Catie: I don't know, maybe everything, I guess.

[caption id="attachment_375" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Do you like my illustration? ..............i think i might stick to knitting as a pastime."][/caption]

Taco soup = pretty delicious.

I combined a couple recipes to make it.  One for a tortilla soup and one for a chicken taco soup, and it turned out nice, containing:

One can each:

Diced tomatoes

Tomato paste

Corn

and..

1 c. black beans/pinto beans mixed (approx.)

3 cloves garlic, minced (no granulated garlic yet - I actually bought some, "garlic powder" that was, well, garlic powder.  Literally powder.  I'm afraid to use it in much of anything and since garlic practically comes out everyone's ears -- or out their pores, at least -- I just use the fresh stuff mostly)

One quarter of a yellow onion I had in the fridge

1/2 a chicken cooked for stock and picked clean

1 teaspoon each:

Rosemary

Thyme

Basil

a bunch of chili powder (yay, mom!), maybe 2-3 tablespoons

a bunch of cumin (I'd never realized that cumin is what makes tacos smell like tacos and it's what makes them TASTE like tacos, too, it's delicious!)

and probably other stuff I forgot.

We topped it with cheese, sour cream and crunched up tortilla chips, a delicacy that is neither difficult to find, nor very delicate.  The things are as tough as beef jerky and I don't know who that Indian is on the bag, but what's a Native American doing on my tortilla chips?

Mmhm.

I think the main problem is that you'll find tortilla chips at every grocery store (for nearly 6,000W), but I could swear not a single Korean has a clue what to do with them.  Must be just for us.

But if they are just for us... why doesn't anybody ask us which kind we like?

Democratic country.... psh.  I don't think so!

In other news.

MY PIE GREW!  It was like the miracle of the previous miraculous pie dough was visited upon my chicken pot pie dough!

Only, when your pie crust grows -- and I mean literally, GROWS -- it's less exciting and more frustrating!  Although, maybe that's only true of me, the ever visual cook, who likes everything to look pretty as well as taste good.

I even cut hearts out in it!  Trust me, this pie was freakin' cute before the miracle of the dud dough was visited upon its tender flesh.

[caption id="attachment_368" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Some miracle. Hmph."][/caption]

As you can see, it is swollen, lumpy, and shapeless.

However..... did it taste delicious!!

It was SO yummy and SO flaky and delicious!  Sort of like eating a pot pie made of filo dough or.. or like a croissant filled with pot pie.

YUM.

Aaron got real sick this week and came home with Ben one night to borrow some of our Nyquil (correction: Fake-quil from Wal-Mart) and I sent him home with a piece of chicken pot pie.

The next day, I went into Ewha to shadow his classes and the first thing he said was, "That pot pie was DELICIOUS."

The next thing that was said was from Brian, who shouted.  And then was very angry the rest of the day that he had not also received pie.

[caption id="attachment_370" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Looks like mush, but it was nice."][/caption]

I told him he'd have to get sick first.

He said he had been sick just the week before.

I said he hadn't come to my door looking sad and pathetic.

He said he had to go back to America and then he left.

And now he's in Portland and we're ALL jealous and it's like he did it JUST because I didn't give him any pot pie!

And I guess he didn't.

But it's like he did.

That is the middle and I didn't realize that all a chicken pot pie is made up of is crust, chicken, vegetables and chicken gravy.  They're SO easy to make!

And with all the chicken stock I cooked up, I will have many more opportunities.

On allrecipes.com (which is a nice website but has been infiltrated with a lot of, "easy" and "modern" cooking that's sometimes irritating), all the pot pie recipes called for 'cream of' soups (cream of chicken, cream of mushroom).  I knew people made pot pies before cream ofs came in cans, so I kept looking for the real thing, and finally found it.

Chicken gravy is ridiculously fast and easy, too.  Practically as fast and easy as opening a can.  So, it was worth it.

[caption id="attachment_371" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Brand new sockies!"][/caption]

Beyond chicken pot pie -- hard, I know, who wants to move beyond a MIRACULOUS (some would even saying HEALING) chicken pot pie? -- we have knitting.

Almost as exciting.

These are Ben's new socks.

They were knit with GOLF Print, another Italian brand from.. Filatura di Grignasco.  It's 70% virgin wool (I don't understand what the "virgin" is for except maybe that it comes from sheep who've been shorn for the first time?), 30% acrylic (not virgin).

It was fine to work with, I guess.  Although, last week, at our new favorite Starbucks, I got really excited about turning the heel of the second sock and -- somewhat hyped up on half a grande caramel macchiato (a drink I never drank until I quit Sbux) -- my hands got real sweaty and the yarn got a little squeaky with acrylic which was gross.  I hate, hate, hate squeaky yarn.  I'm hope that they won't be too sweaty, but it's the only sock-ish yarn I've come across here at all, so I compromised all my values.  An action I may later be struck down for by the mighty hand of.. natural consequence?

Also knitting the following:

A wrap inspired by THIS one.  There's a better picture of it at Ravelry, which is the one I chose my cables based upon, but you can't get into Ravelry without an account, which is cumbersome and on and on.  Basically, I saw the scarf and then I found some similar cables and just, you know, cast on, knitted five inches, ripped the whole thing out, started over and now I'm to.. maybe six inches again?  Maybe 7.  I'm happy with it this time.  I like the actual pattern's small cable better than the one I was able to scrounge up off the internet, but mine is okay, too and it's the actual scarf I like, so in the end it's all the same.

