Sunday, November 15, 2009

[caption id="attachment_227" align="alignleft" width="420" caption="One of many mandarin men, lining the streets of Korea"]mandarinman[/caption]

Good morning!

Or.. afternoon.  As the case may be.  It is 2:00pm here, I guess.

We both have our excuses for not posting in the past, you know, forever.  Mine is also Fringe, in part.  I do like it a lot (though it is SCARY -- a lot of people explode!).   But... mostly, I'm just not as enthralled with Korea anymore.  I still like it here (how many times have I said that?  brainwash myself much..?), but it's not as new and novel.

Also, we are alternately very poor and somewhat poor, so we don't always have a whole lot to talk about.

We took some fall-ish pictures last Saturday, though.  It's been a beautiful fall here.  There are a lot of bright red Japanese Maples and yellow Ginkgos along the sidewalks.

And also mandarin orange, persimmon, and nut vendors.  We're not sure what there is to do with persimmons.  I used to work at a tiny produce market and we'd get them in every winter and put them in a slightly refrigerated case, where they would turn from orange to red and then get slimy.  Really, really slimy.  The mandarin oranges are amazing some of the time and bland the rest - it's really hit or miss.  We get them a lot.  And we haven't tried the nut vendors yet.  They always smell delicious when we walk by though.

[caption id="attachment_229" align="alignleft" width="420" caption="The road that goes by HomePlus."]homeplusroad[/caption]

This is the road that goes past our HomePlus store downtown.  It's a good example of what most roads look like in Daejeon, though.  The sidewalks are cobbled and there is usually a running/walking/biking path of red astroturf along side it.  It will be really nice once we get bikes.  We're continually surprised by how many bikers we see about.

Daejeon has even created a bike sharing program with these really cute, green cruisers.  They have rows of them all over town, with little computer/monitor things next to them and you give them your alien registration number and cellphone number (when we get a cellphone we'll be able to use them) and.. I think the first two hours are 1,000W and after that it's 500W/half hour.  I can't remember, but it's not that expensive.  Plus, the bikes are cute.  And there are so many pick up/return points all over the city that you'd only have to ride one way and then you can lock them back up and go about your business.

We've been having a lot of fun the past week or so.  Since we got paid, we've been able to organize our house a bit better and get some more to cook with.  We got a couple big skillets that, instead of being coated with chippy, flaky teflon, have been coated with some sort of "diamond ceramic".  It's amazing.  Nothing sticks to it.  This backfires sometimes when, say, I am trying to flip an over easy egg the stupid thing just slips all over the pan instead of sliding onto my spatula.  But, overall, they're amazing.

We were also able to go into town yesterday and have some fun.  We stopped at one of our favorite destinations, TimeWorld Galleria, this G-I-A-N-T mall creation that houses.. well, we still haven't gotten a good glimpse.  Last night, we checked out the gourmet grocery store in the 2nd basement, complete with a Burger King (you don't get much more gourmet than BK!), and a simply scrumptious gelato place.  They had flavors like cream cheese, green tea, latte, dark chocolate (barely even sweet, just soo chocolatey and sooo good), tiramisu, banana, caramel, milk (isn't that a given?), menthe, withe chocolate (and no, that's not a typo, it was withe) and tons more we can't remember.  We got the tiny size, and thus, three flavor choices: dark chocolate, tiramisu and I wanted caramel, but we got banana - some things just get lost in translation.  We ended up sharing it because there was also confusion as to how many cups we wanted.  It was really good, though there was some argument over who had to eat the banana.  Poor, neglected flavor.

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