, a brand that although it’s cheap and common throughout the Midwest, people never seem to even be aware of its existence. If you were lucky there might have been some old, crusty pizza.

There were two bathrooms, which was nice, especially since a week after we moved in one of my roommate’s brothers stayed the weekend with us, drank too much rum and whisky and beer, and threw up all over the floor of the smaller bathroom. Nobody bothered to clean it up until we moved out a year later—we just kept the bathroom door closed and pretended it didn’t exist—a testament to how dedicated all of us were to our own sloth and filth. Needless to say, it was hardly a place I felt like rushing home to after a long day. It was all very depressing.

My own bedroom was also little more than a closet and, besides, I didn’t own a bed and slept on the floor. One time a friend of mine got crabs so bad, he dragged his mattress outside and lit it on fire, just to make sure he wouldn’t get reinfected with his own pubic lice. Luckily, nothing like that happened to me. What could I have done? Ripped up the carpet I slept on every night and thrown it out the window? Then I would be in an even worse situation: infested with crabs, out of a security deposit, and sleeping on hardwood floors.

Sleeping on the floor for long stretches of time, like for over two years like I did, actually isn’t all that terrible and you really do get used to it—certainly better than sleeping on a rock, which I’ve also done, which is only slightly better than sleeping on a pool table, which I’ve also done and was probably the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been—but nowhere near as nice as a big, comfy, girly bed with lots of pillows.

Ron’s place, which I never saw, was equally as dumpy in my understanding, but also infested with fleas. He spent even less time at his place than I did at mine.

The apartment of our girlfriends was better—I mean, what couldn’t be?—but only marginally so. On the day they moved in I found a bat hanging off the towel rack in the bathroom. It was pretty creepy, and at first I thought it was dead, and wondered if bats could still retain a decent grip with their feet even after they had expired. I felt manly capturing and releasing it outside, even though I’m pretty sure it was just a baby. But, our girlfriends, thankfully, weren’t stereotypical bachelors, which was important. It’s definitely one of the reasons I liked both of them so much.

That summer I somehow managed to get an overpaying teaching job where, if I lived frugally enough, working twenty hours a week provided me with a surplus of cash. Ron was living off a research grant with the goal of finishing his thesis by the end of the summer, but he wouldn’t get it done until the next year, mainly because it was pretty hot that summer, so we had to spend a lot of time drinking beer without our shirts on so we could cool off.

More importantly, Ron and I had our own project we were working on. I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say it involved a lot of Super Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo. Only a 7^th grader in 1994 would devote more than a half an hour to this game, but here we were, two young men on the cusp of adulthood, wasting our summer playing antiquated video games. Looking back, in a lot of ways it was the least productive summer of my life, but also the best.

Anyway, Ron wore hard contact lens, which I don’t even think exist anymore. I’ve never worn them, but they seem awfully uncomfortable, like letting a glass plate contort the shape of your eye, which I guess is basically what they do. At night you have to soak and scrub them in hydrogen peroxide to get all of your eye crud off before you can rinse and wear them again. If you take good care of them they can last for a long time, but the entire process just seemed so time consuming. No wonder he wasn’t making much progress on his thesis.

I used to use a lot of hydrogen peroxide in a lab I used to work in, but I was sloppy and constantly spilling the stuff all over my hands and wrists, bleaching the hair completely white. It was almost as bad as the time I spilled silver nitrate all over my hands, which turns skin black on contact, and made it look like I had terrible frostbite and that all of my fingers should have been amputated.

The lab had a huge gallon jug of hydrogen peroxide that was always sitting next to this other chemical, which I never used, but one of the Chinese grad students told me that if you stuck your finger in it you would taste battery acid in your mouth. He gave me a long explanation that I didn’t completely understand about how it gets into your nerves and messes up your senses. Before long, he told me, everything tastes like battery acid, not chicken.

“But don’t taste it, even with your finger” he cautioned me, as if I was curious to try it. “I’m pretty sure it’s also a brain carcinogen. I had a friend in Beijing who died of brain cancer, and he worked with that stuff everyday.”

I didn’t want to get brain cancer, so I moved the hydrogen peroxide to another shelf, far away from that other chemical, the one that causes brain tumors, but the next day my boss told me to move it back and not to mess up his intricate shelfing system again. I didn’t like that job anyway, so I quit. Eight dollars an hour is hardly worth waking up every morning to a breakfast of battery acid, only to slowly die as a tumor expands in your brain.

