Good God Sauce

Well, I've finally crossed another culinary experience off my stay in Korea, aside from eating live octopus and several other more minor meals in which I've partaken, but this was certainly the most humbling and painful one to-date.
A friend and I meet up during the week occasionally in Cheonho to eat out. Last time, we agreed to have sample some of the street fare that is on most streets throughout Seoul. I had commented to him previously that I had been unimpressed with the spicyness of the food in this country, as I had heard a lot about it before I arrived. It seems as though everything is slightly spicy, but nothing incapacitating, nothing mouth-blistering, nothing caustic. Tonight, I have gained a new respect for the Korean ability to create gut-dissolving food.
My God! It's been over two hours and I still can't think properly. The pain on my lips and in my mouth is gone, but the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is just beginning.
My friend had been to this stand that sells chicken on wooden skewers before, saying that they have some extremely hot food. I believed him, but I was not prepared for the undertaking properly. He pointed up to a sign and says, "There it is. 'The King of the King.' You want to try to order it?"
I agreed since ordering food is one of the only things I know how to do semi-properly in Korean, and I wanted to get a bit of practice. The woman looked at me and began saying something in Korean trying to discourage two obviously ridiculous foreigners from making a mistake. My overconfidence was just that-- overconfident. The ladies were right. They made them up for us and dipped it in the napalm, which had a separate area on the counter that was quite a distance from the rest of the more mild sauces.
As she handed them to us, her and the other ladies kept their eyes on us while we took a bite. The first bite was pretty hot but tolerable. As you may know, super hot food takes a few seconds to really reveal its whole effect. After the second bite, my mouth had little feeling, my lips hurt every time I spoke, and every other system in my body was beginning to shut down. My nose was running, my forehead was covered in sweat, and I was crying. The ladies did their best, handing me a cup of water to quell whatever pain was left that my damaged nerve endings could muster, but it didn't work. I was permanently damaged from the experience.
We walked around Cheonho for a while sweating it off, and the rest of the planned street food banquet came pretty much to a halt after the next stop, which was good by itself.
I was going to go out a little more this evening, but I think I'll pass. I'm going to stay at home with my milk
King of the King is a good name for that death chicken. I would have called it Almighty Murderous Despot of Hades, if I had my way.

Learning Korean

Korean is an extremely difficult language to learn, at least for me. I have no prior experience with any Asian languages, and for that matter Korean is much different than, say, Mandarin Chinese or Japanese. Some of the vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese, while some of the grammatical structure is apparently similar to that of Japanese. I've had a long-standing goal of trying to pick up the native tongue of my students and the people that I see on the streets on a daily basis, but it has been less fruitful than I have hoped. It is nearly impossible for me to take formal classes as a result of my work schedule, and as a result of my lack of formal classes, my ability to learn Korean has been thwarted by a lack of pragmatic usage of the language.
I have a textbook and a dictionary, so I can learn particular words and phrases by reading it (my reading ability is existent, but still quite insufficient), but I when I try to use the phrases I butcher the pronunciation. Nevertheless, I still haven't given up on figuring out how to communicate with the vast majority of people around me that speak little or no English.
I did come across something today that might be promising for increasing my ability to contextually use the language. This company called Pimsleur makes language tapes for several different languages, including Korean. I know, learning languages through tapes is certainly not ideal, but I did the first lesson and it actually seems like it might be a way to increase my unpleasantly-low level speaking skills. I'm going to try to ride out the ten lessons that I have until I have exhausted them, and then maybe I'll have some type of framework for learning more of the language. I hope this is the case because it's really bothering me that I cannot understand people that are trying to speak to me, and that my usable vocabulary is limited to a few phrases that I find myself repeating constantly.