There's A New BBQ Place in Hwajung...

...and it is quite satisfying. We tried it out and were very happy to find that it was a little unlike other bulgolgi BBQ houses. When you go for bulgolgi, you usually get a plethora of sides, sometimes including a scrambled egg souffle in a little wooden or cast iron pot. At this particular restaurant they still had all of the delicious sides; however, they did not serve their egg like other places. Instead, they had a donut-shaped cast iron pan that fit over the perimeter of the BBQ grill in the middle of our table. We threw in some kimchi, onions, and garlic and the server poured liquid whipped egg into the pan. As we cooked our meat on the grill, the egg began to rise. When we were ready to chow down we had a huge souffle right there for us. It was awesome.

Trying To Relax

The weeks are flying by. Every time we reach a weekend we are amazed that the week has gone by so quickly. Our time in Korea is racing to a close (we've been here almost 8 months already) and we are trying our best to grab every chance at adventure while also fitting in our necessary chores to live happily and healthily, haha. Sometimes the chores get pushed back.

Saturday evening we went to the Dragon Hill Spa and got some much needed R&R. This time my massage didn't leave me covered in bruises, haha. It was nice to relax in the hot water while breathing in the cold air of early (early early) spring. We also went to that deliciously spicy curry house in Hongdae that we went to around a month ago. We got a much spicier curry this time, I thought my mouth was going to burn right off! It was good, though...well, it was good after a pitcher of water and the fear that my tongue was going to disintegrate from the spice.

This Sunday we went shopping in preparation for some friends coming to Korea. On Wednesday, March 24, my bestest friend is coming for a week of fun! I can hardly wait, I'm so ecstatic to see her. It has been too long. Nick's good friend is ALSO coming to visit for a week starting March 28, so we will have TWO great friends visiting with us in the next few weeks! We are excited to show them around Seoul and have them experience all that Korea has to offer. But first, we need to get them some place to sleep. We went to Dongnaemuen and bought a full size convertible bed and a big fluffy blanket so they will be comfortable. While at Dongnaemuen we happened on a band in traditional garb playing the Korean music we have learned to love. It was nice.


After returning home and doing copious amounts of laundry (welllll as much as our apartment allows since we have to drip dry our clothes - those of you with a dryer don't know how lucky you are!!) I made us a fancy dinner. Today, for those of you who don't know, is "White Day." White Day is in response to Valentine's Day. In Korea, girls give boys gifts on Valentine's Day, while the boys give girls gifts on White Day (March 14th, one month later). Then, on April 14th, it is "Black Day" where singles go and eat noodles with black bean sauce (honestly, black bean sauce noodles are so good that I might go eat some on Black Day anyways). It's honestly just a huge ploy for the stores to make more money off of chocolates and stuffed bears. All the same, I made us roast lemon chicken with a special treat - green beans! We picked some frozen green beans up at the foreigners' market a few weekends ago and I sauteed them with parmesan cheese, croutons, garlic, and cherry tomatoes. I topped them off with some sauteed onions and put the chicken over a bed of mushroom rice pilaf. It was very good.


This next week should busy and fun. Report cards again, preparations for the first monthly test of the new semester and also a field trip with the morning classes on Friday! We will be taking the prekinders and kinder kiddies off to a big indoor playground. We are looking forward to it!

Dinner At Our House!!

Nick and I decided to have a party because we have a new teacher. We wanted to say hello properly and we wanted to say goodbye to our good friend who is going home. After inviting all of our teachers, the Korean teachers, and some neighborhood friends we had almost 20 people coming! I decided to cook Italian food since it is hard to find decent Italian food here. I spent all Tuesday night making meatballs, chopping zucchini, peppers and onion, broccoli and shredding cheese for the penne.


This morning we woke up to a snowstorm. What a wonderful way to start the day...we thought winter was over!!


After work everyone came over and we whipped up a storm. People brought salads, cheese and crackers, fruit, garlic bread and lots of desserts and wine. It was great! We crammed people into our cozy little home and we all had a lot of fun. It was especially nice to spend time with some of the Korean teachers outside of work. The food was pretty good if I do say so myself, and we had a great time laughing and joking with all of our friends.

Shabu Shabu Is DELICIOUS.

Tonight one of our fellow teachers introduced us to Shabu Shabu. SHABU SHABU IS DELICIOUS.


