The usual

One of my kindergartners has been out of school since our Lunar New Year's break.  It's going on three weeks now, and it's kind of ridiculous.  At first, she wasn't going to be back from her grandmother's house until three days after break was over, then it was ridiculously cold and she got to stay home and now I have no idea why she's not back yet.

I had a lovely food adventure last week. Erik and I went to the Chinese neighborhood in Seoul and got some very authentic Chinese food.  It was so authentic, in fact, that the menus were completely in Chinese with Korean subtitles and no one working there spoke English.  We ended up ordering the dishes from the blog post that he had found the restaurant from because we really had no idea what any of it was.  We had kung pow chicken wings, a spicy tofu thing, and their specialty, a beef noodle soup that had cilantro in it.  It was all quite delicious.  I have developed mad chopstick skill and was able to pick up the peanuts with the chicken wing without thinking too hard about it.

Porridge: the Korean version of oatmeal.  It's kind of the same consistency of baby food, but don't let that turn you off.  It might be slightly closer to grits.  It comes in tons of different flavors like pumpkin, pine nut, squid kimchi and beef and mushroom.  It's quite delicious.  It used to be quite elusive and I didn't quite know where to get it except the not as good kind you get in those little chef boyardee-esque containers.  I found out yesterday that there is a whole chain of restaurants that offer it for take out and there's one right around the corner from my apartment.

Unpleasant Noises

In general, my apartment is pretty sound proof, unless there is someone in the hall or you're in the bathroom.  In the bathroom, I can hear all lovely things from other people's apartments, from flushing toilets to people hocking loogies in the shower in the morning.  Most unusually, I regularly hear the person in the apartment above me puking their guts out.  This is at least on a daily basis and always at really odd times and it is quite disturbing.

Yesterday night I was awakened from my grandmotherly early bedtime by bloodcurdling screams outside my building.  This went on for at least 30 seconds.  I couldn't see anything out the window except more people looking out their windows to see what the heck was happening.  I found out from the other American teachers the next day that they could see two people talking and then heard some giggling after the screaming so apparently it was a domestic conflict and not really serious.  That and the police weren't called leads me to believe that it was someone doing something stupid, but it was still hella annoying and disturbing.

This week is turning out to be excruciatingly cold.  The high today was 15 degrees Fahrenheit.  This makes my twenty minute walk to work extremely unpleasant.  I could not feel my face when I arrived.  There is also a layer of ice on everything because it snowed really hard yesterday then melted a bit and made everything ridiculously slippery.

I started filing my taxes this week and it's making my brain hurt.  I need to have them done so that I can fill out my FASFA so I can have financial aid for grad school.  So many extra things for foreign income which I don't have to pay for anyway because I only have to pay those taxes in Korea.  GAH.

bubbly bubbles

I was wandering around my neighborhood looking for dinner when I made a new discovery.  There is an outdoor ice rink about two blocks from my house.  I knew there was one down town, but this one is well hidden because it is below street level but with an open top and walls around the hole so people don't fall in.  I may need to take advantage of this while it is still cold.  Hopefully their rental skates will be somewhat decent.

I managed to drop a half used bar of soap in the toilet today while I was taking a shower.  How did I manage to do this you ask?  Well my bathroom is basically a large shower with a sink and a toilet thrown in.  If I don't want the toilet seat to be eternally wet, I have to life the whole seat up when I take a shower.  If you are not familiar with soap, it can be quite the slippery little devil.  And plop, into the toilet it goes.  So now I have a chunk of soap sitting at the bottom making the water bubbly and pineapple scented.

A ten year old girl beat me at arm wrestling today.  Ouch.  There goes my street cred.  She then proceeded to beat her classmate who is a skinny 10 year old boy.  At least I have that.

I wonder all the time what people are talking about when they speak Korean.  I feel like because I don't understand and it sounds so nice they're probably saying really unusual and interesting things.  I would probably be disappointed because I'm sure it's just as stupid as some of the things that people talk about in English.

Fun with Art

I found Yogurtland style froyo in Seoul today.  It was amazing.  Lovely plain tart yogurt and a bar full of toppings which you then pay for by the gram.  WIN.  This may become a regular haunt.

Trickeye Museum is loads of fun for the whole family.  Basically it's a museum full of renditions of famous paintings in which you can participate.  It is quite entertaining to take pictures of yourself, for example, getting eaten by a cyclops,

maybe being stabbed by a rhinoceros,

or maybe that you grew wings and flew away.

I made my way over to the Nation Museum of Korea as well, but it wasn't nearly as entertaining picture wise.  It was ridiculously huge though.  There were three floors of things to see and it took me about an hour a floor of browsing quickly and not reading too much.  I did skip a floor and a half because my feet were starting to hurt.  It was mostly about the history of Korea and there was quite a large amount of pottery from all over Asia.  Admission was free so even though I didn't see everything, I can always go back and not worry about having to pay.

Vacation = Love

Interesting (/gross) experience of the day:  I was walking around downtown Seoul when a guy walking in the opposite direction stops to look at something in a store window and lets rip a loud, wet one.  Luckily, I wasn't in any position to smell anything.

I spent my first tourist vacation day wandering around down town Seoul in below freezing weather for 4 to 5 hours today.   One of my small children definitely gave me a cold which made my wanderings quite a bit less comfortable.  I tried to go to the National Museum of Korea but was unsuccessful.  I shall have to try again, seeing as how they have a very large statue of Buddha which I would like to see.  I wonder if they let you rub its belly for good luck.....

