Cuttlefishlore

Okay, so quite a few things have gone down since you heard from me last. For one, I found out (through my master skills of observance) that Koreans don’t eat the skins of those grapes I was telling you about. You know how I said the meat isn’t very well attached to the skin? Yeah, well, that enables them to just suck everything right outta there. Through the tiny little hole made after you pluck the darn thing off the stem. I KNOW! Needless to say, I am going to continue eating skins, as I am a growing girl who needs her vitamins.

What’s up: I have a few ongoing crises at the moment as well. For instance, who do I call for tech support when I live in Korea? What do I do when I find out my co-teacher is expecting a baby? And how do I get the mold out of my air conditioners (my apartment is otherwise lovely and I would certainly not trade it for anything)? But more on these later. The tech support is the biggie…I seem to have an issue with each of the THREE computers I’m working on over here. Mom, dad, why oh why didn’t you make me study computer engineering?

Food: Last night, John and I finally had some 삼겹살 (samgyeopsal). That literally translates as “three layer meat” and it refers to a traditional meal that revolves around pork belly. You grill it yourself right at the table, dip it in various yummy sauces and place it, along with any/all of the wide array of veggies you’re served, in a Perilla leaf [kkaennip, which literally translates as sesame leaf, but it's perilla (mint family)]. At the very least, you would wrap the freshly grilled meat with a slice of fresh garlic and red chili paste in the perilla leaf or a leaf of red leaf lettuce. Either way, the meal is totally up my alley. I can’t wait to try some of the other variations which involve less fatty cuts of meat.

On second thought: Maybe I should keep a separate blog for food definitions. Or an appendix. My new fun game is going to a restaurant, ordering blindly, then looking things up on Wikipedia and in my phrasebook and guidebook. I think this is the best way for me personally to learn Korean, because food and its vocab is one of the only subjects I seem to remember well. I hadn’t really sat down to learn Hangul yet, but as soon as I started copying down the Korean words for all of the things I’ve been eating, along with encyclopedic English definitions, things began to stick. I typed the Hangul for samgyeopsal above almost completely from memory (I have a Korean-English keyboard, which is pretty sweet. I can switch between the two whenever I like with one keystroke)!

Scrrrrrratch!: Here I would like to thank the awesome grocer with the eye patch who helped us with groceries last night by telling us which carrots were Korean and which ones were Chinese. This was very important. Thank you, pirate grocer man. Also, thank you to the dude eating dinner next to us at the restaurant. He helped us order the above-mentioned meal when his sister, the waitress, kept trying to ask us how much soju we wanted (or so we thought). You two will probably never see this, but THANK YOU.

Now I should probably get to the all-important subject line.

The teacher who played hookie with us: On Friday, after teaching our morning classes, John and I went with one of his co-teachers (Korean teachers who teach English grammar classes and co-teach our  classes) to the immigration office. There we applied for our Alien Registration Card and a Multiple-Entry Visa. Thank goodness we had a translator, because I have no idea how we would have managed that otherwise. I canNOT imagine what immigrating to the U.S. is like, and I’m sure it’s much more painful. Soon we will get both of those things and our Passports back and we’ll be able to get our health care cards, apply for frequent shopper cards, and fly in and out of the country as often as we please. When we were done and after quite a few polite exchanges of “Do you think we should go back to work?s”, our helper took us into town to show us around a bit. We had paid for the super-long taxi ride out to the immigration office (“why should you pay, you’re helping us?!”), so she got us coffee at Starbucks (yes, it’s expensive here). We sat at Sbucks for quite some time, as she is one of the most charming Koreans we’ve met so far. What am I saying–I adored our class leaders at orientation, and all of my co-teachers are SUPER cute. Anyway, John and I asked her a million questions and we talked about everything we could think of, including whale breeding habits. This was the first time either of us got to spend real quality time with a Korean, and she was really friendly, helpful, and fun. It sure beat being in class! After coffee and tea, I got us donuts, and then she made sure we new where the biggest movie theater and stationary stores were. Vitals, no? We found out that there will be an Onggi (big ceramic pots) expo in October. We shopped and talked until we were completely exhausted, and then went home to fry up some delicious ham and egg sandwiches.

Expats and navigation: On Saturday, John and I accepted an invitation to spend the weekend hanging out with some wonderful EPIK teachers we met at orientation. Emily and Matt are a couple from Bellingham, WA who live near Ulsan University and Mun Su Stadium (the World Cup Stadium). This is an awesome place to live. Problem is that it’s about an hour away from where we live by bus. Ulsan, though it is supposedly richer than Seoul financially and is the third largest city in Korea according to population, does not have a subway or light rail…yet. The buses are awesome  because they seriously go about 70 mph, but John and I live in a neighborhood out on this tiny little precipice which juts out into the East Sea/aka Sea of Japan/aka the Pacific Ocean. Imagine a tiny Florida-shaped peninsula. Now imagine us at the bottom of that peninsula. Now imagine that there is no bridge west to the mainland and downtown Ulsan. Yeah. Now imagine that the University and the Stadium are on the far western edge of downtown.

