Confession

I don't know how to use my microwave. Apparently it is some fancy baking microwave or something. There is what looks like an oven coil on the roof and it doesn't really heat things up, it more cooks them. But I don't know which buttons to press and I end up with crispy noodles instead of warm ones. It does saute mushrooms though.

I guess I should try and google it, but it's almost more fun to try and figure out how to do it through trial and error. Although this leads to smoking coffee and frustration when after hitting "1" the timer goes to 25 minutes.

I will keep you updated on my progress or lack thereof.

Weekend at Cindy's

Before I left for Korea, I made a date with Cindy to visit Daegu this weekend and see her. The main reason we picked this weekend was because our tattoo guy is getting ready to move home and we wanted to get touch ups done and this was a time he was available. Both of us are also trying to save money and didn't want to go anywhere.

I left Saturday morning and met her at a subway stop. She woke up super late because she went out the night before (a slightly running joke now) and then had to try and find me in a cab. We found where we were going and met up with Jeff. Cindy's touch up was relatively easy and only took about 5 minutes. He had to basically redo my entire one. It hurt a lot more this time around 1-because re-breaking scar tissue hurts more (according to him) and 2- he went into a deeper layer of skin so that hopefully it will stay this time. He did warn me that the ink might bleed (as in become blurry) a little, but the other option was to go at the same level and have it come out, so I told him to try it. Before he did mine, he showed us the bear head he did on himself the night before - it's huge. It goes over the bottom half of his thigh onto his kneecap. He is a very talented artist though. Cindy lied down on the couch while he did my tattoo and then we left to go back to her place.

She lives a ways out of the city so a 20 minute subway ride and then a 25 minute bus ride got us to her house. She has a pretty nice apartment though and lives across the street from her school. She took a nap and I watched some TV and played around on the computer and dropped my stuff off. Then we got ready and went downtown to meet her boyfriend, Torrin. When we met up with him, we also met up with another friend of theirs, who was supposed to watch his friend do a belly dancing demonstration. Only in Korea is there a random belly dancing show in the park in late November.

Look at the side at the girls in full winter jackets

After watching that for a bit, the 3 of us went to a place called When?! The waitress (Rose) knows Cindy now and speaks very good English. They also have some awesome bbq (oddly called Obama) that is covered with herbs. It was good. They also give you kimchi pancakes as one of the side dishes. After dinner we met up with Mitch at a bar and played a round of darts (I won!). Then Cindy and I went to watch the last Twilight movie, Breaking Dawn 2, in the theater. We didn't get out until close to midnight and neither of us were in a bar hopping mood, so we just went back to her place. Our cab driver was a reject from NASCAR or something because he drove like a crazy guy (but got us back in under 10,000). We relaxed and chatted for awhile then went to sleep.

We woke up this morning and chatted some more, then Cindy made us stir fry with chicken, ham and glass noodles. It was very good. Then we took showers and got dressed and I hopped on the bus back home. She had a potluck dinner later that afternoon and I didn't want to get stuck having to stand on the bus (which can happen). So it was a low-key weekend which was great. I love hanging out with Cindy and it felt like old times.

Time flies

So I doesn't feel like it's been 6 days since I last posted, but apparently it was. Sorry. Nothing of interest has really happened in the last few days though, so that's why I haven't really felt the need to post anything. I'm nervous about money this month because I don't get paid until the very end of the month but already have a bunch of things going on in the next few weeks. So I am trying to limit what I do/eating out etc. That's hard because going out for food or coffee is one of the main ways I visit people here.

This weekend I just stayed at home. I literally did not leave my apartment for over 48 hours. I was still feeling a little bit of the cold and just decided to sleep. I also started watching the series "White Collar" and got addicted to it. I also cooked (sort of). I made pasta with sauteed mushrooms, green onions and pine nuts. It was pretty good.

But I also saw this awesome teaching video on tv and that made me happy. Hopefully something more interesting will happen soon!

Korean asthma returns

I have been here just over a week and already have a cold. I am being proactive this time and looking for a humidifier, drinking lots of fluids and pretending I don't have one.

