Chuseok

Yes, I know I haven't written in a long time. I'm a very important person and it's hard for me to find time to sit down and write things.

Right now Brendan is making dinner. We're having baked chicken with onions, kimchi, rice with seaweed wrappers and tofu in sesame oil. No, really, don't be so jealous. I know this all sounds wonderful to you. Actually it is all good.

My ankle is getting better. I still wear a brace every day, but today I actually ran to catch the subway. I think that's a good sign.

We just had a 4 day weekend. It was Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving. It's also a day when they honor their dead ancestors. I didn't honor any dead ancestors but I did celebrate by sleeping. A lot. We also went to a place in the city called Insadong. It's an older part of the city. They have a pretty awesome stream that I will post p0ictures of. We also saw a statue of a famous general in the Josan dynasty. He was a pretty formidable looking guy. Brendan is trying the tell me the exact name of the place we went. Apparently it sounds like qhuang-wong- whatever. It was nice to see another part of the city, and you can see the mountains very nicely there.

We also made some new friends last week when we went to a Thursday night Trivia. A couple named Kendall and Richard. They teach at a University here and have been working in Korea off and on for...9 years. He's from New Zealand and she is from Texas. They were happy to have us on their team because i'm full of useless knowledge and Brendan knows everything.

I'm having my after school class make a movie so that I don't have to teach them anything. They have decided to make High School Musical. Despite the fact that they are all girls, and that they are all Korean and they don't speak English very well, I think that they're doing a pretty good job. I was hoping to use my video camera to film them, but it refuses to work. It currently just asks me to eject the tape and when I attempt to retrieve said tape it refuses that give it to me. Make up your mind video camera! Brendan tried to fix it, but I think he broke it some more. Now it just makes this whiney beeepy noise when I turn it on. Anyway, thank God my camera has video recording on it.

Brendan wants me to tell you about some of the good food that we've been having. The other night we went out to an Indian Restaurant and got some wonderful vittles. In my opinion there wasn't enough of it, but it was really good. We had Chicken Satay, a salad with purple dressing, Lamb Curry, Samosas and Garlic Nan. It was great. The place only had like 10 tables and was rocking a decidedly Urban/Modern/Garbage can decor. For some reason our waiter laughed at us. That seems to happen quite a bit here.

We also had some tomatoes with mozzarella and olive oil. No basil, but still delicious. I have to say that their tomatoes might be better than our tomatoes, and their apples and pears are huge! The size of a baby's head. I'm not kidding.

Last night we were wandering around for a while looking for a restaurant with an English menu, or at least pictures, and we finally settled on a thai restaurant that didn't seem to have either. But it's Thai right? It has to be good. Much to my surprise, when the menu arrived it had English AND pictures. What a delight. I don't remember exactly what we had, but Kelly like.

That's the thing about Korea, one of the things I really miss is going to a restaurant, sitting down for a meal and thinking, "What am I craving today?" We can't do that here. Everything you order is a guess. Even if you know what it is you are ordering and aren't just blindly pointing at something on the menu (which we have done) you never know if it's going to be anything like you are assuming. Ordering is like a mine field. Will you end up with an entire cooked fish, head and all? Or perhaps sauteed spam? Maybe even chicken butt. At school the food is buffet style, that is where I try to strategize my portions. If i'm looking down the line and seeing a lot legs or tentacles, i'm just going to pile a bit more rice on my plate today thank you very much. Of course there are downfalls to this strategy. Sometimes I mistake one dish for another and end up eating a heaping pile of, let's say, pig fat and "mushy starchy thing" that I thought was beef stew. Then i'm missing out on the candied anchovies which are actually delicious. I have also thought I was putting a green olive in my mouth which turned out to be a hard-boiled quails egg soaked in soy sauce. I guess you live and learn.