Merry Christmas!!! (in the states)

I thought I'd post an entry on the day you all celebrate Christmas. Christmas is not too big of a deal here in Korea, and here are some pictures I took of random objects that people turned into Christmas decorations. It doesn't really make much sense but, hey, that's Korea for you.

Reddy Tab

I don' t think I've mentioned this, wierdly, but there's another teacher at my school with the last name of Reddy, and she's not Indian (well, she's Canadian so that's almost as bad). She's the first person, EVER, I've met with the same last name as ours and she says the same. Interesting tidbit I thought you'd all be itnerested in.

Oh yeah, guess what?
I'm off until next year!!! Today was my last day of teaching, and while the rugrats are cute I am so looking forward to this break:)

Pity Fork

I went to a sushi restaurant last night and received a resounding F on chopstick skills. It was so resounding that the hostess took pity on me and brought me a fork- I was the only person in the entire restaurant to be given one.

I see Fire and I see Rain

I've probably read more US newspapers (albeit online) this past month than I ever did when actually in the USA. And I've seen Brea mentioned in them more often than I have ever seen it before! Apparently there are floods? Is the canyon closed? More importantly, hows our house? I got lots of stuff still there that I need to keep tabs on.

Korean Haircut

Well it was a long time coming, and those Christmas party pictures showed a lot of dead ends, so I decided to bite the bullet and go to a Korean hair salon. If there were not salons every block in my neighborhood, I might have traveled to Itaewon (the neighborhood around the USA Army base...needless to say it's where a lot of foreigners gather, and very few Koreans) but it's not my favorite area of Seoul so I try to stay away from it. Plus, I'm pretty easy going with my hair (remember the shades of red and black?) so I thought it would be an interesting cultural experience. Which it defintely was.

First of all, the guy spoke no English, so we were communicating entirely through hand gestures. My main goal was no bangs. Korean men and women really like their bangs. I was adamant on that point and that point alone, pointing to pictures of girls and women around my chair that had very blunt bangs and just shook my head and crossed my arms in the universal sign of "No." He definitely got it. First he started out with cutting my hair when it was dry. Definitely not how we do it at Salon Russo. He was pretty fun to watch. He would walk in 180 degree turns around my chair analyzing my head in deep thought and then he'd just drop to his knees, in an exaggerated I'm going to ask you to marry me pose, and start snipping. And snip, and snip, and snip. And snip.
I was kinda worried I was gonna get another of those disastorous pixie cuts but it turns out he was mostly thinning it. I swear half of my hair got cut off my head in those first few minutes before he reached for another of his instruments to actually cut the length of my hair. Aside from eliminating about 98% of my layers, I was fine with the cut. It ages me a few years, but I can still pull it back and I've always though short pony tails were cute. The next fun part came when he washed it- after the cut. As soon as my hair got wet he started doing all sorts of odd motions with it, like karate chopping it with his hands and rubbing it in between his hands really, really fast, as if they were pieces of flint and he was trying to start a fire. I didn't understand it at all but I was getting a really, really nice head massage but him at the same time so I didn't try to look up and see what he was doing. Maybe my hair was being rude and needed to get put in its place. I don' t know which but as soon as he started hair drying it in curls I was so fascinated by what he was doing. He basically divided my hair into five sections and curled all those sections around his fingers so they formed a single curl. I looked like an Hasidic Jew. It was the funniest thing I saw last night.

Well, the whole experience cost about 12,000.00 won, which is less thant $9. As soon as I left the salon I threw my hair up in a pony tail and scurried home, to analyze the damage. It's definitely not the chicest cut I've ever gotten, but it's far from the horribly Korean haircut I was warned it would be by teachers who prefer to travel two hours to get white people to do it. It was also the perfect cap to a very odd day- seeing as yesterday was Drama Festival. But I can only write about one odd Korean experience at a time, so I'll have to write about that later!

