Wednesday 6 March 2013

(Day 229) Seoul Nambu Correctional Facility-day 134 D-22

sit-upspush-upschair-lifts
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Breakfast nothing
Lunch rice & kimchi
some sort of grassy kimchi
mandu
tuna & slimy seaweed soup

Slimy seaweed is an automatic negative, as is more than one kind of kimchi. 5 dumplings does not a meal make.
Dinner kimchi
spicy vegetable & beef soup
shredded potato
raw pickled garlic

Raw garlic? Really? Nothing else with it, just garlic? What kind of side dish is this shit? Koreans have some very strange ideas of what constitutes food. If my room stinks, it’s their fault. At least ai won’t have to worry about vampires.

It was a beautiful day outside, so I had to go out during exercise period to experience it. It’s supposed to get to 17°C by Saturday. If that doesn't indicate spring is here then nothing else does.

Mr Kim and I are on speaking terms again. It's hard to hold a grudge against the only other person able to talk English. He gave me a box of coffee, too which is very welcome since I can't buy my own anymore.

I'm not very impressed with the menu this month. I'm never impressed with rice and kimchi 3x a day, every day, but since January, the menus have been getting progressively worse. Oh well, only 21 more days... 21 more days... 21 more days... If I only drink one coffee per day, I'll almost have enough to last the rest of my time here. That’s very unlikely since I already used 2 out of 20 and I have... 21 days.

I wonder why I didn't think about it a lot earlier than now... It suddenly occurred to me that I possess the skills and materials to make my own set of playing cards, but put into actual practice proved more difficult than I thought. Drawing the cards was easy—8 cards per sheet of A4 paper and 6.5 sheets of paper. The face and Ace cards were the only the elaborate cards of the bunch. The rest were all repetitive and more tedious than difficult. Then I took my pencil drawings and inked them using black and red pens. Herein lay a problem. The ink was visible on the backside.

“Okay,” I thought to myself, “I'll add an extra layer of A4 paper to each sheet of cards. I have glue. No problem.”

Until it came time to separate the cards from each other. I have no scissors because they’re sharp and dangerous and I might use them to commit suicide or homicide. So now I have 6.5 sheets off nicely drawn playing cards I can't play with. I solve the problem by folding the edges over and over to get a good crease and ripping them apart. Crude, but effective. Now I can play solitaire for the next 20 days!

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