The summer ended and classes resumed, my last semester of college, and Ron and I were still mooching off our girlfriends’ apartment. Ron still hadn’t finished his thesis, but with my help he had made great advances in the field of Super Street Fighter II, and I was proud of him. At the end of the semester we threw a party, mainly for me because I was graduating. I don’t really remember much of it, but my brother was there and he fell sleep on the heating vent and burned his face, and another one of my friends threw up off the balcony. Too much Burger Beer and Jaeger will do that to anybody.

The next morning I had to go to the graduation ceremony, which meant putting on a suit. Putting on a suit when you’re hungover isn’t very fun, and to me it seems very contradictory. Suits are for people who are in control and know what they’re doing, and here I was, young, stupid, hungover, blind with a headache, and I had overslept and hadn’t had time for a shower. I didn’t deserve to be wearing a tie.

For some reason I decided to wear my contacts, and this was when I reached for Ron’s bottle of hydrogen peroxide, which looked exactly like my bottle of saline solution. I washed both of my contacts with the hydrogen peroxide, unknowingly, and then put in the left lens and immediately knew whatever was in that bottle wasn’t meant to go on your eye. I’d had plenty of chemical irritants spilled on me before, since I was such a klutz in the lab, but never was I clumsy enough to actually spill anything on my face. I couldn’t see, and the pain was terrible, completely engulfing the entire eyeball. Even worse, my contact was already on my eye, so I had to scratch it out of there with my peroxide stained fingers.

I screamed and honestly thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. I spent the next twenty minutes washing out my eye in the sink, which helped and soon my vision returned. I was pretty happy about that. Of course, I looked even worse now—my eyes weren’t even uniformly bloodshot anymore.

Maybe one day I’ll write about something important….9,099 out of 10,000.

My apartment building was small and cramped, basically a filing cabinet for a lot of old people and a couple of other foreigners. Inside my room there was a hundred-foot length of rope and a carabineer inside a box mounted to the wall, with instructions in English and Korean telling you how to repel down the side of the building in the event of a fire. There were also instructions—instructions I had deciphered word-for-word with the help of my Korean dictionary—to head to the 15^th floor or higher in the event of a poison gas attack, and wait for rescue. There were only fourteen stories, but, it was home. Well, a place to sleep, really.

I walked in the door and the guard, the lonely old man who never seemed to stand up or leave his desk or be off duty, stood up and acknowledged me for the first time ever. He waved me over and I thought maybe he had missed me, that maybe he was wondering where I had been for the last month.

I went over to his desk and he gave me a key. Very slowly in English he told me “3-1-7,” while holding up the appropriate number of fingers.

I was a little bit confused. “My room is 617,” I told him in Korean.

“No, no, no,” he said. “New room.”

My school paid my rent and arranged my apartment so, I guess, they reserved the right to move me around without telling me while I was away on vacation. It was annoying but, in retrospect, not very surprising. School was constantly being cancelled for a random day each month, and I would show up in the morning only to be greeted by a locked door because nobody ever told me about it. I never knew what was going on.

Even though my new apartment was in the same building with an identical layout, it was noticeably shittier. I don’t know why, but cigarette butts clogged the shower, which I felt was even grosser than having to pry out somebody else’s hair, which is what I had to dig out of the sink when it didn’t drain as I was brushing my teeth. There were dirty dishes left on the kitchen counter that reeked of old Korean food, a smell I had worked so hard at in my old apartment to keep outside. I looked in the fridge and catalogued the food I would throw away before I went to sleep—an entire fish, a quart-sized container full of kimchi, half a dozen packages of tomato-flavored yogurt. There was a single beer inside too, a Cass, not my favorite of the Korean beers, but I opened it up and drank it anyway. I guess one should never complain about free beer.

A thin layer of black dust coated every surface, and I wasn’t really looking forward to scrubbing it all off. It was after midnight, I had classes starting in two days, and I just wanted to sleep. All of my belongings had been already been moved and were sitting or hanging in the same places I had left them in my old room, and I thought this was very creepy and disconcerting. It would have been better if everything had been dumped into an unorganized heap on the floor. I wanted to complain and get an explanation, but knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, so instead I just wet a rag and started mopping up the floor.

