Fuh Fuh Fuh Fuh Fuh Freshhhh

When I hear the word ‘delicacy’ I used to think fine, delicious and appealingly unusual. However recently  this has changed, and now it pretty much just makes me think mega friggin’ weird. Went to try a Korean delicacy (by which, according to my recently reformed definition, means something just really skank) called  Sannakji/산낙지. The ‘nakji’ part means a small octopus (good start) and the ‘san’ part apparently means fresh. When they say fresh, they really mean fresh. It’s killed, the tentacles cut into chunks that are several inches in length, and served straight up(not quite old boy style, although you can if you’re sick in the head). If that doesn’t sound tantalisingly tasty enough, it is still squirming and wriggling  on the plate (you can youtube dat). Vomiliscious. The suckers on the tentacles are still doing their mad skillz, so apparently if you don’t chew them properly then they can get stuck sucking your throat and suffocate you. ‘Double D - Dangerous and disgusting’ [Tucker, 2012].

It’s starting to get pretty cold now. The other day it dropped to -13 degrees C apparently. It’s so called that on the way to class in the morning I no longer see the ‘Dancing Doctors’ do their pre-shift warm-up outside the hospital. Truly  disappointing. It snowed too. I can’t even describe the sheer elation and disbelief of my 27 year-old Australian mate who saw a snow ball larger than 50cm tall being rolled. It was probably comparable to a blind person seeing creation for the very first time, or a parent holding their new born baby for the first time.

On the underground the other day, saw that a kid was memorising some English vocab and so had an inquisitive peak over his shoulder.  I’m not sure just how great a grasp of the English language these kids feel they need, but I’m fairly sure they’d get by (I’m able to personally testify to this) without the words ‘finagler’, ‘garrulous’ or ‘halcyon’ as only a few examples of words ‘you only need if you’re on countdown, or if you’re really anal about knowing words that you would only need if you were on countdown’ (quotation marks not strictly necessary). Don’t get me wrong, I love (believe it or not) unusual words (don’t necessarily know many) (any), but for second language these are the least of their worries. I would have said they were getting totally mugged off by the vocab that they were learning if I hadn’t later spotted under the phrases section ‘to get to first base’. Now there’s some proper education, English language basics.