Pilgrims in Korea

Here's another belated holiday post for you.

For Thanksgiving, Laura and I tried to organize a potluck at our apartment with all the teachers from school. We even put up a sign-up sheet in the teachers' lounge, which was largely ignored. The Canadian teachers didn't even make the effort to not RSVP--likely due to the fact that we both snubbed them on Canadian (or as I call it, "fake") Thanksgiving back in October. So as the big day drew closer, we were afraid we wouldn't have much to be thankful for this year.

People living in America have a lot to be thankful for. Like FREEDOM, for starters. Or the soothing wave relief that comes from remembering that you aren't from Canada. How about the Emancipation Proclamation? And Billy Mays. You also have a lot turkeys for eating.

Turkeys are so plentiful in America that not even Sarah Palin could kill all of them. In Korea, however, turkeys are almost as rare as dodos, a ButterBall going for 80,000 won (60 bucks American) at the local Costco. What's more, our apartment in Korea doesn't even have an oven, so even if we traded a healthy Korean child on the black market for a turkey, we still wouldn't be able to cook it properly.

So despite the missing turkey, the American teachers still came to our Thanksgiving bash in full force. They brought a cornucopia of dishes that nearly replicated that fateful meal between the pilgrims and the Indians in 1621: deviled eggs, fruit salad stir-fried sweet potatoes, pot roast (from a can) mashed potatoes (from a mix), and gravy (this too, from a mix). For dessert, we of course enjoyed the customary Reese's Peanut Butter Pie.

Thanks to Linda for the pictures and pie.

Midway through the feast our Korean friend, June, stopped by, and like Squanto offering corn to the pilgrims, he prepared kimchee-squid pancakes for us.

And there were even a couple of Canadians who came. They brought the traditional Thanksgiving bottle of gin to wash it all down. It was like we never left the USA.

On a related note, I tried to teach my kids how to draw hand turkeys. As you can see, the purpose of the activity was understood by the students by varying degrees:

My favorite is the Medusa-Turkey.

Expect my Christmas post in late 2011. Please let us know what you were thankful for in the comments.

Fish ate our Feet, now we are real Koreans

I have put together a picture show to catch you up on our last few weeks in Korea:

First, Chris and I went to a bar that had a doctor fish bowl where you put your feet in and tiny fish eat the dead skin off your feet.   Yeah, thats normal in Korea.  

Then we went out with our Korean friend John, who studied English at TIEP (where I used to work in Austin).  To help us celebrate our four year anniversary, John took us to Seoul Tower where couples are supposed to attach two locks to a fence, write a message on the locks, and throw the keys off of a cliff. 

This is a picture of Chris throwing his key off the cliff.  Oh yeah, that's the manly man I fell in love with four years ago.

John and I ran into a real live Mexican Mariachi band and I got a chance to practice speaking Spanish.

And finally, we took care of a friend's dog to help fill the void that Honeybucket has left.

Don't be shy, leave a comment!  This means you Grandma!

How We Halloweened

I apologize for just now getting around to posting about Halloween, but what with the time zone difference and no daylight savings time here, it's actually like 1996 in Korea.

Anyway, for Halloween, Laura dressed up as Governor Sarah Palin (or SCARE-ah Palin, since it was Halloween):

Unfortunately, it's not a very authentic costume since she isn't smeared with moose-blood and ignorance.

I went as Podongi (포동이), the mascot of our city, Anyang:

Again, not as authentic as it could be. I wanted to respect the integrity of the mascot and go pantsless, but ol' conservative family values Gov. Palin censored me and said I had to wear the shorts. [insert tasteless comment about how there could have been even more grapes]

Also, did I mention how Halloween is not celebrated at all in Korea? A bunch of us teachers dressed to go to CLUB PYSCHO, a foreigner-centric bar that was the only Halloween game in town. We tried to catch a cab, but for some reason no taxis were willing to take a chance on a (former!!) Vice-Presidential Republican candidate, a ninja, a mohawked punk, some from DJ Jazzy Jeff's posse circa 1989, a pirate, a hippie, a magic eight-ball, a white Korean schoolgirl, and a fully grown adult who voluntarily attached several balloons to his clothes with scotch tape.

We decided to split off into smaller groups composed of the least provocative combination of costumes, but for some reason, my group (I was with the ninja) still couldn't catch a break with a taxi. Finally, I had to hide behind a tree, and when one brave cab driver reluctantly stopped to pick up the ninja, I sprung from the shadows and into the taxi. Now I know how a black person in America must feel: like an anthropomorphic bunch of grapes in Korea.

Hope everyone had a GRAPE HALLOWEEN. I know I did.

Too many hugs.

BONUS ROUND: post your Halloween costume in the comments!

Myeong-dong: Where a girl can be a girl and a boy can buy a man-purse

Laura wanted to have a no-boys-allowed shopstravaganza last weekend in Myeong-dong, but I still managed to track her down.