Today I met Keung He for lunch. I think we will probably have weekly lunches (at least I hope we do) because she likes to ask me questions and vice versa. She uses me for English, I use her for Korean, so it's like a language exchange of sorts. Anyway she took me to a Korean place that's famous for it's bibimbap. She had a combo of barley and rice but mine was just rice. Next time I will get the barley too. One good thing about having a cold in Korea is that my taste buds are slightly off. This lets me try some things and get used to them. One of my friends ate a potato chip the other day then said she had to eat another one because the first doesn't count. It's totally true - the first bite doesn't mean anything here. Sometimes something awful later tastes great and the opposite is true as well. I'm still not trying fish though.

I remembered to wear slip on shoes this time and we walked right in and sat down. She ordered for us and they brought out the food super fast. It's sort of a make your own style restaurant. They give you a giant bowl of rice, then a plate with veggies (kimchi, seaweed and bean sprouts) and then other bowls with more kimchi, tiny anchovies, hot peppers and other side dishes. Then there is a big pot of spicy sauce called gochujang (here's a recipe if you want to make your own) that you can add to taste. A tablespoon of this stuff is enough to make the entire bowl of rice spicy. You mix the bowl with your chopsticks, but then eat it with a spoon. They also gave us seaweed soup (which I don't really like when I can fully taste it but was good today to dim the spice).

The bowl in the top left corner has the veggies. Then there is a big fish. Next is peppers and seaweed. The bowl at the bottom is my rice. Next to it is the seaweed soup.

After lunch we went and had coffee at a cute little place called Yummy House which is directly across the street from me. We chatted and did "language exchange" for awhile then she went with me to the pharmacy to get a decongestant and laughed when I said thank you (she always does because she says I sound funny when I speak Korean - it's my polite voice so it sounds like a little kid).

School today was pretty good. I will write another post later with more details about my school and classes, but I want to give it a little while for me to settle in before I describe it. One of my co-teachers brought in persimmons to share. I like the hard ones (these were that kind) but don't care for the soft ones. Then a student gave us all candy and another student gave everyone a bag of dried mango from a trip she had taken to the Philippines. Then another student gave me more candy. So that was nice :)

On my way home from work, I stopped off at the corner mart to get cereal, but they didn't have any so I bought some ramen instead. I still haven't gone grocery shopping yet and I needed food so I could take the medicine. While I was there, the counter lady noticed the change in my voice, asked if I had a cold, then proceeded to tell me that I needed to wear a scarf (this was all in Korean and gestures). The ramen I bought looked plain (the reason I bought it) but I think it was made with hellfire because my lips have been burning and I finished eating it 30 minutes ago. I will keep you updated on the progress of my cold and everything else that's going on. Laters!

Mums the word

This weekend I went to Masan to visit Liezle. One of the reasons I decided to go to Masan this weekend is because it was the mum festival and I thought that would give us something extra to do. I left Jinju around 9am and immediately got on the wrong bus, but figured it out before the second stop in Jinju. I got off that bus then got on the correct bus, which luckily was immediately behind us. Masan is only about an hour away and I took a cat nap and looked at the scenery. Once I arrived, I called Liezle who gave me directions to get on another city bus and ride it for about 20 minutes. I was then supposed to call her when I got close to the stop. Her directions were very good and I got off at the correct stop (or one past) but my phone decided to stop working and I had no way of contacting her. I decided to start walking and find a coffee shop. They are usually all over Korea and most have free computers that customers can use. So after walking for about 30 minutes and still not finding a single coffee shop, I got back on a bus and headed back towards the bus station because at least I knew where that was and I knew there were major coffee shops there. So after about another 15 minutes, I spotted an Angel in Us, which is a big chain. I got off the bus, went inside, ordered and coffee and...no computer. I was not happy. So armed with coffee, I decided to do what I should have done in the first place, and go to a PC room. It's like an internet cafe. I've never been in one before, and should have taken a picture, but I was stressed out and sweaty at the time. It's a giant room with tons of computers with huge monitors and comfy desk chairs. A nice young girl showed me what to do after some miming and pointing on my part. You log in with a card number, then when you check out you give them the number back and they charge you based on time. I logged onto facebook and luckily Liezle was monitoring her phone. She had gone to the hospital close to her house because she thought I might have been in a bus accident since we had been talking and then I wasn't answering my phone all of the sudden. So after some messages, I decided to just get in a cab and hope he would take me to the correct place. He did. So what should have taken a total of about an hour and a half took closer to 3. Suzette, one of Liezle's friends from home who also lives in Korea (I forget which city) was also meeting us so we just waited near the hospital for her, then went back to Liezle's to drop off our stuff. Her apartment is adorable. It's a decent size, but more importantly, it's arranged in a usable fashion. She also has a small couch and decent storage spaces.