I made a note to talk to Fede on Monday morning, the Korean maintenance guy who had grown up in Argentina and was now working at my school. He said his parents had forced him to move back to Korea to solidify his citizenship, but since he suffered from paralyzing back spasms he wasn’t allowed to join the army like most Korean men, so instead he had to work at our school where he wasn’t even paid. He longed to be back in Buenos Aires where people knew how to dance properly and he could hit on girls. Fede was kind of weird, and I think I could understand why Korean girls didn’t like him hitting on them. He only wore oversized football jerseys, but he was nice and it was easier to talk to him in my broken Spanish than work through a conversation in Korean or English with the administration. Besides, he was probably the guy who had packed up all of my stuff and moved it.

When I was down washing the floor, I noticed a Korean penny on the floor. I tried to pick it up, and when it didn’t even budge, I guessed that it had been shellacked onto the floorboards the last time a fresh coat of varnish had been put on, whenever that was. I tried to force it up with my fingernail and, when that failed, a credit card and finally the claw of a hammer before giving up and telling myself that it didn’t really matter.

Fede wasn’t very helpful…65,034 out of 100,000.

I didn’t even notice until we shook hands, when I reflexively looked at his hand because it felt so weird. It was very hard, with all these misshapen lumps of bone sticking out all over the place, but it was also kind of swollen and squishy. I think it might have been the softest skin I’ve ever felt on a person; it was just so silky and smooth. Newborn asses are like 200-grit sandpaper compared to this guy’s hand. I recoiled in horror when I finally looked at his hand, to see it actually touching my own. I mean, he might as well have offered me a severed head on a platter, based on my reaction. It was embarrassing for me, to so directly call attention to someone else’s deformity, and in such an open and undeniably distasteful way, like a child pointing and laughing and throwing food at somebody in a wheelchair at the mall.

“Oh,” he said to me when we stopped shaking hands, clearly unoffended that I had flinched and backed away after touching him. I think he must have gotten it all the time, so he must be used to it by now. “You noticed my hand, uh? Best thing that ever happened to me.”

Klaus told me how he used to work in a factory until his hand got, as he put it, “caught and grinded into a machine” when he was 30 which, to me, might be one of the most horrible experiences that could happen to someone. I’d rather get my foot chopped off by a lawnmower.

“Boy, I really hated that job,” he reminisced. “I mean, even before the accident I hated it, you know?” he clarified. “But what else is a poor kid from Hamburg supposed to do?”

The ambulance took him to the hospital where he spent the next four days in a morphine-induced coma. In the meantime, the doctors—“good, German doctors, and maybe even an American”—had operated, sewing together that freakish mitt of his.

After that he let me look at his hand up close. He had maybe half of thumb; the rest of the flesh had been pieced together and assembled into a bizarrely-shaped flipper with an absurdly long pinky finger. He didn’t have anymore fingernails left to trim. I don’t know where all that skin came from, if you can even call it that since it was a web of criss-crossing scar tissue.

He wasn’t shy at all about his hand, opening and closing it like a crab, showing me that he could still write and use a fork and even build a house of cards. He was right-handed, and said it was easier to learn to use his new flipper than learn to do anything with his left hand. He said he still couldn’t feel very much with it, which he proved by pulling out a lighter and holding it underneath his palm long enough that I half-expected him to have a second-degree burn, but he said he’d learned to live without any feeling in his right hand.

“Besides,” he said holding up his left hand and looking at it, “there’s nothing wrong with the other one.”

Even so, his right hand was still an ugly hack-job. “What carpentry school did your doctors go to?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t. I’m surprised it hadn’t fallen apart a long time ago, like in the 80s. It just looked so haphazard and unplanned and unfortunate, like surgery that would have been done in the 1800s. It should be put in a museum next to a picture of a guy with a hole drilled in his head to let the demons out. It was hardly an example that most surgeons would be willing to put on their resume.

Now Klaus lived off a sizable pension and insurance payments that allowed him to travel—something he had never done before, having lived the first 30 years of his life without ever leaving Hamburg—provided he lived frugally and stayed in the kind of countries that most people couldn’t identify on a map.