So hanging out with Matt and Emily during the week is hard, unless we meet downtown, but the bus ride to and from downtown on a weeknight sucks on its own. So Saturday we ventured out to their neck of the woods, armed with a hiking pack chock full of sleepover gear.

John tries to embarrass me as often as possible.

After meeting Emily, Matt, and another great couple (Vicki and David from New Zealand). We started by strolling through Grand Park, a gorgeous park full of all kinds of neat surprises like lakes, a rose garden, an Olympic lap pool, exercise equipment, amphitheater, pristine lawns, a “can you walk on these pointy stones?” path, etc. It is giant, and we walked through or past pretty much the whole thing. Then we went to their apartment to cook and stay the night.

Fußball: On Sunday, the plan was to go see a pro soccer game with a bunch of other EPIK teachers…perhaps 15 in all? I kept trying to say ‘football’ for the sake of the Brits in the group, but I pretty much failed. I would think football the whole time and then I’d open my mouth and sort of choke and SOCCER would come out like I had Tourette’s. We showed up a little early, beer and soju in hand (you can still byob to Korean sporting events…and you can still drink outdoors in public, too!), to find out that our 12:00 game* was in fact at 7:00. As tired as we were, and in spite of the fact that it was now a school night, those of us who’d come from the other side of town decided to stick it out. With people skipping town on the weekends to tour the rest of the country, and going out to dinner with bosses and the like, who knew when the next time would be that we could all get to a game together.

So we walked around to the back of the stadium, where there is a lovely little lake. We witnessed some kind of kids’ footrace that looked pretty serious and cheered some of the kids on. Some of the kids had dads running along side of them, which I thought was pretty cool. Then we hopped in some big beautiful paddle boats shaped like swans and whales. We paddled around for about an hour and participated in your usual pondgoing shannanigans like ramming your friends’ boat, splashing, racing, going into restricted areas, and the like. John and I took a nap for about 15 minutes and opened our eyes to find a Korean family in a swan boat staring at us. They said hello in Korean and we returned the greeting and they paddled off. I hope they didn’t think we were drunk.

After a few whale races, ADD kicks in and you start taking pictures.

Gettin’ Neked: After that we had a huge lunch…bibimbap, guk, mandu, and veggie pancakes (forgot the real name for them…jeon?). Once we were nice and bloated, we decided it would be a good idea to all get naked together in front of strangers. So we walked over to the nearest spa and had ourselves a bath for about two hours. It was pretty fantastic, and only cost about $5 to dip in and out of hot and cold tubs and mineral baths for as long as we liked. After that and some meandering, we wandered back over to the stadium, stopping only for the essentials: ice cream, coffee, chocolate, beer, and soju.

The Ulsan Tigers hosted the Busan (or Pusan) I’Park. I’m not sure what I’Park means. I thought maybe it was the corporation that owned them, but maybe it’s some weird kind of mascot. I’ll find out as soon as I post this, I’m sure.

We left around minute 76 because we were, I hope understandably, pooped. At that time, we’d been kicking ass (3-0), but from what I can tell on the I’Park website, they did manage to get a goal in before the end of the game. The game was pretty great, we had front row seats, and halftime was pretty damn impressive. These women came out in bellydancing costumes and performed a kind of cross between bellydancing (not Korean) and fan dancing (Korean). Oh, and loads of giant fireworks went off RIGHT in front of our faces. That was terrifying, but definitely dynamic(Have I mentioned that Korea is dynamic?). I haven’t had bits of firecracker shell rain down on me with hot ashes in quite a long time. They sell an instant version of a super spicy ramyeon soup in the stadium that was really yummy. Ramyeon is just what you think it might be: ramen, as you know it. Long tangly skinny noodles.

Say hullo to all the fans at home!

I think I’ve rambled quite enough for one post, but I do want to take this opportunity to give a mass birthday shoutout to some old and less-than-old friends. Starting about a week into August, and hopefully ending this week, I was helplessly un-connected to the greater world of facebooking and scheduling and phone calling and the like. Once I got on the plane for Korea, I couldn’t even send a birthday text. So I generally want to say I’m sorry and HAPPY BIRTHDAY to DAG, Sarah P, Sirikit, Anand, Kim, Zach S, Mr. Dunbar, Jenn, Jill, Laura, the Bruntons, and Natalie. Hope you all had good ones! Also, big congrats to Willy on his recent engagement! And to MikeyB for his less recent one. Beware, Daria tells me everything. Well, probably not everything. But she certainly is a Source.

Miss you all something terrible.

xoxox

dani

Next Time: Maybe I will talk about the things I said I’d talk about this time. Maybe I’ll explain some things I haven’t explained. I’ll try not to write chronicle style like this post, ’cause I think that’s boring. I’ll probably write about a nasty statistic I read about two weeks ago that I can’t get out of my head. Hold your breath.

*note: This is one way in which I find Korea to be MUCH like India. One Korean had told one member of the group that the game was at 12:00, after looking at a website. Another member of the group insisted on a 5:00 start, according to a different website he had read. No local person we checked with seemed to have the correct game time. Perhaps this is a generality which can not only be applied to Indian train and event schedules, but to many Asian schedules in general? Foreigners in Korea call it “dynamic“. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you, English Ulsan Tourist Hotline, for clearing that one up.