I attempted to go to a falafel place that I was told is excellent, but it was closed, I'm hoping just because of the holiday, and not for good.  I ended up getting a burger instead, my first burger in probably six months.  Since I eat them so infrequently, I don't want to taint the experience by getting a Whopper or a Big Mac.  I went for the good stuff, ie $8 burger.  Yay lots of garlic and real meat.  Surprisingly, Korea has a very good burger chain, called Kraze Burger.  They've started exporting it to the US, I think the first one is near DC.  Unlike with Mr. Pizza, where they took the pizza and added all kinds of weird stuff to it making it wholly unlike American pizza, Kraze Burger just makes pretty standard burgers with lots of topping choices and fairly good quality meat.  Now the only problem is my mouth has the metallic-y post-garlic-consumption taste.

While I was walking down town, I wandered up towards the area where "the Blue House" (read, 'Korean White House) is and some how still didn't see it.  This is like my fourth time up there hoping to see it and just missing it completely.  On the plus side, there were lots of old style Korean houses, or 'hanok' 한옥 in the area which I got to see.  On the negative side, I forgot my camera at home on my bed.  Not that I would have enjoyed exposing my fingers to the air long enough to take a decent picture.

I love vacation.  I can sleep in tomorrow and go to the Trickeye Museum and eat gastronomic ice cream.  Very exciting.

On a random note, I received a box of cup cake mix in a care package.  Seeing as how I have neither a conventional oven or a toaster oven, I shall be attempting to make cupcakes via microwave.  Apparently, it has been done before.  Wish me luck.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Monday is Lunar New Year, otherwise known as Chinese New Year.  In celebration of this holiday, I have a glorious five day weekend.  I shall be spending this weekend relaxing and being a tourist in a rotating schedule.  First order of business, pajama day.

For some reason, in Korea, eggs come in packs of ten.  Why this is, or why in America it would be a dozen, I have no idea.  Who decides these things?  Is it an arbitrary number?  Are there commitees that decide how many eggs should be in a carton in different countries?

I recieved a lovely care package this week from a one, Ms. Erika Hartley.  She is fabulous.  I now have Cheez-its, orange Milanos, a cute hat, some warm socks, glass markers, an assortment of other wonderful things and these things called Magic Milk straws.  Magic Milk straws are amazing.  I don't know when they came out but basically it's a straw you stick in a cup of milk and use like a normal straw but it makes your milk flavored.  It makes any milk awesome.  I have strawberry and they're almost gone.  I may be buying in bulk soon.  Yum yum yum.

Another thing that was added to my collection of random stuff this week was a tub of that fart noise making goo.  Kelsey got some in a package from on of her friends.  I really want to give it to one of my kindergartners who is a little cheeky monkey and see what happens.

Speaking of kindergartners, I believe one of them has given my a runny nose considering she had a river going for like two days this week and now I'm finding myself needing to blow mine every half hour or so.  Booo getting a cold again.

Somebody ate my mandarin orange.  It was in a baggy at work with a hard boiled egg for a couple of days.  When I looked on Friday, there were other oranges in the fridge, but only a hard boiled egg in my bag.  Momentary sadness.  Luckily, oranges do grow on trees.

I'm getting bored of short hair, so until further notice, I am growing it out.  I will probably get bored of long hair in like five months and cut it again, because that's how I roll.

A Little Taste of the Past

Some experiences are beyond explanation that anyone else will really understand fully.  I had one of these on Thursday.  While she was here, my mom had mentioned a vegetarian restaurant run by a buddhist monk, but we didn't have time to go.  So Kelsey and I decided to go for dinner just for an interesting experience. The restaurant is called Sanchon 산천 and it is tucked away in a little alley in the more traditional part of the city called Insadong 인사동. It was set up like a traditional tea house inside with lots of plants and old wood work and was really quite lovely. The best description I can give you is that it looked like the inside of a Japanese building or house you'd see in a movie set before the modern era.  We sat at a floor table and at first the floor heat was really nice, but the longer we sat there the more boiling hot it got.  Booty melting temperatures.  We were the presented with a 23 plate meal of mostly unidentifiable green things.  There was a plate of appetizers that was more familiar, with things such as mushrooms, fried kelp, acorn jelly, some kimchi and spicy lettuce and Korean pancakes 파전.

Then came the plate of mysterious green things, one of which smelled like feet. We were very amused by the whole situation and spent most of it giggling. It wasn't a bad meal, in fact, some of it actually tasted pretty good, it was just very unusual and not something where I would wake up one day and be like "I really feel like eating monk food today." Next, came the dancing.

There were three different performers who each did two dances a piece.  A couple of them were really interesting, but I swear there was one where all she did was walk around the stage and play with her skirt like you would right before you curtsy.  There was about a half hour of dancing followed by about 10 minutes of drumming.  The three women came out with drums and played them over a drum and flute track playing in the background.  It wouldn't have been so painfully funny if they had rhythm or decided not to use a background track.  They would get off and you would hear two sets of drumming off beat from each other and it just sounded horrible.  The girl playing the pan was particularly bad and she had the loudest instrument.

For some reason we can't explain, Kelsey and I found this night ridiculously entertaining.  We spent the whole way home bursting out in laughter from the whole ordeal.  In any case, if you are either really serious of have a good sense of humor I would totally recommend doing it.  It's a nice look at traditional Korean culture although it is a little on the pricey side.