Winter Blahs

Haven't posted in about a month, I've been doing my usual winter hibernation thing. I think I need to live somewhere where it's summer all the time. I hate the sleepiness I seem to live with all winter.

So this weekend my neighbour Lynn and I checked out the Tiger Cafe, a Russian restaurant on Texas Street. It was "interesting", the coffee was really good, Lynn ordered pork-stuffed cabbage rolls (they were HUGE) and I had my first-ever taste of borscht. Lynn and I seemed to both have the opinion that borscht would be some kind of strange experience, but I thought it was pretty tasty; beets, cabbage and pork with a dollop or sour cream, pretty tasty! There was a little menu in English and a Russian menu of about 6 pages, the English menu only had about 4 or 5 dishes but the one in Cyrillic had about 30 or 40. Must learn Russian next year.

Tonight I showed Lynn a little coffee place in Nampo-dong where I go to hide from the crowd. The nice lady who owns it is always very pleasant. Her son attends university in the US and he sends here things from time to time. Tonight she had a box of flavoured Quaker instant oatmeal on the shelf and I've been craving the stuff for a few weeks now (yeah, I know, it's weird.) Anyway, she saw me shwoing it to Lynn and she opened it and gave me a couple of packs. I gotta remember to bring her something nice when I come back from Canada.

Ever decreasing circles

I'm about ready for bed, it's already too late. I just finished watching the show Medium on Fox Korea. It's about a psychic who helps the DA solve crimes. So anyway, I thought for a moment about my impending end of contract (hopefully subject to an extension) and about life in Busan and life in my neighbourhood in general. I recalled watching the movie Chingu a year or so before I came here, it's actually set in the neighbourhood I work in now. I changed channels and, oddly enough, it happened to be playing and the next scene was of a guy singing My Way in a noraebang. Then I remembered the first night that the teachers took me out for a welcoming party we went to a noraebang and I sang two songs: My Way and Play that Funky Music. Just a little odd.

Something else a bit unusual about this film is that they speak a dialect of Korean local to Busan and general Korean audiences needed subtitles to understand some of the dialogue. I keep joking to friends that I'm learning Busanese dialect so that when I speak Korean they'll know where I'm from. :D

Korean Postal Sevice

So I had my first taste of the using the Korean Postal System today. I sent one 15 kg (that's 33 lbs for you oldtimers) box to Canada; it cost me $115 to send it via EMS (Express Mail Service), a kind of guaranteed delivery, trackable, expedited parcel service. The guy next to me was mailing what looked like a crate of truck axles to Russia! I guess the postal system here is really useful to small businesses.

The bigger post offices even sell the boxes, seven sizes up to about a half cubic metre in size, the boxes cost about $4 for the biggest, double corrugated box they have and there's a guy in a booth who will package everything, including bubble wrap, etc., for you for a small fee. You can walk in with a bag of stuff and they'll do it all for you. Crazy service!

Seyoung sent a parcel to her sister in New York last week: a total of three days to delivery. Canada Post never looked so poor next to these guys. It costs about the same to send a standard service parcel of half that weight from Canada to Korea.

I had to fill out the EMS form twice because I filled out the return address in Korean and the clerk explained in broken but passable English that Canada requires its return addresses in English. All other countries will allow return addresses in Korean. So I guess Canada Post provides as poor a service to its international brethren as it does to the citizens of Canada. So much for a privatized post office.

Rainy December Day

It was warmish (~10C) and raining this morning in Busan. Kinda of like Newfoundland in early June. One of my adult students gave me a small bag of ddeok and told me about making Ddeok Guk, a kind of rice cake soup. I have lost all taste for anything fish-flavoured lately and wanted something different so I made some soup with ddeok, Korean instant beef stock, fresh spring onions, dried shitake mushrooms and frozen mandu. It was the best breakfast I've had in quite a while and perfect for a wet, grey day. There's a recipe for Mandu Ddeok Guk at My Korean Kitchen. Although I didn't follow the recipe, or even read it all before, my soup is very similar! Maybe I am becoming a Korean, as my director is fond of pointing out.

There are a few new photos posted to Flickr, descriptions, etc. will follow as time permits. I'll post an article or two about them later...

I've been thinking of building myself a hidey-hole somewhere. A little house to stick my books and junk in while I "wander up and down upon the earth". While Googling for "cabin building" info I found a link to this site with a freely downloadable PDF file that you can print to make a model of Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden. The site also has links to the Thoreau Reader, which has some good annotated versions of Thoreau's stuff.

Although I am admittedly a materialistic person (not in the sense of riches, but in the love of objects) one of my favourite personalities in history is Henry David Thoreau. There's a lot to be learned from his writing, even if you aren't the minimalist Trascendentalist he was. Have a look, go build your own shack, or for the more time restricted, download the PDF and build it on your office desk :D .

monk

Lack of posts

Hey all (any) who might still be checking it. I haven't been posting anything lately, likely due to my "Autumn mode" kicking in. Those of you who know me well probably know by now that I kinda vanish off the radar for short periods in Spring and Fall.

