Honestly, now.

So Kerri and I went hiking yesterday. There’s a 2001 Oulet store in Migeum (which is the area I live). Despite the “outlet” name, it’s not very cheap at all. However, the grocery store does have an entire aisle of food from home. Anyways, if you go behind this outlet store, there is a hiking trail. While not nearly as difficult as the trail behind E-Mart, it’s still nice for a walk.

The trail has light poles every so often. Like the other trail, there is a place to work out at the top. Kerri and I took a rest at the top. However, I wasn’t feeling all that tired, so I started doing sit-ups on one of the inclined sit-up stations. I didn’t really feel like it was doing much, so we continued our hike. Funny thing, this morning I thought I was sick. Really, truly ill. Aparently, the sit-ups were doing something after all. I think I’ll go again tomorrow; I’d hate to waste this pain.

I didn’t see a whole lot that was new. There were a few little songbirds that were far to quick to be caught by my camera (because I know that I couldn’t be too slow). Magpies are everywhere. I know that they’re probably pests, but I still find them rather charming.

Also, yesterday yet another class asked if I was married to Greg (the head teacher). After replying “no,” one little boy asked if I was a lesbian. These kids were about ten. Then I was asked if I ever had a boyfriend. Well, yes. But we broke up. All the little girls let out a horrified gasp. I guess breakups don’t happen that often. (Most of the teacher (native) who aren’t married have been dating the same person for years.

After our hike, Kerri and I were both starving. So, after walking around a while trying to find a place that had nice pictures to choose from, we gave up and walked into a place.

I turned to Kerri. “Do you ever have those moments where you feel white? Not just white, but REALLY white?” She said, “Yeah.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m having one right now. You?”

“Yep,” she said.

Nothing was in English. I’ve been to this type of restaurant before, so I kinda knew what was going on. We were handed a menu. Oh was that funny! I imagine that I was giving the waitress the exact same blank stare that my kids give me at time.

The waitress was very nice and explained everything to us very slowly. Too bad it was all in Korean.

I looked at the menu and told Kerri to pick something, anything and I would do the same. Just make sure that the total would be under ten dollars. So we did. The woman looked at what Kerri had picked and crossed her forearms in the Korean sign for “No.” Then I decided that we should get something slightly familiar. I asked for Bi Bim Bap. (It’s one of a handful of words that I can actually read!) So we got Bi Bim Bap and I have no idea what else. I wrote it down in Korean (copying off of the menu) and sometime I’ll bring it to school and harass one of the Korean teachers for a translation. Just for eating there, the place gave us a free appetizer. From right to left the appetizer had: Kimchi, egg and veggies, and some pickled mystery. Bi Bim Bap is a combination of rice (bap) and veggies with a fried egg on top. The final soup was rather spicy, but pretty darn good. It caught me a little off guard when I bit into a chunk of hot dog. I later found out that the soup has a history. During the war, United States forces would throw out a lot of the food they didn’t like (Spam, hotdogs). People here didn’t have a lot of food, so they took the discarded meat and mixed it with ramen. I was told that the soup is a symbol of the people are survivers.

The appetizer. Another odd thing, the eggs were cold. It was good, just was rather different.

Bi Bim Bap. Not my favorite, but not bad. Eat it with a spoon. If you eat it with chopsticks, you’ll be laughed at and mocked by the locals. The dark stuff on the egg is seaweed, which is why it’s just not my favorite. This dish costs about three dollars. Healthy and inexpensive.

Finally, the hot dog soup. Quite dee-li-cious! (as the kids say)

So I went to play on the internet/update the blog yesterday night and…………..nothing. My computer believes (with a sincerity that rivals cults) that it is not connected to the internet. But it is. It says so in my network connetions.

But my computer truely believes that the internet does not exist. Nevermind the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

One of my coworkers said he’ll try and help me fix it.  And in the meantime, I’m opening my email at work.  (Rather hazardous, I know.)

Interesting sidenote: How the foreigners react to other foreigners. Sometimes we wave like our arms are on fire. Othertimes you can almost see each other chanting the mantra, “Make no eyecontact. Make no eye contact. Make no eyecontact .” I think it just depends on how you feel that day. Half the time I’m excited to see someone with round eyes and the other half I feel very much like saying, “What are YOU doing here?” Odd how things work, I guess. Oh yeah, tried out another trail. I’ll try and post during my break today. Cheers.

So Kerri and I decided to go hiking yesterday.  We asked around and was told that there was a pretty nice trail fairly close by, maybe a twenty minute walk from where I live.  So, after taking a backpack with some food and lots of water, we were off.  The trail is behind an E-Mart, of all places.  We were off!

Now yesterday has been the only that that I could see blue sky for the entire day.  So it was sunny, muggy and pretty warm.  We start up the trail at a pretty good pace.  There were quite a few people on it.  We find a map, but being unable to read Korea, we have no clue how far we are going.  It was pretty fun.  Albeit rather warm fun.  The trail was fairly well-maintained (there were parts where you had to hang onto a rope to scurry over the rocks.  At the top, there was a place to sit and what looked to be a jungle gym for grownups.  There were places to do chin-ups, sit-ups, stretches and a variety of other things.  We ate our lunch and hiked back down.  The trail opened up to an amazing garden where several women were working.  The garden was terraced.  Mostly vegetables, but some flowers as well.

While it was hot all day, it was much, much cooler the father along you got on the trail.  Kerri and I were on a mission to reach the top, but on the way back down we’d stray from the path.

I was one of only a handful of people wearing shorts.  Most were wearing long pants, long sleeves and a hat.