Shabu Shabu is where you sit at a traditional Korean table and cook spicy soup at your table. You put thinly sliced raw meat into your soup and and cook it until it is all tasty and perfect. You also add greens and mushrooms and onions into the soup. After you eat tons of soup you cook noodles in the soup pot. The noodles soak up the leftover soup base. Then after the second course and you stuff yourself with noodles, the waitress comes and cooks fried rice in the pot, soaking up the spices and everything that has been cooked during the dinner. It's soooooooo good. Here is Nick saying "It is Goooood!"



We had a great time with some of our friends and we thoroughly enjoyed the food. We can't wait to go back!

The New Semester

The new semester started yesterday with a bang. Much like an explosion there was lots of noise, panic, running around and chaos and classes started up. We each got a slew of new students, some old ones, and we paired it all with new books, new subjects, new classrooms and new partners in crime.


Nick and I now both teach kindergarten, but not with each other. There are four kindergarten classes and they divide them up so two teachers work together and switch classes to teach different subjects to only two classes. I teach in Holly Class now, and I also teach some Willow classes (remember, all of our classrooms are named after trees) while Nick teaches in Maple Class down the hall and switches into (my old) Pine Class. Our schedules are much more similar and it does make prep work easy because any supplements I make up Nick can use on his classes as well. We each teach Reading, Writing, Art, Speaking and Computer classes to our homerooms. Nick teaches Science to his two kindergarten classes while I teach Phonics to my two kinder classes. We are actually very happy with the set up.


Our "new" morning kids are pretty good. Nick has taught all of these children before so he already knows how they act and what they enjoy. I am just learning - but I am happy to report that I am quickly warming up to my homeroom class. I have 12 students this time around (last semester I had 9) and I have 7 boys and 5 girls. 2 of my girls will be absent the first few weeks of school so I only have 10 kids right now though. My new homeroom class is the "lowest" level out of all of the kindergarten classes, but they are still exceptionally bright. My kids are rambunctious and wiggly, eager and excited. They have good intentions though and lots of potential. I think I will help them a lot and we will all have fun getting them to learn.


The girls are already latching onto me, holding my hand or asking me to pick them up when we are playing during break times. The boys are cute and sassy. They all LOVE it when I pick them up and flip them upside down, so I had my new Korean teacher (who I adore) take "first day" pictures of me holding them upside down to put up in the photo section of our classroom.


This morning we had library class and I picked a book to read aloud to them that was about a mix up. Instead of a new teacher, a class got a GORILLA for a teacher! My students were in fits of giggles. The gorilla teaches the students in the story how to count with their toes, swing from trees and draw on the floor. The book gave me a great idea. After lunch we pushed all the desks to one side of the classroom and we covered the floor in butcher paper. I drew big circles on the butcher paper and gave each kid a set of markers. We talked about how nouns are people, places and things. Then we talked about some of our favorite things/animals/etc. They got to draw their favorite things on the floor, just like the children in the book. Afterward we posted up the giant pictures on the walls of our classroom. I also had each child tell me a noun that they love and I drew a big poster while they colored with all their favorite nouns. We have a gorilla, a monkey, a rocket ship, a jet, a tiger, a butterfly, a robot, a dragon, a race car and a dinosaur. I put "Welcome to Holly Class" around the giant group of creatures and we put it up on the wall outside of our class. The kids loved it.

The afternoon classes are also great. Nick and I are overjoyed with the children we have this semester. I now teach first grade, third grade, one fifth grade class and sixth grade. Nick teaches first grade, second grade, and fourth grade. We got some of the same kids and some new ones. We are so happy with our schedules, we feel we got great classes and great kids. We are really looking forward to the rest of this semester!

Hair Cut

We start a new semester tomorrow, so I got a new hairdo today :)

It's darker than I originally wanted but I like the cut. I think they did a very good job, especially since they spoke no English and I couldn't explain myself in Korean.

Tonight we are going to dinner with one of our friends for Shabu Shabu - it's a Korean version of a Japanese hot pot, where you cook vegetables, tofu and thinly sliced meat in a big boiling pot of soup. Yum!

Indian Buffet in Itaewon

YUM YUM!

Today we went to the Taj Palace Indian Restaurant in Itaewon. It is an all you can eat buffet. We stuffed ourselves with butter chicken, piping hot garlic naan, tandoori chicken, chana masala, lamb curry, vegetable curry, raijta, and more. It is SO SO good. The meat slivers apart with your spoon in all the rich hot (and sometimes spicy) sauces. We love Indian food and we can't wait until we actually get to go to India and eat our fill. Until then, Sunday buffets at the Taj Palace keep us happy.


