Week 14, Thursday

As of today I lost five pounds, and as of this afternoon, nearly all the rest of it in an embarrassing gym accident. Sometimes machines are not intuitively obvious and I had to call out “excuse me” in increasingly louder desperation until an older man replacing his weights nearby could save me.

(The squat machine had a catch that released but halfway through the set I realized I didn’t know how to lock it back in place. “Oh no. Will I have to hold up this weight until someone sees me?”)

Later in the evening a friend and I attended a rice wine making class and met two interesting men with whom we joined for fried chicken at a restaurant in a back alley of Gangnam. Carrying our rice wine, which we dubbed “white wine”, we sped walked to the station to catch the last train before midnight. Like Cinderella, if Cinderella were Korean and carrying a tub of fermenting rice juice instead of glass slippers.

I called mom to update her about my Thanksgiving festivities and she could return the favor. “Your Korean boys are on TV”, my family told me, and honestly get you a family who will rewind the Macy’s Day Parade so you can see NCT 127 dance on a LEGO float.

*Later, the encounter and dinner with the Korean men from makgeolli class will leave me with an icky feeling. My friend will admit to me that she also felt a bit used; while nothing nefarious went down, there was something in the details of the conversation that would strike us with the familiar “token foreign friend” experience.