Klaus was so happy about the hand and what his life had now become, and clearly loved telling his story, that it almost seemed appropriate to say, “That must be pretty nice, having a mutilated hand and everything.” Listening to him really made me jealous that I wasn’t as lucky as him. I was pretty envious, really, and getting kind of depressed just thinking about it. I mean, I don’t have a deformed anything.

A blizzard hit that night, and with nothing else to do, I was stuck inside the next day watching bad American movies with Klaus and Marius, the Romanian kid who ran the hostel. I was still kind of mad at Marius because he was kind of an idiot, and he had locked me out two nights before, on a night when I had almost been stabbed by a gang of teenagers.

We watched Dodgeball, the Ben Stiller movie, which features David Hasselhoff in a cameo.

“Hey, I met that guy once,” Klaus said when Hasselhoff appeared on screen for the first time.

“He’s really great!” He stood up and gave Hasselhoff a very lop-sided round of applause.

Man, Klaus, I really do miss you, wherever you are….98,098 out of 100,000.

This is my route, roughly, in case you were curious.

Want a postcard? All you have to do is ask. I will be back in the fall with thousands of photos, a few good stories, and hopefully a couple of scars.

Have a good summer. See you soon.

11,538 miles (out of 100,000) left to go.

I arrived at her office, and the secretary told me to wait while she checked to see if Susan was in. I waited, looked down at her desk and saw three small fishbowls, each containing a small goldfish in a different state of expiration. The word fishbowl is really a generous title, as they were really just small glass jars, no bigger than coffee cups—something you would store paperclips in, or a handful of Hershey’s Kisses—not containers suitable for live animals that needed to swim around in, I don’t know, at least a quart of water.

The fish on the left was clearly dead, belly up at the surface. It was kind of remarkable how stereotypical it was, how fish can only float in this one position after they’ve died. The one on the right had passed away long ago, only leaving behind brown murky water and the lumpy remains of its body. The one in the middle, head at the surface, pathetically gasping for air, could only pass his dying moments by looking around and seeing his own near and distant future in the jars surrounding him. His one eye, looking up at me from the surface, was asking me to help him save his dignity by getting this all over with and just flushing him down the toilet already. Clearly he hadn’t had much of a life, even by the standards of a goldfish.

I imagined this woman keeping all her animals in terrible conditions, never knowing that there were more responsible ways to go about pet ownership. At home she probably had ferrets living in mailboxes, hamsters in Tupperware, a bird in a shoebox, puppies trying to run around inside a burlap bag under the bed. As long as their bodies could fit inside, then it must be good enough.

The secretary came back after a minute. Maybe she honestly just didn’t know about the condition of her fish, just like how you just don’t know when you have food stuck between your teeth. Maybe nobody had ever told her the obvious, that her fish weren’t doing so well.

“I don’t think your fish are doing so well,” I said, pointing to her jars.

She looked down at her fish with a look of stern disapproval, like she was shaking her head at a disobedient child who was being forced to sit in the corner.

“They’re always acting like that. They’re just faking it,” she said before adding, “They’ll be fine.”

“Oh,” I replied, glancing at the mud-colored pudding of a goldfish on the right side of the desk that had clearly been rotting for quite some time. Who knows, maybe they would be just fine. I was hardly an expert. The last time I had a non-mammalian animal to take care of was in the 8^th grade, when we were all assigned crayfish and anoles to study in their little plastic bio-domes. All of the crayfish ended up dying over Christmas break when nobody came in to feed them or change the water in their aquariums for three weeks. I still remember how bad that room smelled. Most of the anoles managed to survive the winter break, except for mine which was devoured by the very crickets we had placed in the terrarium for it to eat.

“Stupid anole,” I thought when saw the half-eaten remains upon my return. “How could you not figure this one out?” A billion anoles in the world and I manage to get the vegetarian who couldn’t even put up a decent fight against a handful of bugs. Every ecosystem it seems, even the ones you buy in a plastic box and watch on your desk, can be a cruel place.

The secretary told me that Susan was in her office, so I forgot about the fish and the anole and I walked down the hall. I found Susan in her office at her computer, talking to herself in a clearly audible voice.

“I’m just so busy. Got all these emails. Oy.”

Susan worked in the English as a Second Language Department at my university. With graduation looming and no real plans, I had agreed to teach English in Korea. It was either that or move back home and sleep on the floor at night while slowly being driven insane by my parents, something I would wish on nobody. And I only had sixty dollars left in my bank account.

