God forbid there should ever be a rice blight...

Korea is dependent on rice the way that 19th century Ireland was on the potato. I'm not kidding. Just a walk around the supermarket and you will come across rice tea, rice noodles, rice cakes (of varying levels of disgusting glutinous-ness), cold unidentifiable rice drinks, brown rice beauty products, rice based shampoo and I could go on but it's mildly traumatising. I'm pretty sure that Samsung and LG are currently working on plans to build the world's first rice PC. Should some kind of unpredictable climate change render rice uneatable, Koreans would be pretty buggered.


Kevin and I are currently pretending to get ready for Cambodia. One thing that travelling around the world has taught me is that the best laid plans are open to odd changes (bus boot door falls off and bags are held down with bricks, errant llamas barricading roads, freak medical scares) so plans are sketchy at best. We land in Phnom Penh next Saturday night and apart from Siem Reap, the killing fields and Angkor Wat, we're pretty open. Certain people (such as a Mr Murray) have been actively encouraging us to go and shoot at cows with an AK47. Heck, I can't even use one of those guns with the harmless gunpowder SOUND let alone one which actually produces bullets.

Tomorrow night is a staff night out as we usher out the old and welcome in the new teachers. Welcomes in Korea involve vast amounts of soju and abandoning of all inhibitions so it should be a blast.