Today was also the day that I decided I was rather sorry I left my sunglasses on top of my car.

At the top!  Kerri estimated our entire hike to be somewhere in the neighborhook of 6K.  My calves are rather sore today.

Something kinda nice….there’s a clock in each one of these places to sit.

You could look through the trees and see for miles.  Unfortunately, my camera wouldn’t take a decent photo.  Ah well, the trees would have blocked most of it anyways.

Magpies are everywhere.  There were also these little birds that sounded like chickadees, but moved like nuthatches (sp?).  The little guys wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to get a picture.

My travel-buddy, Kerri, on a rock.

The trail was rather easy, but fun.  We’re going to have to fun some other trails soon.

The view of Sunae at the end of the trail was amazing.  There’s not really much else to say about.  Just a general feeling of “Wow.”

The purple flowers were from a tree.  The orange flowers are from a vine.

I’m considering trying to find the other trail I heard about.  On second thought, maybe that can wait until Tuesday.  I’ll need to recover.  Take care!

I can’t remember what the place was called, but the work crowd and I went out for Sam’s birthday.  (Which was last week, but he was sick, so it didn’t count.)  It was a lot of fun.  There was a deal where you could order three appetizers for less than 10 dollars.  So we had fried chicken and a few other interesting things.

These are some yummy dumplings.  The outer wrapping is much thinner than the dumplings that I make.

The sauce that went with them was sweet.  I didn’t get a picture of the fries (they went quick).  But the fries were covered in cheese and pineapple.  It was strange but quite good.  Nothing was near as greasy as the bar food in the States, but I’m sure it still wasn’t the best for me.

This was a kimchi pancake.  While I only like straight kimchi in small doses, this was pretty darn good.  The bread part had tomato in it, I think.  It reminded me of pizza with artichoke heart.  All of the food came out to us almost too hot to eat.  In the middle of the picture, you can see the button to push for service.  The menu reads “Hof Soju.”  “Hof” means “beer,” I think.  (feel free to tell me I’m wrong.)  Soju is the Korean equivilant to vodka.  When the kids find out that I’m new, there’s a list of questions I get asked, one of which is, “Teacher, teacher! You drink soju?”  Another favorite question is, “Teacher, teacher! Are you married?  Do you have boyfriend?”  After I reply no to both questions, they start to speculate on which other teacher I love or is in love with me.  Since I’m new and always asking the head teacher questions I’ve been informed that the head teacher loves me.  Too funny.

These two containers contain a very little bit of yogurt soju.  Sounds nasty.  Sounds really nasty.  However, in the spirit of “I will try almost anything once,” I tried it.  Wow.  It was wonderful.  It’s meant to be taken in shots, which is a shame.  It’s tastey enough that it would be good to savor.  One carafe is less than four dollars and contains about a dozen or so shots.

Good stuff.

Sam (birthday boy) and his girlfriend, Jennifer.  Sam is a Lawrence kid as well.  Him and his girlfriend came to Korea about two months before I did.  It’s nice having someone that knows the places that I miss.

We didn’t know each other before we got here.  However, there are a few points where our friends overlap.  Small world.

This is Joe (American).  In the background and looking at the camera is Kerri.  She’s the other “new girl” at Avalon.  We have an odd set of similarities.  For example, we both brough our “Learn Spanish” CD’s to Korea.  I’m into Swing.  She’s into Salsa.  We’ve decided to be travel buddies (because it’s more fun to get lost together).

The girl on the far right is Stephanie.  I just met her last night.

Not the most flattering picture of Don.  He’s hilarious.  One of the odd folks from Canada.

Well, Kerri just walked in so it’s hiking time.  Actually, it’s more like eating time and then finding the trial time, but you get the idea.

Cheers!

I have my very first break in my classes today. I’ve been teaching four classes a day (80 minutes each) all of this week. I guess we normally only teach three classes (that four hours of classroom time!) a day. So from 7:50 until 10p.m. I have a planning period. Except I’m just covering for teachers on vacation so I have no planning to do. I suppose I could go home, but that would feel weird. And I’m supposed to go out with the work crowd tonight. So I have some extra time to upload a few pictures and try and catch up on email.

This was in San Francisco. Sometimes, I like grafitti (sp?).

Another San Fran shot. And I thought the hills at KU were bad!

Copyright? No, copywrong! This is in the building over from where I live. For some reason, it just makes me laugh every time I see it. On the inside of the building there is a sign that read, “Coffee, Bar, Goodtime.”

There’s just so much that I didn’t expect. Granted, I’ve been amusing myself for the past few months by reading other people blogs about “Konglish” and all of the funny things that go along with “when East meets West,” but still I didn’t know that there is SO MUCH of it. The other night, there were a couple of guys selling bootlegged DVD’s on the street corner. They didn’t know much English, but when me walked by they assured us that they could show us “very good movie.” Then they would just hold up one of the many movies on the table. Still, they had a pretty sweet deal rigged up. The movies were less that five dollars, but the quality was dubious.

Something I see on my walk to work.  No barista needed.  Granted, the quality of mocha just isn’t the same.  But still, for only 500 won (about 50 cents), you can’t really go wrong.  Except for the fact there’s one at school where I can get my crap coffee for free.  Hmmmm….Free coffee.    Well, that’s about all the fun pictures I have loaded on my photobucket account.  More to come now that I have internet!  Cheers!

As of 15 minutes ago, I have internet and cable at home!  I’m pretty darn excited that it’s Friday.  My plans for this weekend: get groceries, try and find a place to hike, got to Seoul, and some other stuff I can’t think of at the moment.

I’ll write more tonight after work.