She told me to have a seat. “I know, I know—you’re not supposed to smoke these in university buildings,” Susan said as she removed a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, “but I have ways of getting around all of their rules.”

She pulled a screwdriver out of her desk, jamming it between the screen and window frame, cracking plastic and twisting metal. Once the screen was pried open a couple of inches, she lit up a cigarette and let it hang outside the window as she exhaled through the screen.

“The administration can be so uptight around here, but what they don’t know can’t hurt them.”

It was like watching the guy who lived across the hall from me when I lived in the dorms, who would smoke pot and exhale through a cardboard tube lined with dryer sheets, which did little, if anything, to conceal the smell. He eventually got kicked out of the dorms for stealing glassware from the chemistry department, which he had fashioned into an impressively sized bong. The last I heard his mom had tricked him into going to rehab in Minnesota.

“I loved teaching and living in Iran,” Susan told me, who had taught English in Iran back in the 70s, while taking a drag. “But then, you know, the revolution happened and I had to leave in a helicopter from the embassy,” she added, nonchalantly, dismissing the Islamic Revolution with a wave of her hand.

“Don’t worry though. Nothing like that could ever happen in Korea.”

“Now, if you have any teaching experience—lifeguarding, for instance—” I almost stopped her, wanting to ask if lifeguarding really was teaching experience, since you mostly just sat in a chair all day, not really talking to anybody, but I decided to let it slide, “—then you should put that on your resume for sure. The Koreans like to see that you’ve been in a classroom before.”

Her advice, though good intentioned and more or less sound, didn’t seem to make sense. I’d already applied and been accepted. I mean, I already had a work visa in my passport and everything, and a plane ticket. Again, I decided not to bring it up.

Susan’s husband came into the room, one of the largest people I’ve ever met with a thick beard and British accent. That guy had to have been, I don’t know, at least nine feet tall and just as wide. He seemed nice and shook my hand with his soft, dinner plate-sized hand. I’ve always wondered how couples like this manage to get together—Susan, maybe five feet tall, and her husband, who very well could have been a trained bear.

Our meeting ended—“That’s enough for today,” she told me, “I think we’ll get going now”—unsure if we had even talked about anything, except maybe how to get away with smoking while inside a state-owned building. Why had I even made any appointment to talk to her anyway? I couldn’t really think of a reason.

Two days before my flight, Susan called me on my cell phone, desperately worried that since I was unprepared to teach in Korea. She was practically hysterical on the other end.

“It can be really tough over there. You might not be able to handle it at all,” she said, contradicting everything she had been telling me since I first met her. “It’s very, very strange over there.”

I made an appointment to see her next day, the day before I had to leave at 5 AM to make it to the airport on time, but she ended up standing me up. I think that was the first time that had ever happened to me, and, to be honest, it made me kind of sad. The secretary—her fish, apparently, still doing fine according to her—mentioned something about Susan needing to leave early and get started on dinner.

The next day I got on my flight, a fully loaded plane at O’Hare, and went to Korea. I was picked up at the airport by Mr. Lee, Susan’s contact in Korea who arranged schools for everyone to teach at, and his 14-year-old daughter, which I thought was kind of weird. I guess he didn’t want to leave her at home alone. He was nice and claimed to have learned English from reading novels with the help of a dictionary, which I also thought was kind of weird. Maybe I should have read more Korean novels when I was over there.

As soon as I could I emailed Susan and told her that I had arrived and things were going pretty good. She never returned my email and I never heard from her again. I heard later that she ended up quitting after Mr. Lee was replaced by another guy, Mr. Kim, who was kind of a jerk.

But, everything turned out alright in the end, except for the fish (they died)…34,899 out of 100,000.

One of the first meals I had when I arrived in Korea was a full-grown octopus, which the waitress brought to our table when it was still healthy and able to crawl around and look at us. It was big, with a head the size of a soccer ball and arms that easily could have been over four feet long. Our waitress plopped it into a pot of boiling water in front of us and put a glass lid on top, so I could see the octopus inside squirming around as it was being boiled alive, frantically trying to push the lid off with its arms. It was pretty sad, it’s futile attempt to save its own life. As you can imagine, it didn’t manage to last too long in there. When it was fully cooked and dead our waitress grabbed a pair of scissors and started cutting open its head, causing all of its brains and guts to leak out everywhere. She gave me a big spoonful of the brain and octopus broth and one of its arms, all covered in suction cups. It was alright, I guess. At the time though, I did feel kind of bad about it because octopi are really smart. If we lived under the sea they would be our pets.

