Catie: Korean Apples and the fall.

Have I said how much I like Korean apples?

In America, I get so confused with all the apples types.  I just try to remember that I like Honeycrisps and Jonagolds the best, although on NPR I just heard that Honeycrisps are considered an eyesore by, "Apple Experts".  I still like them.

In Korea, there is just the apple.  It looks like a Fuji or Gala, but it tastes SO good.  They're new apples (duh, it's apple season), so they are crisp and happy and ripe and I just keep EATING them.

I do not have a picture of The Korean Apple because, well, I have now eaten them all.  But really, apple pictures are boring anyhow.

The Korean Apple is not good for applesauce, pies, or any kind of baking.  It is only good to eat raw.  We've been putting them in with our tuna salad sandwiches a lot and, when we are rich enough again (WEDNESDAY!) to afford chicken, we will put them in with our chicken salad sandwiches - the rich man's tuna.

A lot of Korean produce is seasonal, so I am very afraid these apples will go away, which is why I keep eating and eating them.

Speaking of seasonal, all the leaves have now fallen.  They were so cute coming down, too, because so many trees here are Ginkgo and Japanese Maple.  The Ginkgos turn bright yellow and the Japanese Maples have sweet, tiny red maple leaves.

Before they all fell, I took some pictures.

[caption id="attachment_386" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Some (male) gingkos -- no sticky fruit droppings here, but a lot in our dong from female trees."][/caption]

They may be blurry, we were walking and it was cold and windy, so there was some shivering happening.

[caption id="attachment_387" align="alignright" width="225" caption="One of the giant highrise apartment buildings that the entire middle class is housed in."][/caption]

The giant highrises are interesting.  Not only are they very.. you know, high, but they are considered high status, too.  These ones are probably upper middle class.  They're in the downtown area, very close to our HomePlus.  If you want to be considered middle class or above, you have to somehow manage to live in one of these... things.  And they're not cheap.  We hear they're gigantic, though.

Down there is a mandarin orange man's truck.  He's not our mandarin man.  Our mandarin man doesn't have a truck, he just sells mandarins and persimmons right next to our bank.  Everything you buy on the street here is bought in large quantities, so to buy mandarins off the street, you have to get a big bag of them.  But these are only W3,000.

[caption id="attachment_388" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="A mandarin man."][/caption]

Let me just tell you, the mandarins here are like the apples, to. die. for.  I can sit down and eat five to six in a matter of minutes.  The problem is we always buy so many at once and the window of delicious-ness is so small, that the last bits of them often gets way too ripe to be good anymore.

At their peak, though, you have never tasted a better mandarin orange.  Throughout the fall, everyone's been eating them.  Everywhere we go, there are mandarin skins on the ground.

[caption id="attachment_389" align="alignright" width="300" caption="A lot of street vendors have blue trucks like these."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_392" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="So pensive."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_393" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The lovely male ginkgo."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_394" align="alignleft" width="224" caption="A typical big street in Daejeon: trees and a red, astro-turf walking/biking path."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_395" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The Quakers have come to Daejeon!"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_396" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Plastic Island. Is that happens when we litter at the beach?"][/caption]

That's all from our walk.  Actually, there's more than that, but I'm not sure where the memory card is.  Have I posted our photo of Tomato Savings Bank yet?

And now I have to go and buy some, "pizza cheese", known in all other parts of the world as, "mozzarella".  Even we don't say, "mozzarella" anymore though, only pizza cheese.

Brian and Aaron like to call it, "fake cheese", which I don't understand since it really is cheese...  but they seem to think it's fake.

Anyway, off to find pizza cheese, dry the dishes and make dinner.

Tomorrow, I teach at Ewha.  SCARY.

- catie