This time, the salesman didn't come to us; he brought a catered box lunch to about a dozen of us and demonstrated his product to his captive audience. I'm not exactly sure how they determined which teachers were shuffled into the staff lounge where the table was set with the boxed lunches, but somehow my lunch group (teachers all eat with their own lunch groups) got herded in the room. Rather than sending me off aimlessly to attach to some roving lunch group (horrors!), they beckoned me into the room with them.
I opened the box and found pork cutlet, squid cutlet, a bed of a few pasta noodles, some curls of some kind of sauced and vegetable-stewed meat, dried sheets of seaweed, white rice, cooked but cold seaweed, marinated peanuts, fruit cocktail, and kimchi. We also had a cup of warm fish-cake broth on the side. Not outstanding, but I wasn't going to turn it down with all sorts of administrative teachers staring at me across the table. The fruit and peanuts were actually really tasty, and the kimchi was a little bland, but bland is better than sour in my opinion.
The salesman commenced his talk as the teachers chowed down. They were all looking at their plates, not up at each other or at him. Some teachers ate the dried seaweed, while others ignored it. Then he asked a question. One of the teachers answered to his satisfaction, and he passed over a bag of long, dried seaweed stalks. the teachers applauded her. He did the same thing again, and awarded another bag of seaweed. then he gave a bag to everyone else at the table. My managing teacher assured me that the dinner and the seaweed were free. I actually had surmised this, but it was nice to get it confirmed officially.
Following this part of the presentation, the man showed some sort of video showing (I suppose?) the health benefits of eating his company's products. He passed around price pamphlets and some little gold drink pouches from which he had torn off a corner. It's kind of like a CapriSun pouch, but it can't stand up on its own. The first teacher to receive one sniffed it, made a face, tasted the drink, commented, and slurped down the rest of the liquid. It had a picture of seaweed on the front of it, with a decorative ocean background. I asked my managing teacher what it was and she said, "It's sea food." It was called "효소톳농축액" which translates to something like "Sea weed fusiforme sap/enzyme concentrate." Here's a picture of the package I found later.
Now... where I'm from, seafood means tuna, shrimp, grouper, flounder, crab, and maybe squid. But I guess she was making a distinction between sea food (edibles originating from the sea) and seafood (fish, crustaceans, etc.). It was about the color of red bull (dark yellowish), didn't have much smell, was a little bit thick (less than cough syrup though), and tasted... like nothing for which I have a reference. It wasn't salty, not sweet, not fishy, nor sour, nor bitter, just... hm. I'm really not sure what it was. But it wasn't gag-inducing, so I decided to just finish it all off, since I was being watched very closely by everyone at the table at that point.
What a lunch. We all carefully packaged up our lunch remains and rubber-banded the lid back on just as it had begun, rinsed out our disposable soup bowls, placed all the styrofoam boxes with their contents back in the cardboard box from which he had taken them, and went back to our office. I don't think anyone bought anything. the teachers around me remained quiet for the rest of the afternoon.
As I was getting to leave school that day, I gathered my things together as usual, but this time I reached over to put the seaweed in my bag. My managing teacher leaned over and asked if I knew how to cook it. I had no idea. She started to explain, enlisting the help of a nearby Korean literature teacher, but they still lacked some vocab. Then the math teacher behind me chimed in and said I had to use sesame oil and beef. He was adding sound effects and gestures in place of the words he didn't know. Then the human ecology teacher across from me said, "Oh, garlic! Garlic!" and suddenly 6 teachers were excitedly trying to explain to me how to cook my seaweed. One man commented that the bag I got was designed to feed 30 people, so I should only cut off a tiny, tiny, tiny bit from the end if I was just cooking for me. A good thing he said something. I might have thrown the whole thing in the pot...! It was quite a lot of excitement for our department, but we had a good laugh.
Whether I try to cook it or not (and I really probably should, since they'll ask about it now...), I'm glad for the wacky, unexpected cultural experience it was. Apparently each pouch of the weird sea weed sap drink was worth about $10... Here's a picture of the dried seaweed bag, so you can see what it looks like.
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