White Elephant Christmas Party

We all got together to have a White Elephant (or Yankee Swap if you're Canadian) Christmas Exchange. I stole these pictures from our hostesses facebook profile :)
I was quite excited when opening my gift from Breanne, I hold many a memory weaving neon colored pot holders with this loom.
The awesome Kongrish box I brought (each side had an English phrase that made no sense) to the party, it was the first one to go via Kyle.
Krystal, Breanne, and Jocelyn in their ugly Christmas sweaters.
Korean apartments are small, so we were all sitting in the kitchen.
My full present, including a cd of Rain- the Korean equivalent of Justin Timerlake.
An exponentially better gift than the foldable spoon and twisty ties that Nermin got.

I kept knocking over the Jenga tower so a teacher recorded a photographic journal of my reaction when I finally got one piece out.

A Walk in the Park

Went on a long walk in a very big park about 4 blocks west from my apartment. These are some pictures of my aimless wanderings.
There's a game going around facebook and various blogs right now that calls for the people reading this to grab the nearest book to them, turn to page 56, and to write down the 5th sentence on the page as well as the book and the author. If anybody's going to write a response to this entry they have to do this. I'll go first:

He stopped. The story seemed to be over.
"The Battler" by Ernest Hemingway
(ok, technically it's the 5th and 6th sentence, but Hemingway has a tendency to write 2 word sentences so I used them both.)

Notes to Self #1

Stock pots are called stock pots because those are the pans you are supposed to make stock in. When stock is made in smaller pans, the kind one would make rice in for example, not enough water is put in and after a couple hours of simmering a recipe that called for 6 qts of stock now has to make do with a couple of cups of very rich, chicken broth.

Also, when working with a whole chicken, remember to get ride of the penis part of it. Really gross to handle when cooked.

I'm making my own chicken stock (the Barefoot Contessa would be proud...) right now and will attempt to make chicken soup later on, but while the broth is simmering I thought I'd post some pictures of my neighborhood, Songpa (pronounced as it looks but with the "o" taking on the same sound as the "o" in phone) and Jamsil (Jam-shil). Korea is a busy, diverse, slightly cukkoo, fashionable, technology savvy, beautiful, smelly, confusing city. I've shown you all pictures of the mountains but here are pictures that represent what I see in my daily activities.

Songpa: My Stomping Ground

Can you imagine a high rise in a major metropolitan city in the US having a cartoon fish painted on the side of it?
Can't decide whether you want a latter or a lager? Well come over here, you can have both!
This car garage is apparently a Presbyterian church.
Asian mannequins (I say Asian rather than Korean because this style of animation is very Asian) Notice how big their heads are? I was very surprised to see how many large noggins there are in Korea. The Reddy's fit right in.
I've been here only once...
This looks crowded, but after seeing other parts of Seoul I've come to see how nice and quiet my neighborhood is. In other parts of Seoul a street on a Saturday morning would be, literally, jam packed with people, shoulder to shoulder.
Lots of lanes on South Korean streets.
It's official- Andrew Lloyd Webber is everywhere. Cats is annoying even when I know what the words are, I have no idea (nor any desire) to see how it sounds in Korean.

Bleghhhh

I'm not sure if it was the three kids who threw up in class this week, the gushing nose bleed of another student, the total inability of 7 year olds to wash their hands (particularly my class of mostly boys who love running around touching eachothers "tenders"), or the all around pollution of Seoul...but I am incredibly sick right now.

Birthday in the Future

It's a very wierd thing to celebrate your birthday in the future. The teacher's knew about it but it was pretty quiet, since for everybody back in the States the 29th for me was still the 28th for them. I went to a museum with one of the teacher's and then at night I went to an Italian restaurant with another friend. The next day, when I was officially 23, everybody back home figures out it's my birthday and all day long I was getting facebook messages and emails. It was very nice. (cough, cough, NONE OF WHICH WERE FROM MY PARENTS!)

The same guy whom I went to the Italian restaurant with took me to the soccer game. A friend of his had a friend who knew someone who worked at the stadium and got us 3 free tickets. I'm not sure exactly how it worked. But basically a very nice Korean man who worked at the World Cup Stadium (named, aptly so, for the World Cup South Korea hosted in 2002.) came and walked us up to fantastic seats in the first row of the second section. And we didn't have to pay for any of it. It was the semifinals of the K-League (Korean League) and was a really intense game. We had 30 minutes of overtime with the final score being 4-2 (6 goals scored in a professional soccer game? That's unheard of!) including a header goal set up by the only black man in South Korea (well, thats not true, the baseball team has one African-American).

