old vs. new

Exploring our small town we walked from the old town Jinyeong to the new town.  The old town was worn down with dirty alleyways, smelly shops, dog poop, and I even saw a dead rat!  My first rat, belly up.  We found the train station - Korail - which will take us to Mokpo in about 6 hours, Busan in 2, Seoul in +4, Masan in 18 mins.  After our last bus ride to Gwangju we are a lot more excited to try the train system. In the old town I also encountered some puppies, even an older basset hound howling at us as we stood over it on the bridge.  ( A good sign is that they do have an animal hospital). There are very clear distinctions between the old and new.  

The old is on the south side of the major 3+ lane hwy.  The train tracks are also clearly defined to not cross.  They use bridges, underground tunnels and flag men to ensure that no one walks out on the tracks at their own will.  The underground tunnel was interesting.  At one end it was short in height, I even had to duck as I went through it.  It had the sewage also running under it.  

It was a very short trip under the train tracks that we are not wanting to take again, unless maybe if our city is on fire.  Mostly because at the end of it we encountered a spider that was probably the size of my palm. 

 On the left is the old city and on the right is the new city, to see all of the photos taken today visit flickr - old vs. new set.

Across the main hwy you immediately enter the new city, where everything is developing, new trees, new homes, new high rise apartments!  Glen says they build up because the cost for land is too high to build out.  Probably also because 70% of South Korea are mountains.  The new city is clean and community built.  Thousands of people live in these apartment buildings.  We walked all the way around the gated community, mostly because the security guard came to talk to us and we couldn't understand him.  Within another 2 years a development just like this one will be duplicated on the north side of it.

To the right is the downtown "strip" of new Jinyeong.  It has many coffee shops, restaurants and even a dunkin donuts and basket robin's. A couple of family mart - convenience store - and GS supermarket in the basement. We think that the upper levels are office space, but we think soon to come this complex will be full with shopping franchises. 

After our downtown walk, we came across the best part of our city.  A park/plaza.  I didn't get any photos of this ,but all the children from school were in the park riding little atv's and scooters.  They were also having an art show of the stuff they made.  It was quite neat.  The kids in this city are a lot more energetic than the adults.  They are usually the ones that stare at us and say Annyeong (hello).  They are always surprised when we respond in Korean back.  I can say already that I will be spending a lot of time in this park.  It is probably the closest recognizable thing we have here to home - specially with a cup of hot coffee in hand.

What do I eat?

I was fortunate enough when I went to Greece to LOVE everything I ate.  Strawberry's by the pound at the markets, 1.5 euro gyro's topped with french fries around the corner, nutella crepes down the street. 

I've only been here for 5 days but my menu has sure been limited.  The first day we got here Andrew and I thought we would try and surf the menu's at the local restaurants (this was a common thing in Greece). But before we were even halfway through our first door, we were encouraged to sit down and were faced with a menu 100 percent in Korean.  Our ordering tactic has now been limited to pointing at the pictures on the doors and nodding.  It turns out, our "first Korean meal" was most likely a Chinese dish. It included many small dishes that we had no idea what to do with, shrimp, octopus, a black creamy sauce, and the woman working the restaurant cutting my food with scissors. You can read more about our first meal at - Andrew's Blog. -- click to see!

At the end of this meal we also attempted to say "thank you for this delicious meal" - chal meo-geo-sseo-yo.  I learned several days later that if you don't pronounce the "chal" just right, you are actually referening to something along the lines of "do you breast feed?" 

The next day we decided we would try to jump right in and start cooking like Koreans.  HA HA HA.  Not only do we know nothing about cooking Korean food but we can't read Korean.  All the labels and directions to cook things are all in Korean.  I wish we had a device that we could scan the Korean in, like a bar code and then the English version would then appear.  Many times now we have had to "guess" how much of an ingredient goes into something, and how long it is cooked for.

Not only is that new but they way Koreans cook is quite different.  It may be different in larger apartments where families live, but we have one small toaster oven and two small stove tops.  The options for our stove tops (gas stoves) are high heat and off.  No matter how slow I turn it down to get it on low, it always blows out while cooking.   As I was telling Andrew today - new kitchen, no oven, one heat, new food, no directions, or ingredients ... I feel like I should be on/win some international cooking show contest for beginners.  After all, I have made chicken and dumplings that were edible.

I also realized that my love for sweet pickles may have been something I was bred to love. Being that I was in the womb while in Korean, and Koreans put sweet pickles on EVERYTHING!  We even got them with our pizza tonight.

While on the street today I also bought 6 large and juicy pear apples from a vendor selling them out of there truck.  Next time I seem them I will have to take a picture because they are almost overflowing the back of the truck.  I was hesitant to buy them since I am looking to avoid traveling sickness from food, but I am glad I did because it's quite succulent.. as you can see.

Where do I live?

After a long flight to South Korea, from Chicago, I arrived at our very nice apartment in a very small town.  Andrew and I were tickled pink with our accommodations.  We got the best deal by far.

This is our foyer.  Koreans use this space to take there shoes off.  It is apart of there cultural custom to not enter a home, temple, some restaurants, with shoes on.

 

 This is our bedroom.  It came with a wardrobe, bed, and tv stand.  It is very large I would say.  We are still working on getting use to the extremely hard beds and where to store all of our clothes.

Left is the view from our bedroom  through the hall.  You can see the doorway of the bathroom.  The photo to the right is part of our kitchen and doorway of our laundry room.

To the left is our bathroom.  Note the shower head is hanging next to the sink, we were expecting this.  To the right is our laundry room.  it's very spacious and has a drying rack hanging from the ceiling.

 And this is a photo of our kitchen.  Andrew is attempting to make our first breakfast.  It was very good.  We had almond pancakes (little brown) and eggs and some meat links.  We discovered that it is hard to buy food when we can't read Korean.  He accidentally bought peanut oil instead of syrup.

We have enjoyed living in our little apartment together.  We (like every other apartment) live above a restaurant.  Our restaurant is still vacant, but once that moves in I'm sure we will be smelling some great Korean food!