Tuesday 5 March 2013

(Day 228) Seoul Nambu Correctional Facility-day 133 D-23

sit-upspush-upschair-lifts
1004040

Breakfast nothing
Lunch kimchi
some sort of radish root in red pepper sauce
banana
potato & rice pasta soup

Some pretty meager offerings here. The soup was better than slimy seaweed, but very bland—needs salt. Very small portions of the side dishes and a banana leaves a gnawing hunger for the rest of the day. I hope dinner is better.
Dinner kimchi
turnip? in hot water
grass?
sweet & sour pork

I think it’s turnip but it could be some sort of radish. Whatever it is, it’s in hot water... oh yeah, there’s a shrimp, too. The grass could be garlic or green onion stalks, but it just looks and tastes like grass mixed with red pepper sauce. Crap. That’s what it all is-- crap. The pork is okay.

Now the rumor floating around is there will be a general pardon in celebration of Buddha's birthday, which is until April or May (May 17th, I think). Neither of those dates makes any difference to me, since I'll be long gone (22 days to go...), but what's interesting is the fact that any significant holiday (president inauguration for example) leads to rumors of a general pardon. The first time, I was hopeful. Now I know its bullshit. It’s what passes for hope in the slammer.

Personally, I find the holidays in here a time of despair, not hope. The holidays remind me of what I'm missing out on. I don't look forward to them at all, except as a marker of time passing by. 8 months is in jail is nothing compared to the usual sentence of years, but it's enough for me to know that I'll avoid it at any cost in the future— especially if I'm not in a first world country. I'm lucky this is Korea and not someplace like Laos or Cambodia.

I was given a slip of paper today and once again no instructions on what to do with it, so I gave it back without filling any of it in. Sometimes— actually most of the time, I get the feeling that I'm missing out on something vitally important, but no one here cares to tell me what's going on. They're real quick to yell at me when I don't follow instructions, often failing to realize no one told me what the instructions were in the first place. Of course, this makes me indignant and hostile... Only 22 more days only 22 more days...

Still no menu, thus far. The menu has really sucked. Out of 10 meals served so far, 0 have rated 4 rice bowls. 3 have received 3 rice bowls. Four meals rated a 2, two meals got 1 and one meal got a high of 0 rice bowls. There are still 4 more meals to try. Hopefully, at least one of them will get a 4 bowl rating. Three weeks of shitty meals is something I hardly look forward to. However it is only 3 weeks until I am finished with this crap forever. Maybe crappy meals are but a small price to pay.

I finished the last page in my sketchbook JO brought me way back in September. I probably would have finished it sooner, but I've been negligent in the drawing and writing lately. It’s not that I'm uninspired. Rather than write everything twice-- on paper and then again on the computer, I would just as soon wait until I have my computer in 3 weeks.

No comments:

Post a Comment