Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Welcoming the new arrival!

I got my first paycheck yesterday. This is a terribly exciting event for any number of reasons! After I got off of work yesterday, one of my American colleagues and I went to one of the electronics stores near our apartment building. We bought such essential things as blenders, an oven for me and a crock pot for Qiana.

We managed to communicate which models we wanted of each item, and we were able to pay for them ourselves. However, my oven had to be delivered because a) it weighs nearly 50 pounds and b) they didn't have it in stock at that particular store. However, arranging this was beyond our ability in Korean. Thankfully, there was an employee at the store who spoke quite good English who was able to help us out.

This evening, I was on the subway on my way home from work and my phone rings. I answer it, and it is the delivery man who is speaking very fast Korean. I recognized the name of the store, the word for "oven" and the name of my apartment building, so I figured that he was trying to tell me that he was there to deliver the oven and wondered where I was. I was about ten minutes away from home, and managed to tell him that.

When I got back to my apartment, he was standing in the hallway waiting for me with a rather large box. I was really glad that I didn't have to arrange to get it home by myself! He helped me get it all unpackaged and set up. We couldn't communicate well enough for him to show me how to use it though. After he left, I dug out my Korean dictionary and started trying to translate things.


I am happy to report that I was able to figure out enough to get it on the oven setting, set the correct temperature and time, and successfully bake some banana bread!! However, there are lots of other settings that I'm pretty clueless about. I think I'm going to need help trying to figure them out. Without further ado, here are the pictures!





Wednesday, October 20, 2010

I had a moment on the subway

Actually, I had two moments on the subway today. I was taking the subway to have a baking day with my friend Renae today. She lives about an hour away from me, so I settled in with my nook and my iPod to do some reading.

I have spent the last three weeks or so reading a 650 page biography of Dietrich Boenhoffer. It has been an excellent book, and I've really enjoyed it! I was nearing the end of the book, and was quite engrossed in the story when someone reached over and touched my arm and said "did you buy that in Korea or in your country?"

It took me a minute to realize that someone was talking to me, and to process that they were speaking English and understand what their question was. I pulled out my headphones and we talked about the nook for a few minutes. It turns out that this family (it was both parents and a little girl) had been living in America for the past 14 years. They had only been back in Korea for two days. Their little girl really missed having English books, and they wondered if an e-book reader might be a good way for her to go. So, we talked about different e-book options for English books, and I told them about the wonderful English bookstore in the foreigner district, and then they got off of the subway and I went back to my book.

I was listening to Mozart's "Requiem" in my iPod. This shouldn't really surprise anyone. That is one of my very favorite pieces of music. It is important to note that a Requiem is a set of prayers for the dead. I was reading the last 25 pages of my book. It is walking through Dietrich's last meal, his last letter, last trip, his execution less than two weeks before the Allies liberated the death camps... There were excerpts from his memorial service in England, stories of how his family found out what had happened to him...

I was sitting on the subway, in a fairly crowded car... And all of a sudden, I started crying. There was something about the combination of the music and the story that just pushed me over the edge. I normally hate crying. I hate crying in public even more. I wasn't particularly happy to be crying this time, but in a strange way, I was also a little bit glad.

I haven't written much about the subway on here. This is intentional. I hate the subway. It is always crowded. It gets really hot. Sometimes there are so many people that cram into a car that you literally can't move at all. Remember those old Looney Tunes cartoons where the subway trains are actually sardine tins? Yeah... I'm convinced that the artists visited Seoul for their inspiration. The subway is always loud, and it is always confining and dark. I hate the subway. I hate riding the subway.

But... For a little bit, in the middle of all of that, there was a moment. A moment where the subway faded from my mind, the noise and smells didn't bother me, I forgot about the old lady who was steadily staring at me, and I was able to enjoy my book and my music. It was a nice break from the seemingly constant assault on my senses that living in Seoul has provided -- even if it did require some tears.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Dinner with friends

I spent part of this afternoon working on grading with some of my friends. We all met in a coffee shop in Seoul and graded for a few hours, then we decided to go get some dinner. One of my friends grew up in Korea, but she moved to America when she was 9. She speaks Korean, so she was trying to figure out where a good restaurant was. We finally decided to go into this little meat place.

Eating out is really different than it is in America. It is most common to order big dishes of food that the whole table shares. One of my favorite types of restaurants are the meat restaurants. Basically, you have a grill in the middle of your table and you order plates of raw meat that you then cook.  Another major difference is that all Korean meals come with 반찬 (banchan) that are small side dishes. 

Some restaurants have Western style tables and chairs, but this particular one didn't. I'm still not used to sitting cross legged on the floor for an hour or so. It can get kinda awkward... The food was really really good though! We ordered a plate of beef, a plate of pork and some 부대찌개 (bundae jigae).

