Thanksgiving in Korea

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!

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I bought a sofa

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.

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CDI Pride Video

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:

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Bulguk-sa Temple, Gyeung-Ju

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.

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Giant Crabs

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!

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Halloween

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.

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