Saturday afternoon.

Hello all,

It's Saturday afternoon here.  This wont be long, but I just thought I would give a few updates on Korea.  I still haven't been able to do any regularly blogging due to my top secret project.  It is a computer project and my file crashed last week.  So I had to start over.  I will be close to finishing  this weekend and then next week/weekend is our 5 day weekend and I will have lots of time to finish my project and upload the last month of our lives in Korea.  

Recently our school has hired a new teacher for the computer courses that Andrew and I were doing every 3 days.  We now have about 30 students.  It's been a little tense since our school was under the impression that we would have 100 students by this point.  Andrew and I will miss these computer days for they were very easy on us, and they are now replaced with more classes.  We now have 4 spring classes and 5 red classes.  So almost a 1/3 of our classes are just beginner kids.  Our schedules have been slowly changing from the recommended schedule of our classes and school.  But next month  we will only be teaching 5-6 classes a day.  

On a more interesting note we ate live octopus last night!  It was still moving, but conveniently cut into small pieces. We also had Japanese style sushi and raw fish, salmon, oysters, and some other stuff I didn't know what was but wasn't cooked.   Andrew got a couple of pictures on his iphone so you can look for that soon.

Okay back to work.  Anneyong

Baby, it's cold outside!

Soooo.  Once again we are having water issues.  This time it wasn't the girl upstiars flooding our ceiling.  Yesturday the water pressure started to get really slow.  This is normal when someone is using the water in for laundry or a shower, but it started to decrease to a dribble around 9:30.  We texted our landlord who came over this morning and told us that the pipes which carry water from Gimhae to our town had frozen and bursted! UNDERGROUND!  Apparently Southeastern Korean can't handle below freezing temps at night.  They said it would be fixed today, but it takes 5 hours for the water to pump it's 15 miles distance to us. 

On the plus side, all of those years of boiling water while camping really paid off this morning!

Soon Enough

Hello Family and Friends-

I know I've been MIA from blogger and flickr for awhile.  I wanted to let you know I haven't died.  I'm just really busy. I'm working on a top secret project that is taking up all of my free time. So in a few quick words (because I'm at work) I will share what we've been doing. 

For New Years we went to Seoul with Becky and Nick.  When I'm done with this project (roughly 2 weeks) I will post my photos and tell you about my favorites, and better yet what I want to do when we go back in June.

The weekend after we went to home plus and Bugoh Hawaii with Kang and his family.  We Enjoyed a great day of tubing, ice sculptures, and a traditional Korean Bath House.

This week at work has been crazy hectic!  We have had open classes every day, where parents and perspective students can sit in on our classes and see just how well we teach.  With reassurance from Glen, we are great teachers!  Tomorrow (Friday) we are coming to work around 9:15 am to go to a kindergarten orientation to hand out notebooks and hopefully get our student count up.  I think we are around 25 students now.  If we have around 60-70 students by the end of March we will be able to stay open.  If not we have been told our friend Jack (who owns lots of schools) will help place us at a new school, probably in Masan or Changwon.

At school I've been learning a little Korean.  I use these words almost every class.  I included how to pronounce them, and not in the grammatically correct kinda way.

Hurry - "ball-ie!  ball-ie!"

Folder - "pie-ile"

Memorize - "way-ou-say-yo"

Then this weekend we finally have a little time to ourselves.  I think Andrew will take a little time off from his video games and do some sketching and reading, and I will continue to work on my top secret project. (It's a secret because it's a surprise, but I will show you all when I'm done with it).

And in the meantime you can check out Andrew's Blog to read more in depth about what we've been doing!  Especially since I've been told by more than one of you that "Andrew is such a great writer!" I agree, so enjoy.

The Christmas Season

Most of you don't know that I am a list fanatic when I'm excited about something or need to get a great deal of things done. This Christmas Season was no different.  I won't go into detail of how Andrew took this, but I've included a picture so you can feel the same way.

This is how our Christmas Season started.  It didn't go as planned but we did accomplish everything on the list.  I did post the remainder of the posts in reverse order, so you should scroll down and read the posts as they took place over the weekend.  Enjoy! 

A little Christmas cheer

Andrew and I had a little time off for the holidays this year.  Christmas Eve we had off, and decided to spread a little Christmas cheer to our Jinyeong friends Kang and Glen.  The weekend before we picked up some rose wine from Home Plus and a bag of cookie flower along with vanilla, and chocolate chips.  Of course the directions were in Korean, and to add a little twist on top of that, everything was in grams.  We don't have a scale to measure the ingredients with, so using Andrew's great googling skills we attempted to convert grams to ml.  We didn't do the greatest job but at least the cookies were edible.  I also discovered that soup bowls were not going to be big enough to mix all the ingredients together (the flower alone was 1000 grams) so we had to resort to the largest thing we owned - a frying wok.  And then after all that, we cooked 6 cookies at a time in our little toaster oven - Tom.  ( I felt our toaster oven deserved a name after the great work he did this weekend, along with our ironing board - Frank, and the Hush Puppie dog - George)

Mixing: 400g of butter, 3 cups of sugar (1/2 of required),
10x more than required buttered-flavored vanilla, 3 eggs

Ditching the spoon and hand kneading the dough as I
added the 1000 g of flower 10 g of baking powder
 - in a frying wok

adding chocolate chips - 7 dollar bag of chocolate chips!

putting Andrew to work by rolling the dough

6 at a time. 2x longer to bake than suppose to.