부대찌개 translates into something like "army base stew". After the Korean war, meat was difficult to come by, so Koreans took surplus SPAM, hot dogs, and other such things and mixed them into the traditional Korean stew base. The stew we ordered also came with a block of ramen noodles and a slice of American cheese. It wasn't my favorite kind of Korean food, but it was ok. 

Hello John! (You can see the tips of Nayoung's chopsticks... She was sitting beside me, so she didn't make it into the picture) All of those little white bowls are banchan. You take the meat and there are several different things you can dip it in and eat it like that. Or, you can take the lettuce leaves and fold it all up in that and eat it. Both ways are really good!

Some of the banchan we got tonight were buckwheat pancakes with wasabi, bean sprouts and caviar on top, fermented pumpkin, several squid/octopus dishes, kimchi, and several others that I don't remember...


They brought out this portable gas stove to cook our stew on. You can also see the plate of pork waiting to be cooked and the block of ramen noodles with the cheese slice.

This is the budae jigae cooking at the table. 

One of the best parts about this meal was it only cost about $10 per person! It was pretty awesome!

Friday, October 15, 2010

Whew...

Midterms are done. Well, almost done. I still have to give the exam to my IT English students on Tuesday, but the exam has been written, copied and stapled AND the Monday review session is planned. All that remains to be done is the grading. That will be a bit of a nightmare, but it will be over soon enough. 

One of the good things is that I have some extra time off next week. ESWP did midterms a week ahead of the rest of the university to help the students out a little bit with the rest of their exams. So next week, in lieu of attending class every day, we are sponsoring "American Culture Week". What this means is on Tuesday and Thursday we are showing some movies with free popcorn and then doing a short activity after the movie. Students are required to come to one movie and that gets them marked as present for the whole week. We are showing "Up" and "The Terminal" and everyone is pretty excited about it!

As a result of this, I don't have to spend nearly as much time at work this week! I have to go in for an hour or so on Monday to do my IT English review session and for an hour on Friday morning to read books to my 4-6 year olds... But I don't have to go into work at all on Wednesday! Happy day!! My friend Renae and I are getting together at her house and having a baking fest! She has an oven, so we are going to go a little crazy! We have pizza or calzones, bread, brownies, and chocolate chip cookies on the menu! 

It will be really nice to have some extra time to get stuff done. I'll be able to go to the expat banking center and get some stuff set up, and go to the foreigner's district to buy a Korean book and some spices and such that I have been wanting. I can sleep in a little bit, and hopefully make it up to the mountain that is in my neighborhood. 

I'm also planning on posting a lot of pictures on here in the next week or so. I've been unsure about what to post on this blog, so I've been waiting until something special or interesting happened... Then I realized... I live in a foreign country. There are lots of things that are different enough to warrant being interesting. So, I'm going to try and take you on a photo tour of my immediate neighborhood. I'm starting to figure out where to go for different things, so I can show you "my" stores ;-) I also hope to get some pictures of my campus and classroom. I'm going to try to get better about giving more of an idea of what life is like here instead of waiting until something out of the ordinary happens!

As part of my attempts to make this blog a little more user-friendly, I have added a formspring to the right hand side of this page. You can basically ask questions on there, and I'll get them and do my best to answer them. They can be about information you want about Korea, teaching, me... Ask whatever you want, and I'll try to answer it!

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Things I love about my students, part I

Consider this to be an on-going series of posts, whenever my students do something that is particularly newsworthy.

This post is actually a few weeks out of date, but I don't have a memory card reader on my computer at school, and I didn't have internet at home for a long time. Last month, Korea celebrated a holiday called Chuseok. I wrote about it a little bit here. Several of my students gave me small gifts for Chuseok.

One student gave me this lovely box.


Inside of it was a small teddy bear wearing hanbok, which is traditional Korean clothing. He now lives on my computer at work. 


She had also written me a really sweet note.



A few days ago, I walked into my classroom to discover that some of my students had drawn this picture on my whiteboard. I thought it was pretty great!


Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The New and Improved Apartment!!



I've been in Korea for almost two months... In some ways, it feels like a ridiculously long time where so many things have happened.... And in some ways, it is starting to feel pretty normal, and life is pretty routine. I've finally been able to decorate my apartment a little bit. It is felling a LOT more like home, and much less like a hotel room, so I'm really thankful for that!!

Monday, October 4, 2010

I'm almost fully functional!

I have been informed that an appointment has been made to get internet set up in my apartment! Finally!! I should be online by tomorrow evening. I'm super excited. This means:

I can actually have phone contact with people in America!!
I will be able to consistently check, write and send emails!
I can finally catch up on "Lie to Me" on hulu
Hopefully my internet signal will be strong enough to upload all of the pictures I have sitting on my camera.

Basically, I'll be around a lot more. Hopefully posting on here will pick up too!

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