PS- I changed my profile picture to the official banner of FC Seoul where the motto is "Impossible is Nothing." I haven't gotten to show you all too many pictures of mistranslated English in Seoul (of which there are MANY) but I thought this was a good example.

FC Seoul 4 - Ulsan Hyundai 2

Number 8 is one of only 2 black men that I have seen in Korea. And he helped set up a really awesome goal where a forward headed it in during the final 15 mins of overtime.
The cheering section. Spent the entire time dancing and blowing horns. A Korean rendition of "If You're Happy and You Know It" was sung from them every once in a while.
World Cup Stadium, home of FC Seoul and of the 2002 World Cup.

No beer or hotdogs for Koreans at sport matches. It's strictly Korean fare.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We may all be scattered around the globe but I'm very thankful that I at least have family 6,000 miles away!

Hiking: Korean Style

I went back to the same mountain I went a few weeks ago when I saw the temple, this time do more hiking. And let me tell you...hiking in Korea is a hoot! First, it's mostly older people wielding ski poles and booking along the trail, in way better shape than anybody else. Secondly, 90% of trails consist of climbing up or down stairs. Sometimes the stairs are really crude stone steps, while others are just plain wooden stairs put in by the park. And the other 10% consists of slipping and sliding treacherously along cliffs that may or may not be trails.

Today I went with some teachers for about 4 hours (but probably 3 in Reddy time because some of those girls were slllloooowww! And if I'm saying their slow than they were definitely going snail pace.)

Seoul is surrounded by mountains, but I've yet to see any when actually in the city (pollution, too many sky scrapers). Yet, it's very easy to see Seoul when you're up high.

Galbi w/ Coworkers

2 teachers and myself went out for bbq after work tonight and this picture was snapped. In the middle of the table is the vat of coal with meat grilling on top of it while the rest of the surface area of the table is, literally, covered with side dishes: tofu, egg, kimchi, salad, lettuce leaves, soup, garlic, onions, rice, mashed potatoes (Korean style...), lettuce greens, cabbage, radish.

Orange country Fires

Mom and Dad- Is our house still standing?

Seaweed

I spent 18 years in California, hating that annoying marine shrub that wounds itself around us every time we went into the beach. But, nearing the ripe old age of 23, I've discovered a healthy appreciation for what we call Seaweed. And who knew it tasted so good?


The top picture is of gimp, a dried and salted piece of seaweed. Koreans eat them like potato chips out here. I know it sounds wierd, but its the most delicious thing I've discovered (aside from Barbecue that is). The seaweed is paper thin but crunchy. The main danger of eating too many is you can get lots of green stuff stuck between your teeth.

The bottom picture is of beepembops (that's the phonetic spelling) and I eat at least one every day, usually for lunch. They cost about a buck and consist of seaweed, rice, and a filling of some sort of protein. They come wrapped up in a ball and you microwave it for a minute or two and then kind of smash the ball open with your chopsticks. Usually the center is tuna or chicken, but this particular beepembop came with Kimchi, the fermented cabbage I mentioned earlier. Not my favorite Korean staple (if you think dried fruit made you gassy, try being around people who eat fermented cabbage for at least 2 meals a day, every day...) They come wrapped up in a tin foil ball with writing I don't understand on it, so I never really know what I'm going to find in the middle. Kind of like a cereal box. It's just rice and seaweed, so the only flavor is what the center provides. It's not the most delicious food I've encountered here, but it's so cheap and filling I really enjoy it.

*Sidenote. Korean food in general is incredibly healthy. These both cost between one and two dollars and the main ingredients in both are seaweed and rice. I find it interesting that the cheapest food options in Korea consist of such healthy ingredients while in America, our cheapest food is whatever is on the Dollar Menu at McDonalds.