After a brief rest period, we walked to a little restaurant near her apartment and had lunch. We ate samgyupsal - sort of like thick cuts of bacon. This kind was also rubbed in a spicy sauce. The people were really nice and gave us tons of side dishes including some really good onions, the always present garlic, peaches, acorn gelee (which was actually pretty good) and sweet potatoes.

Lunch

After eating, we hopped in a cab and went over to the other side of town, near the harbor, for the festival. I didn't really know what to think, but I was happy with it. There were tons of flowers everywhere. Most were put into some sort of sculpture, but there were also just pots and pots of them in random spots. I might have done some of the craft things, like making soap or tea, and the girls probably wouldn't have minded, but I already dragged them there, so I didn't want to make them wait for me. Chrysanthemum tea taste like eating flowers by the way.

Flower castle that you could walk under

The only down-side was the bees. None of us got stung though.

They had all these weird sculptures in the middle, including this guy, an Indian in full head dress and a crayon

Pandas

Passed this restaurant and had to take a  picture for the Roll

Masan harbor through a flower heart

The "mascots" of the festival

After the festival we went to a coffee shop and sat and people watched for awhile. Then I had to pee, which usually isn't a problem, but this coffee place shared a bathroom with some other stores, so you had to go 3 stores over, walk down a hallway and have a key. It was fairly clean though, so it all worked out. Then we rode the bus back to Liezle's and met a friend of hers at the corner grocery store to pick up dinner making stuff. We made spaghetti with red sauce with mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes and onions. It was really good. We also ate some food that Sam (Liezle's friend who lives a few houses down) made earlier with a Korean lady - fried kimbap and some really good chicken and potatoes. One of the stranger parts of the evening was when her landlord showed up to fix her outer door which was basically hanging on by part of a hinge. It was 6;30 on a saturday night and 3 guys show up, they unlock her door (without knocking) while we're in there, apologize once they realize people are there, plug in a desk lamp so they can see better and proceed to fix her door. Then they tried to ask us to go get chicken and beer with them, but as we were already cooking and in pjs (and due to the fact that they don't speak English and we don't speak Korean) we decided not to go. We sat around eating, drinking and chatting for a few hours, then Sam went home and we went to bed. Sam let me borrow her bed topper, which is almost like a thin mattress. It was pretty comfy. I could feel that I was getting sick though, so I tried to drink a lot of water before bed.

When we woke up, I had the start of a cold, which sucks. I need to remember to get a humidifier asap. We got dressed, had coffee at Liezle's then met Sam and went on a hike behind their apartments. Neither of them had done the hike before. It was crazy steep and had long flights of stairs at some points. I am totally out of shape and had to go fairly slow up the mountain. Sam and Suzette are in really good shape and they went ahead of us and told us that the top wasn't really worth it because you couldn't see anything, so Liezle and I went didn't go quite to the top, but we went a decent amount of the way. It was a gray and cold day too, which didn't make it any better.

Obligatory gym halfway up the mountain

Giant hula hoops next to the gym hung on a tree branch

Second or third set of stairs

Once we got down the mountain, we decided to go to get some food. We went to a little kimbap shop near her house and ordered soup. I got mandu guk which is usually pretty good. This kind wasn't bad except that it had little clams and shrimp in it so I didn't eat very much of it. It started raining while we were eating and the only thing we could say was that we were lucky that it waited until we were done with the hike because at least one of us would have fallen. Then we went to a coffee shop called Java Coffee. It is run by a Kenyan lady. apparently it's a new government program in Kenya and they are opening coffee shops up all around the world. My latte was pretty decent, but my mango donut wasn't anything special. We sat there and chatted, then went back to Liezle's and chatted some more.

Sweet potato latte - it's purple. Suzette ordered it. She likes them apparently.

At that point I decided to go home. I was planning on having dinner with a friend of mine and didn't want to be out too late since I was still feeling sick. When I got to the bus station, I easily got my ticket, only to walk outside to the longest bus line I've ever seen. The line for the Jinju bus went all the way down, then circled back around the station. 4 buses and about an hour later, I was on the bus (and also got a seat - some people had to stand for the hour ride home). I got home, moved dinner to tomorrow, got in pjs and typed this blog. I'm going to bed soon because I need to get up (although not that early) to go with my boss and try to get my phone fixed tomorrow. I'll keep you posted!