Wow! It's hard to believe it's so close to Christmas already!
I ordered a Christmas tree last weekend.... artificial, since I haven't seen any place to get real trees. It was delivered Thursday, complete with lights and decorations, so I set it up.
Now, I just need some presents to go under it! LOL
Most of the teachers at my school have a pet of some kind. A number of them have adopted through one of the rescue organizations such as Animal Rescue Korea. Well, after looking through their site and thinking about if for a couple of weeks, I finally decided to adopt a white minature schnauzer.
She's a 4-5 years old pure-bred that had been used for breeding. She follows me everywhere and is always right beside me. As I type this, she is lying about 2 feet from me snoozing away.
The people at the rescue named her Rada. I don't care for that name very much, so I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with that or change it to something else. Since I got her a day and a half ago, I haven't had to call her anything... since she's always right there. So far the thoughts/suggestions have been Prada, Cenna, Squeak (since she's been debarked), and Kimchi....
Suggestions anyone?
A group of the American teachers got together at my apartment this week to celebrate Thanksgiving.
We had to substitute a couple of roasted chickens for the turkey... since you apparently can't find a turkey anywhere in korea... but other than that we had a pretty traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner.
We had a really good time... and of course we ate waaaaay too much.
We had a good time sharing our family holiday traditions.... for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year.
Of course, we had to go to work after since Thanksgiving isn't a Korean holiday... but oh, well...
Oh... and yes, that is my new sofa you see in the pictures!
It was delivered about 11am on Thanksgiving day... just in time for everyone to break it in! And it's exactly what I wanted... 'except I didn't realize how low to the ground it would be. I forgot how short Asian furniture is. Because of the heated floors, they like to be down low. But, that aside, I think I did a great job for my first online purchase in Korea
Of course, now I've got to get the other moved out so that you actually have room to move around the apartment!
Well, I can tell I'm really settling in for the long haul...
Late last night I bought a new sofa. Or at least I think I bought a new sofa...
To explain... in Korea there is a HUGE online marketplace called GMarket.com. It's kind of the Korean equivalent of Amazon.com, except it has literally anything you can imagine-- from groceries to furniture to clothes, etc. Most every major retailer in Korea (and scores and scores of minor retailers) use it to sell their products. And whatever you order is delivered to your door, usually in 2 days (including things like furniture).
So anyway... when I moved here I was extremely fortunate to have been able to buy a lot of things from the couple (former teachers at CDI) who lived in my apartment immediately before me. Most teachers arrive and have only a mattress to sleep on (and with some hagwons, a rice cooker). I moved into an apartment that was almost completely furnished. And, while some of the things may not have been exactly my taste, it was really nice to have many of the comforts of home right off the bat.
Well, now I'm starting to plan for the future. Several of the photo's I've taken recently I've worked on photoshopping to get framed to use as art in my apartment (art? in a teacher's apartment? a real rarity here).
That got me to thinking about other things-- how to just really make this "MY" home, since I'll be here for a minimum of 10 more months and probably longer than that.
Sooooo.... I ordered a sofa.
And... I ordered a sofa from a Korean retailer (in Seoul) on a Korean website and gave them instructions on how to deliver it to my apartment (in Daejeon).
This should be interesting!
Now, the first hurdle I had to deal with is the fact that in Korea they have VERY different tastes than I am accustomed to in things like furniture. Everything is either what they call "antique" ,translated as a knock-off of an extremely formal victorian living room, or it's "modern", which can be either extreme minimalist or neon pink/purple/red/yellow (and often fuzzy, furry or shaped like giant lips).
While I can appreciate the lines of minimalist design, it just always looks so uncomfortable to me-- certainly not something I want to come home to at the end of the day. And I'm NOT going to buy a giant pink sofa... so, I tried to find something that had a little color to it but was not overly "foo-foo". Here's what I came up with:
The color is "choco" (korean for chocolate). I figured if the cushions look good with the pattern side, great-- and if they're too much, I can turn them around and go with all brown.
Of course, I did show pics of it to one of my asian (Vietnamese, not Korean) friends here whose immediate response was "oh... surprised... VERY asian style".
The price was really good. Furniture is one of the many things that you can get really cheaply in Korea (provided of course that you go to GMarket!) It only costs 137,000 KW (roughly $122.00 USD).
Now, let's see if it actually gets here!
As to my old couch... well, one of the female teachers here is going to buy it from me since she's been here a couple of months and her only furniture so far is a small breakfast table with 2 matching chairs.
And speaking of other teachers and their lack of "stuff"... there are 11 teachers leaving CDI here in Daejeon this month and 11 newbies on their way in to start the process all over again.
They're making a short video showing our "CDI Pride". This isn't the final version, but thought I'd go ahead and link it here:
Well, it's taken me a week to get this posted but last weekend a few of us went to Gyeung-Ju to visit some of the historical sites there. Gyeung-ju was the capitol of the Silla dynasty for centuries and as a result the city is known as "a museum without walls". Everywhere you look, there's the royal tomb of one king or another. There are also several of the oldest Buddhist temples in Korea, including Bulguk-sa Temple, which contains 7 of the national treasures of Korea and Seoguram Grotto, the only cave temple in Korea. The carvings and paintings are beautiful.