SO anyway, without further ado...

This morning I was discussing food with Sarah, one of my adult students. She asked if roasted chestnuts were popular in Canada. I'm not sure how popular they are in other parts of Canada but, to the best of my knowledge, they're a bit of a rarity in Newfoundland. We have chestnut trees, but I don't think the nuts are edible. Anyone care to comment on that? She went on to talk about acorns (dotori) and something called dotorimuk, acorn jelly, a popular food here. I've seen it in the open air markets but had no idea what it was. It looks kinda like a cross between jello and tofu. I still haven't tried this delicacy but we're going to a Korean buffet next week which apparently has all manner of Korean food to sample. That should be an interesting day!

Koreans also eat a kind of rice porridge (jook) which is similar to Chinese jook or congee, but made with short grain rice. They add ground pine nuts to one variety of jook, I'll have to see if I can find a place that makes it. I've given up cooking much at home because my fridge is ridiculously small and things go bad or just fill up the fridge without getting used very often.

Today I finished off the last of my Christmas shopping, which is damned early for me, but still probably too late for the packages to get back to Canada in time. Hang in there, you'll have a second Christmas!

While I was shopping in some distant corner of the market I picked up a wooden plane almost exactly the same as the one in the picture at the top of the wikipedia article. I paid about $10 for it, a better price than I've found anywhere else. The best part was when I turned to leave and the older man who sold me the plane stopped me, took the plane from me, removed the cutting blades and ground and honed them. He then checked the "true" of the plane bed and, using a sharp cabinet scraper, proceeded to make the base perfectly true (no bumps or hollows.) When he was done, he showed me how to properly adjust the blade (done with a small hammer or mallet, by eye, there are no screws) and wrapped it up, bowed deeply and handed it back to me. I'm a shopping addict and a packrat, I know the markets inside out and how to shop pretty well here; Korean shops usually have decent service but this had to be the best $10 I've ever spent on anything. Not only did I buy a decent hand-made plane but I got a valuable lesson in the care and feeding of it.

monk

Pinkeye and swearing

One of my adult students told me that both his sons have conjunctivitis. I remember hearing last week that there's a big epidemic of it in Busan right now. This means that within a matter of days I will have pinkeye. Y A Y! Working with kids is fun and interesting (not for everyone, I know, but I enjoy it) but catching every contagious disease that goes around gets old very quickly.

This morning I taught Kyang-eun the appropriate use of the expression "fuckin' A!" Kyang-eun is a riot, she looks very innocent but has a very dark humourous nature. She always wants to learn more about how to swear in English. I was going to write up a sheet on the usage and etymology of "fuck" but I was afraid (knew) that the kids would get hold of a copy of it.

The End of Hell, er, Summer

Well now, I must apologise for yet again not having posted anything in many weeks. It is not, I assure you, due to my untimely death or lack of activity (well, some lack of activity, but nothing abnormal.)

Summer is finally over and the temperature is now a comfortable 20 celsius every day. I'm told that fall lasts only one month, which makes it about the same length as our summer (and about the same temperature.) Summer was a living hell most of the time, it was just too damned hot, it was pretty much like a Toronto summer from what I gather. Hot, sticky and hot. Looking forward to a bunch of coolish weather between now and November when it gets cold.

This past week was the Chuseok (choo-suk) holiday. It's the Korean harvest festival (Thanksgiving.) Most people go to their hometown and elder sons must present an offering of food to their ancestors. This apparently is a hellish time to be a housewife in Korea because the wife must cook, clean and do everything not just for her husband but also for the rest of his family. Anyway, I just had a five day weekend, which was nice, but I also had a really horrible head-cold, which was not-so-nice. The kids I teach walking biological weapons but I imagine it's the same for anyone anywhere who works with children. So I spent 4 days lying around and drinking soup (and sometimes OJ, sometimes with a little vodka in it ;) ) so it wasn't a totally bad holiday. If I'd had to work in the state I was in I'd have felt ten times worse.

I havent been out of my neighbourhood in a few weeks and the whole cooped-up-with-a-cold thing made me stir crazy. So I sent a text message to my buddy Keith and his new girlfriend and dropped up to his neighbourhood for roast chicken. I also ordered a pot of dakdoritang (chicken pot stew.) Brilliant!! It's a chicken hacked into pieces and cooked in a big pot with hunks of root veggies and onion, like, well, stew, except that instead of gravy they use about 31 litres of Korean hot pepper sauce. I haven't been eating quite as much spicy food lately so this dish was an absolute scorcher but, as with most spicy dishes (almost all of them) in Korea, they manage to make it delicious enough to make you not care that your teeth are melting.

Anyway, I'll post again later. Time to teach my telephone students.