Things I've Seen and Done, Part 9

Things are starting to hit the crunch time. This coming week is the last full week of teaching. It's going to be ABSOLUTELY INSANE. I have so much paperwork to deal with in the next few days. I might do something unprecedented and go into work on Thursday this week. This past week was also a little crazy. Part of it was school stuff, part of it was that I was involved in multiple Christmas music performances this weekend. So I have seen and done lots of things, but none of them were very interesting. 

This is part of the stack of textbooks I had to evaluate for the English camp I'm teaching in January. It will be switching things up a bit. I'm teaching six and seven year olds. 

I tried to make applesauce this week. I peeled and sliced all of my apples, and put in the recommended spices. I left it to cook just like I was supposed to! Unfortunately, the finished product wasn't very delicious. I've only ever seen one kind of apple in Korea, and I just don't think it was up to the job of making applesauce. 

Trash gets really complicated here. There are special bags you have to buy for different kinds of trash. There are multiple categories of recycling to deal with. These are the bags that you use for food trash (there are lots of rules about what does and doesn't count as food trash) that is full of the peelings from the ill-fated applesauce. 

I've done a lot of cooking this week. As a result, I've done a lot of dish washing. I also haven't had much time to play my cello lately. The result of this particular combination was the fingertips on my left hand started to peel. They peeled for three days before all of the callouses from my cello practice were gone. It's going to be rather painful to get them back again. 

I opened my last package of golden oreos this week. I pulled one out, and on one side it looked perfectly normal. Just like a golden oreo should. 

Then I flipped it over, and I saw this. Somehow, this one cookie had gotten put on upside down. It was a little strange. 

It made a nice design in the frosting though. For all of those people who can't eat a sandwich if the bread doesn't match, you'll be glad to know that I made sure to reassemble the oreo in the correct way before I ate it. 

There are tiny stores and road-side stands all over the city for shoe repair. Some of them have different names, but the name of this one made me laugh a little bit. It's called "goodoo byeongwon", which translates (literally) to "shoe hospital". 

Finally, I went to a Christmas cookie exchange over the weekend. This was all of the bounty before we started to divide them all up. It was a pretty spectacular way to spend a Saturday morning!