Bulguk-sa Temple:
Seoguram Grotto:
The National Museum in Gyeung-ju is located at on a lake at the former site of the royal palace. Apparently, the lake was drained for some reason 30 or so years ago and it was discovered that it had been used for centuries as a "royal landfill". About 10,000 artifacts were recovered and many are now on display in the museum.
I only pasted a few of the picture thumbnails here, but there are about 300 pictures from the trip over on photobucket, so feel free to check them out there.
So... it's finally payday in Korea! A few of us decided to celebrate by going out to eat crab.
While that may not sound like a lot, you have to understand that over here they have the largest crabs that I've ever seen in my life. Four of us shared one crab... which weighed 3 kilograms (about 10 pounds). The thing was enormous (and delicious).
It came with all kinds of appetizers/side dishes (gotta love Korean food!) including shrimp, oysters, fruit salad (kind of), seafood salad, etc.... and yeah, this pic is just the side dishes... the crab was still cooking.
... some of which we're still trying to figure out.
Then they brought us out the cooked crab, which they proceeded to cut up for us and arrange it so it actually looked incredible!
Although I must confess... I'm not sure if we had more fun eating our food.. or playing with it!
While Halloween is celebrated in Korea, it's usually only very young children that dress up.... EXCEPT for the Westerners that is. It may just be because it's a way of "connecting" with western culture but the foreigners here seem to really enjoy dressing up and going out. The "foreigner" bars really play it up as well. I forgot to bring my camera, but fortunately one of the other teachers took some great pics. (Thanks Wah!)
On a completely different note... I went through and deleted about 400 friends from my facebook account this week. I had so many people posting things on such a regular basis that I'd just quit bothering to check it. I'd have to wade through hundreds of messages every day. Facebook is used as a major means of communicating over here, so I basically just left the people from here so I can actually see what's going on with the other ex-pats.
I'll start by saying I'm better now...
Apparently I'd gotten food poisoning a few weeks back. A stomach bug was going around, so I attributed the mild fever/nausea to that. Nothing too severe.
However, I just couldn't get back to feeling right. I couldn't keep anything in me... kept feeling worse and worse. At first, I thought it was probably just my system adjusting to the new foods, etc. This went on for about 3 weeks. At the end, my stomach became very bloated/distended to the point it was painful to even sit down due to the pressure it put on my abdomen. I was looking like I was pregnant.
Sooo... I went to the hospital.
Korean healthcare has very high standards. They probably rival the quality of care in the United States. Instead of seeing a general practitioner, I see an Internal Medicine specialist. I had an appointment at 9:20am and was advised it's best to get there a few minutes early because if you're not there they'll give away your appointment. I arrived at about 9am and an english speaking nurse escorted me to the waiting area for my appointment. At just about 9:20, the nurse came back and went with me into the exam room. The doctor examined me... with the nurse acting as a translator. The official diagnosis: acute colonitis resulting from a bacterial infection. In other words, I'd had food poisoning for the past 3 weeks that was gradually getting worse. I guess that's what I get for eating all that street food!
The doctor gave me 4 prescriptions: antibiotics and other things (not sure what they all were, honestly). I left the hospital and went to the pharmacy 2 building over to get them filled. Then walked back to my apartment a block away. All that and got back home by 10:00. Cost? Seeing a specialist at the hospital cost me $21,000 KW and the prescriptions were another $7,000. That's about $23.00 US.
An interesting thing about prescriptions here... when you go to the pharmacy, they package them for you according to your doses. You get this long plastic strip with each dose (however many pills you should take at that time) in an individual pouch.
Anyway... that was last Thursday. Finished up my meds yesterday. I've been sleeping a lot... letting my body rest up and recover and I'm doing MUCH better. Almost back to 100%...
Now... anyone seen one of those vendors selling the chicken skewers? I'm hungry!
Soooo... I have a 5 minute break between class and I run to the 7-11 next door (yes, they have 7-11's in Korea) for a quick snack. I grab an iced coffee and some yogurt covered peanuts... or so I think.
I get back to class... and hurrying 'cause I'm going to have to start teaching again, I tear open the package, dump a big handful in my hand and throw them in my mouth to eat....
THAT's when I discover they're definitely NOT yogurt covered peanuts. They're wasabi covered peanuts... and not American wasabi, asian wasabi...
Well, after choking, gagging, spitting peanuts all over the place and drinking my whole coffee I was finally able to talk...
Word to the wise... if you don't know what it is, NEVER make an assumption! LOL...
Well, I finally got a chance to do some sightseeing this weekend. I love to see different historical/cultural sites and have been wanting to see some of them here. This weekend one of my korean friends agreed to take me around one of the palaces up in Seoul. We went to Gyeongbok Palace, the palace that served as the location for state affairs for the longest period of time in Korean history. I got lots of great pics. I'll only copy a few here, but the others are all over on photobucket.
I was able to see a few other things in the area... there's an entire "cultural area" that has some of the various historic aspects mixed into the city. It's kind of odd to see a traditional hanook home next door to a modern apartment building.
On the way home, there was a group of dancers from a church in the subway. I couldn't understand the music, but the dancing was rather pretty.
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