Hadrian had probably eaten more than a few things people could consider pets. He was especially into eating dog in Korea, but he is also the only guy I’ve ever met who proudly claims to have killed and eaten a rat. Sometimes my Korean friends would tell me not to worry about eating dog, that it was fine since in Korea they only eat “basic, yellow dog” which, as far as I can tell, basically means golden retrievers and Labradors.

I went with Hadrian to a market once to find a special dog soup that’s served in the summer. I forget the name of it, but the idea is that you eat this extremely hot and spicy soup and then somehow it will cool you off, like a glass of lemonade. I never understood how a boiling hot bowl of soup that has been spiced with hot peppers and garlic was supposed to make you stop sweating, but Hadrian swore by it and ate it whenever he got the chance.

“Must be something in the dog meat, since they got different DNA and everything,” was the closest I ever got to a real explanation from Hadrian.

The live animal market in Korea is kind of a funny place, and based on the kind of looks we got walking through it, not the type of environment Koreans appreciate a pair of dopey white guys wandering around in. I doubt you’ll find the address listed in a guidebook. In the back we found the small café Hadrian had been looking for. The first thing I noticed when we sat down was the thick smell, like a dog coming in from a thunderstorm. There was just one old and wrinkled woman working there. I don’t think she really wanted to serve the dog soup to us, but Hadrian can be loud and demanding when he wants to be, so she caved and gave us each a bowl after he started banging on the table with his fist. It was like a dozen other bowls of cheap soup I’d had in Korea, with noodles, vegetables, and a few pieces of crumbly meat. It was hot, though, one of the spiciest dishes I’ve ever eaten. Real hot. So hot that it didn’t even really taste like anything, which I guess was probably a good thing. And, no, it didn’t make me feel any cooler. I don’t think I would order it again, no matter how sweltering the weather.

You don’t have to be that adventurous, or know somebody like Hadrian, to find weird foods. A lot of people when I tell them that squid is a common snack in Korean movie theaters usually exclaim, “Oh, I love calamari!”, but this is a little bit different because it’s not lightly breaded with a splash of seasonings dipped in marinara sauce, but just a tentacle with its huge suckers still attached that’s been sitting on a grill in a movie theater for a few hours, kind of a seafood version of a hotdog from 7-Eleven. Trying to eat a grilled squid tentacle is like trying to chew through a tire, and for some reason they were never cooked very evenly. One side would always be all blackened and charred and kind of tasted like gravel, and the other side would be all soft and raw and pink. Whenever I went to the movies I always ended up getting stuck next to the guy (there’s assigned seating at movie theaters in Korea) who would slowly gnaw through a couple of plugs of the stuff over the course of the movie.

Beondegi also is a very common street food that you’ll see if you ever go to Korea, usually being served out of these big, wide woks full of boiling water. One of my Korean friends described beondegi as, “a snack, you know, like popcorn,” but that’s a very misleading description of what it really is: boiled silkworm pupae. Not that I have a problem with eating insects—I once ate a scorpion (technically not an insect, but whatever) that was roasted on a stick—but the fumes from the beondegi woks were absolutely suffocating and gag-inducing. The beondegi man always seemed like the saddest of the street vendors, constantly awash in the steam of his own food. Later I found some canned beondegi at the grocery store by my apartment. I never bothered to open up a can because the photo on the label was just as nauseating as the smell, but I used to pick up a couple of cans every so often and mail them to my friends in the US, but none of them ever thought it was very funny. Supposedly it tastes better than it smells, but that’s the only compliment I ever heard anybody say it.

Another time I went to a restaurant in Korea with some other Americans and Canadians, and they gave us a menu in English that very clearly said chicken anus was an entrée. Just chicken anus.

“How can that be a satisfying meal?” I asked my friends, but they weren’t very interested in finding out. I tried to ask the waiter to clarify, but I never knew the word for anus in Korean, so he walked away in the middle of our conversation.

