"You Don't Expect Me to Swallow this Tripe!?"

I am pretty useless at picking up on the nuances of conversation. Case in point: last night after Tae Kwon Do as I am pathetically trying to sit cross-legged, my instructor asks me if I would like to go out for a couple drinks with a few of the people from Tae Kwon Do. (We do this every now and again, and it consists of drinking some beers and eating pubfare. Not quite Maude's buffalo wings, but not bad. Mostly Kimchi (fermented cabbage) and squid sticks.) I agree and we are on our way.

As we are leaving we start down the road in the opposite direction of our usual place. I am walking with the only other person who speaks English, Yu Mi an English kindergarten teacher. She points to her stomach and asks me, "what you call this?" She often asks me different vocabulary. I tell her stomach, and she says, "No, no.... inside." Ahhhh.... guts? intestine? She asks me if I have ever eaten it, and I laugh, no, no, no.

I could have taken this as a hint and ran, but I am very slow. So my generous instructor and our friends from Tae Kwon Do sit down to a nice meal of barbequed tripe. Eeek. I have a few bites. It isn't bad, but I can't help thinking as I look through the ring that once safely delivered a pig's feces out of its body that the war is over. And as I chew endlessly on this noble body part, I ask myself why they are still eating wartime rations. But I take solace in the fact that someone out there is making sure that the nether-regions of a pig's anatomy aren't going to waste.