Myeong-dong is basically a rapidly spreading retail tumor that shows no signs of ever slowing down. Shops from all over the world, from the ritzy to the merely high-falutin, are packed into every nook and nearly every cranny--it's harder than you'd think to fit an American Apparel into a typical Korean cranny.

Some highlights:

Four floors of Dunkin' Donuts:

















Mandatory face-bags required for trying on clothes:



And this guy on a mission to single-handedly change
the world into one big 노래방:

Swimming Pools--another opportunity to offend hundreds of Koreans

I have been searching for a public swimming pool since I arrived, but had a lot of trouble because I don't speak Korean. Finally I found one at a Sports Complex near our home. I biked there a couple of times to check it out but always found it closed. Finally I decided to tear down the sign on the door and bring it to a Korean at work who could translate. Once I figured out the pool's wacky hours, I was ready for my first dip in chlorinated Korean waters.

I entered, paid my 3,000 won, and it was at that point that I stopped knowing what was going on. I needed someone to hold my hand and guide me through a turnstile, into the women's locker room. In the locker room I found literally 200 naked old Korean women getting dressed. I wandered around for a while, looking for the pool (after all, I already had my swimsuit on...I didn't need the dressing room) until a woman came up to me and took me to the mass showering area (more naked old Korean women) and started taking my swimsuit off of me. Apparently you need to scrub yourself down..or have a kind Korean woman scrub you...before you enter the pool.

So after I scrubbed down with the locals, I thought I was sufficiently horrified and embarrassed, so I put my swimsuit back on and searched for the swimming pool. I couldn't find it. I was wandering aimlessly through a sea of naked old Korean women..obviously standing out as a 6ft bright white chick in a pink swimsuit.

Finally someone held my hand and guided me to the stairs where the pool was. Then I was for sure I wouldn't mess up anymore... all I needed to do was get in the water and swim, right? That's easy. But before I made it, two ladies stopped me on the stairs and started yelling at me and pointing to their swim caps and pointing to my lack of a swim cap. I guess I missed the sign about swim caps being mandatory. So after more yelling, one of the women graciously gave me her swim cap and I headed to the pool.

The pool was amazing--Olympic-sized and packed with people..probably about 300 or so doing aerobics or laps. Six or seven to a lane. I hopped in and swam for about 25 minutes until I heard some faint yelling...I stopped and looked around to see that I was the ONLY person still swimming. All 299 people had evacuated the pool for what I assume was break time, and were yelling at me to get out of the pool.

I wish this story was an out-of-the-ordinary fluke where I just happened to do every single thing wrong and look like a doofus, but it happens everyday and with every thing that we do. Still, I accomplished my goal of swimming laps at a public pool, and I feel pretty good about that.

Texas Bar in Seoul, Korea

Hello from South Korea! It has taken us a while to get this blog up and moving because our jobs have kept us pretty busy. Thanks for staying tuned...we promise to update this thing regularly. After three weeks in Korea, here are some of the highlights:

1. Chris and I bought bikes which, although the frames are Korean size, the bikes let us explore a little more of our town. The bikes, like everything else you buy in Korea, came with a ton of freebie extras...like reflector lights, a lock and an extremely important bell (we can't say "excuse me" in Korean yet).

2. I have had the best food I've ever tasted. Yesterday, in particular, I found steamed dumplings the size of my face.

3. The kids we teach are horribly behaved but occasionally cute. One of my classes in particular is really out of control and by Friday of every week, I have lost my voice from yelling things like "No Korean!" There are some moments that make it all worthwhile, like when we were asking the kids to name adjectives to describe a fluffy stuffed dog, and the kids said "cute" "fluffy" and "delicious". For the record we haven't eaten dog. Yet.

4. Some of the kids names are really funny because they get them from movies or make them up. I have a Superman, and there's a Harry Potter in another class. One teacher has, by pure accident, a class full of hicks--Bobby Lee, Joe Bob, etc.

5. We have learned that every time you go into a norebang (private rooms with karaoke) you wont leave before the sun comes up.

6. Any afternoon, you can find business men in designer suits sleeping off their Soju (Korean liquor) on benches all over town.

7. Check out some pictures of the outdoor markets:

8.Chris has learned the Korean alphabet, and so far we both know a few phrases that help us get around. We don't know our own address, and teachers who have been here for almost a year still don't know their address. Some stores' names are in English, but if you tell a taxi you want to get there, you have to say the store's name in a Korean accent so they understand it. So, if we want to go to E-mart we have to say E-marteuhh. Mcdonald's would be "Mickiedeezuhh".

I think that's about it for now...check out the pic to see a shirt that doesn't make sense:

We miss you!

Laura and Chris

Howdy from Korea.

Hey you guys. If you're reading this right now, then welcome to our new blog about living in South Korea. Now that we're a little more settled in, we'll try to start posting some of that hot 'n fresh content more or less regularly. Check back soon and thanks for reading.