Andrew cleaning the floor because I dropped some sugar - amateur baker



At least they look pretty.

Also check out Andrew's Blog.  He took a lot of the photos from our Christmas Season, and was nice enough to share them so I could post them on my blog.  I was too busy cooking and washing dishes the whole time to get too many photos, so I am grateful that at least Andrew was able to document our Korean Christmas. -Thanks!  And Merry Christmas

Ho Ho Ho! Merry Christmas!

Santa came early for us.  After baking all day (and wrapping presents) we went to dinner with Glen and Luke.  Afterwords we were pretty exhausted, Andrew still sick and I got food poisoning from dinner.  But Santa came while we were at dinner and neither of us are accustomed to opening presents on Christmas Day.  So around 10:30 we decided to have cake, open presents, and of course play sequence (my Christmas tradition).  It was quite wonderful, and it was great that we both surprised each other with unknown gifts (very hard thing to do in such a small town when you live and work together).

Andrew kicked my butt in sequence

Merry Christmas Cake from Kang, we added the candles for fun

Our Christmas tree and presents
Andrew wrapped his in clothes and blankets and tape
I wrapped mine in pretty paper
(wrapping is also a serious deal in my family traditions)

Andrew and I each got a present from Santa
we may or may have not bought ourselves something at Home Plus
 and then wrapped it for each other

I got a night stand, facewash, thermos, cutting board, and an external hardrive

Andrew got a Cafe Bene gift card, a pencil box with a little scavenger hunt for Seoul,
and Hush Puppie shoes

My favorite picture, Andrew opening his I <3 Micky mouse pencil case
 (a gag gift, though he seems to like it more than intended)

Christmas Toast

French toast may be my favorite breakfast meal.  It was a little tricky finding cinnamon and vanilla but I found them just in time for a delightful Christmas morning meal.

Merry Christmas Andrew!  After a late breakfest we climbed back in bed to watch A Christmas Story (Andrew's christmas tradition) and skype our families for their Christmas Eve celebrations.

Christmas Dinner!

Every year I demand a Christmas Feast.  Mostly because I was away at college and ate crap everyday.  The menu usually had duck or Cornish hens, sweet potatoes, fresh baked bread, and pie.

This year, given my limitations I was not able to have any of these things, but we did make out pretty good. 

Chestnuts wrapped in bacon
They were normal chestnuts so I soaked them in
 water for a full day and then soy sauce for an hour

30 mins in the toaster oven "Tom" and they were pretty delicious

I then taught Andrew how to make deviled eggs.
 Little different using Korean mayo and mustard

Andrew was in charge of pealing the potatoes
(they looked so supple using the brand new potatoes peeler i bought) 
After seeing how dangerous this device was I deemed Andrew official potato peeler.
Ironically he cut himself on the knife chopping the potatoes instead.

We chopped up some garlic and mixed it in with butter,
making them garlic mash potatoes.

pre-chopped chicken, perfect size for Tom

Rubbing the chicken down with garlic butter

making a secret orange sauce to drizzle on the chicken
 (best part of the meal we agreed)

yum!

Christmas Meal! wouldn't be Christmas without some wine and beer!

Food depressed

"I want to stay in South Korea, just so I can open my own food restaurant, and then eat there all the time - get fat and be happy.  I'm certainly not getting fat, and I crave everything under the sun about 8:30 pm.  Well not everything, definitely not anything Korean."
Well this is what I wanted to say, but as I read it to Andrew he told me I sounded too bitchy (in a nice way).  And now it fits his criteria "should sound light-hearted, ha ha, ha ha."

I want a BIG Juicy Granite City Bleu Peppercorn Burger with a tall beer, or two. But to start with I want their Ale and Cheddar soup, and a salad.   

And when i'm not eating that I want a BIG TASTY Greek Kabab from Shish -sorry no picture.


Then for snacks in between my meals, I want all the Gorgonzola cheese I can stuff my face and belly with.

And when i'm done I like to finish with something sweet.  And you can never go wrong with Target's Market Pantry Fruit Snacks. yum.

I guess for the next 10 1/2 months, I can only dream.

December 20, 1997  --  December 09, 2010

You will be loved eternally with all my heart and soul.  

I say a prayer for you as you leave this world and enter an after life of pure happiness.

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me." -Amen

May you watch over us, knowing that we will miss you forever and you can never be replaced.  I'm sorry I couldn't be there as you said goodbye.  rest in peace my beloved dog, you'll always be my bubbie.