A minute later the chef came out. “Look, dude,” he said to me in English, “you definitely do not want to order that.” We asked him where he learned his English, and he said he had lived in Florida as a kid, before his parents forced him to move back to Korea so he could work in their restaurant as a cook. He didn’t seem very happy about it.

We asked him why he didn’t change the menu to read as something more appetizing, but he just shook his head and said it was better that way.

“This way no foreigners will ever order that dish. Seriously,” he added before he headed back to the kitchen, “don’t eat the chicken anus.”

We decided to take his advice. He probably knew where that anus was coming from.

Of course, the best foods are fried. I was living in Spain when I was very little, and my parents said the local restaurants would grab entire nests of baby birds, flash fry the brood when they were still alive, then put them back into the original nest before serving them to you. I wish I had been old enough for solid food at the time.

A friend of mine, when traveling through Peru, told me how he somehow managed to befriend a young Peruvian kid, even though this kid only knew a handful of words in both Spanish and English, and my friend’s knowledge of Quechua was pretty meager. His new friend told him that he would treat him to a meal, and after a harrowing, hour-long moped ride through the jungle, they arrived at a dirt-floored restaurant that only served guinea pig. They prepared it by skewering the whole animal—bones, fur, claws, eyes, and everything else—then deep frying the entire thing in an oil drum heated underneath by an open fire. They slapped it on his plate and my friend said it was the greasiest meal he’d ever eaten in his life, a meal that, on the moped ride back into town, required several emergency roadside stops to clear from his system.

I met this guy another time who, after I told him where I was from, excitedly confessed to me, “Ah, yes, I love America. So much meat!” Although that’s one of the many reasons people love this country, it’s not exactly a secret that the way it’s procured is kind of gross. Back in college I worked for the Department of Animal Sciences at my university for a couple of semesters, which was interesting, but at the same time I was so completely revolted by the science behind food processing that I wished I could have erased from my memory everything I’d learned on the job. A lot of cheap deli meats—Oscar Meyer bologna is a good example—are mechanically separated, which means that whole animal carcasses are tossed into a giant vat, and then pressed through a sieve at high pressure that’s designed to only allow meat to pass through. I’m sure a little bit of anus manages to leak through, but nobody seems to mind.

Somebody also once told me that the roast beef at Arby’s arrives at the restaurant as a liquid in a plastic bag—and needs to be cooked a certain way before it hardens enough to be sliced—but I had already stopped working at the Department of Animal Science when I heard about that and didn’t feel like emailing my old boss to talk about it.

I also ate raw lamb in Turkey once which, I know, sounds like a guaranteed way to get worms, but it was actually pretty good. I would eat it again.

I love food….45,999 out of 100,000.

The two of them thought it would be a good idea to pick it up and put it in the yard of a friend of ours who didn’t live very far away. This is what passes as a clever prank when you’re a 17-year-old in Fairfax, apparently. So, they parked and loaded the deer into the back of the truck they were driving. But when they picked it up a lot of fur rubbed off onto their pants, and a lot blood leaked onto their hands. They both tried wiping their hands onto their pants, but then all the fur just got stuck to all the blood.

“This is really gross,” one of my friends said, unable to find a way to remove any of the bloody fur from his hands and clothes.

Since it was an election season, they decided to gather up a bunch of those political signs from the median and use the wooden stakes to sort of prop the deer up in the front yard. Kind of like one of those fake reindeers at Christmas, but, you know, a lot grosser and smellier and without any blinking lights. It was also September.

Anyway, a deer can be pretty heavy, and those cheap pieces of wood aren’t really meant to hold up a couple of hundred pounds of corpse. Dead animals also aren’t very cooperative, either. Frustration turned into failure, and they decided against putting the deer into his yard, reasoning that his father would probably wake up early and clean up the body anyway, most likely by simply dumping it in his garbage can with its legs sticking out of the top.

So, they put the deer back into the bed of the truck and drove away. After a couple of minutes they asked themselves what they were doing driving around with a rotting deer carcass in the back of their truck and, unable to come up with a good reason, put the truck in reverse and hit the brakes, dumping it into the street.

The next day at school, our friend came to school saying that he felt terrible for hitting and killing a deer on his way home the night before.

“The weird thing was that it wasn’t running across the street,” he claimed. “It was just asleep in the middle of the road. Isn’t that weird?”

I wish I had been there…65,890 out of 100,000.