After lunch we stopped by the English book store (called What The Book, haha) to grab some new reading material and then we popped into the foreign food market. Lo and behold, they had Ken's Steakhouse Ranch Dressing! REAL Ranch Dressing! I mean, sure, it's not Hidden Valley, but after 7 months of no savory dressings (only sweet or spicy here) we were ecstatic. We also picked up some frozen green beans, olive oil, and Ritz crackers. Tonight we snacked on carrot sticks and ranch and it made us smile.


We are happy that tomorrow is a holiday and we get another three day weekend. It's supposed to rain so we figure we will stay in and watch movies and be cozy :)

Movie Time With MAG5

Today we took my fifth grade class on a field trip! We all went to the movies and watched "Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief". It is a movie about a teenage boy who is a demi-god; his father is Poseidon. Someone has stolen Zeus's lightning bolt and Percy must find out who it is and return it before the Gods break out in war and destroy the Earth. I was surprised to see such big name actors in it as Pierce Brosnan, Uma Thurman, and Rosario Dawson. It was a visually stunning movie with lots of special effects. It was a lot of fun for the boys to watch the characters battle Harpies, The Minotaur, The Hydra, Medusa and Hades himself.


After the movie the director took us all to Kraze Burger and we had dinner together. One of my students (who ate two bins of popcorn AND nachos during the movie) ordered a burger AND a chicken sub sandwich. We goofed on him as we sat, slightly amazed, and watched him eat EVERYTHING, even his friends' chili cheese fries when they couldn't finish. It was funny though, watching him attempt to fit the gigantic chicken sandwich in his mouth.


We had a lot of fun with the kids and it was a great Saturday evening. Tomorrow we are off to Itaewon to check out the foreign food market...we heard they had sour cream and ranch dressing. We haven't had ranch dressing in seven months.

Pine graduation

Today was our kindergarten graduation. All of our students and parents came to school and we had a nice little ceremony. We started in our classrooms, taking pictures with all the families. Then we had the children give their graduation speeches. We've been working on them for quite some time now. I was so proud of my students, my kids - they did such a GREAT job with their memorized speeches. They spoke loudly and clearly and even though they were nervous with all the parents there they did excellent jobs. I'll post a few of my favorites - but I will have to edit them down to little clips of their speeches, EACH kid had a 2 minute or more speech :)









Then, we all went into the library and we had the graduation ceremony. The kindergarten teachers each gave a speech and then the director handed out diplomas to all of them. We took pictures with the new "grads" and the parents gave their kids bouquets of flowers. Then the children all sang a song for us and after that was more pictures.


I managed not to cry, although I really wanted to - I'm sad that I won't get to spend my mornings with them. No more special art classes with my little ones, no more writing lessons or phonics classes with them. Come Tuesday I will have a whole new bunch of babies to teach and play with. I am sure that I will be happy with all of my new kinder kiddies, but I will miss my original nine. I AM happy though, because today I found out that I will be an S1-1 teacher (our highest level of first grade) in the new semester, so I will have a good chance of teaching most of my kinder kiddies again!

Mmmmmm Burritos!

Nick and I woke up to a sunny day and all the snow was melting off the ground. Lounging in our pj's, we munched on some oranges while deciding where to go for lunch. I asked Nick what he wanted and he answered, "Burritos!"


So that's what we did. We took the 1000 bus into Seoul and went to Tomatillo, a Mexican restaurant that is reminiscent of Chipotle's in the US. After a thirty minute bus ride we got to the restaurant. We were HUNGRY and ordered ourselves some carne asada burritos with extra sour cream and a platter of nachos with chili and cheese. It was DELICIOUS!! This place is by far the best Mexican food we've had in Korea. Not to say that it is the best Mexican food we've ever had (living in California has made us privy to some AMAZING Mexican cuisine) - but in a country that specializes in bulgolgi and not in burritos, Tomatillo makes us very happy.




We munched through our loaded burritos and very tasty nachos and then walked down to City Hall to grab the subway over to Yongsan. We did some more pricing for our potential camera purchase and then headed back on home to Hwajung. We watched "Men Who Stare At Goats" which is an amusing movie with some great actors in it. It was a nice way to spend our afternoon. For dinner I made spinach curry loaded with veggies. All in all another great Saturday.