The dishcloth is my poor man's project.

Is that string, you ask?

Why, yes, it is.

At Good Morning Mart, right next to the counter, there are these hanks of white string.  Since the very first time I saw them I have been thinking to myself that I wanted to knit something out that string.

I am not sure what it's meant for.  My first guess was just for trussing poultry, but they don't have ovens here, really, and don't eat much meat either, especially chicken which is very expensive.  So, I think it might be for threading (the thing where they pluck your eyebrows with twisted thread -- so confusing).  It's right next to a bunch of other hygiene-type products.

Regardless.

Today we are poor enough that I bought the string (1,700W for a ton of it!), and, back at our new favorite Starbucks (where they served us simply terrible drinks! maybe next time...), I pulled it all apart, discovered it was two hanks looped into one, and wound one hank into a ball.  A task that took ages.

The string is TINY.  And when I say TINY in caps, what I really mean is tiny in tiny letters, but we don't have tiny letters.

I'm holding it double for better weight and knitting it on size 1 needles, which are pretty small, but it's turning out really nice.  I like the more delicate texture and weight of the dishcloth as opposed to one knit out of the regular dishcloth, worsted weight cotton.  It just feels so, you know, delicate.

And that's it.  We need to watch Northern Exposure (our new faaave show -- well, mine anyway!) and probably go to sleep or something equally as LAME and unexciting.

WE MISS YOU!

- catie

Catie: All the pepoples of Korea love their maple food.

[caption id="attachment_202" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="all the pepoples!"]                                                                                                                 [/caption]

We had a pretty good weekend.  We'd meant to go hiking on Saturday up at -- i think this is how it's spelled -- Gyeryongsan National Park.  Which, apparently, is huge and awesome.

Unfortunately, we are not awesome.  And we are lazy on the weekends.

So, instead, we hopped a bus into the big city.  First, we went to HomePlus, which is another huge department store.  There are so many here and they're pretty great because we can find stuff in them to cook at home.  So far, we've been to LotteMart (too expensive), E-Mart (okay prices), Costco (expensive, but they have stuff you can't find anywhere - i.e. cheese, lunchmeat...) and now HomePlus.

They're all basically the same as far as looks and size.  Three giant floors, each devoted to something different, and each of them has some foreign food we want.

HomePlus, though, might be our favorite so far.  We found tons of stuff there.  It was kind of funny.  They have about six or seven different types of spaghetti sauce, Hershey's Special Dark chocolate chips, frozen tortillas, tatertots, canned diced tomatoes (an anomaly, it feels like), Hunt's tomato paste and tomato sauce, canned pinto beans, kidney beans, black beans and -- the holy grail -- GREEN BEANS.  They're all french cut, but they have them!  I was amazed.  I thought I wouldn't see another green bean for a year.

We didn't get to go shopping this time, though we did buy green beans, canned corn (they're so obsessed with corn here that their canned corn isn't too awful and the frozen stuff is incredibly expensive) and a can of tomato sauce to make vegetable beef soup.  It ended up tasting great and just like home.

I think people who live in Seoul, or in Daejeon proper probably think we're nuts for being so excited, but we don't find those sorts of things out here in boonies.  We can find some stuff (Lotte actually has alfredo sauce) and we do have tomato paste here, but for one, like, 12 oz. can its almost $4.00, at HomePlus it was $2.00.  So, if we lived somewhere bigger or more heavily populated with foreigners, it would be easier to find stuff like that, but it makes the finding even more exciting.  And it forces us to think more about what we want to make at home, what's affordable, and when we'd rather eat out.

So, HomePlus was a success!  And, even though we didn't go hiking, we did do quite a bit of walking to get there.

Also, we got the picture above from what seemed to be a small impulse fixture of shoes and purses (yes, impulse shoes for... thirty dollars). It's hard to read, so here's a close-up:

[caption id="attachment_207" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="all the pepoples!"][/caption]

Here is what it says in full: "Make up your skin!all the pepople Love your color.Bloom Boom Boom!"

While I do like the pepoples, I really like the Bloom Boom Boom.  It sounds like someone's getting shot or it's a really loud concert.  I don't know, but it's pretty funny.

Also, we say this all the time, but:  Though we do cook a lot of American food, we eat out a lot, too.  It's just that when we're less financially stable (right now), it makes a lot more sense to make a big pot of soup and eat it for dinner twice than to spend that ten dollars to eat once.  A lot of Americans coming to Korea are accused of either hating Korean food or refusing to try it, and we've done neither.  We like it and we like to eat it.  In fact, we'd probably eat a lot more of it if we had the resources.  However, moving forward.

After HomePlus, we went back to the Starbucks right next to our bus stop.  It's at this HUGE mall called The Galleria Time World (kind of an awesome name) that is full of (as far as we can tell, though we haven't explored very far) brand name Designers: Chanel, Gucci, Dior, etc...  I don't know how people afford that stuff, but it's always packed to the gills.

And across the street from The Galleria Tim World is another Starbucks!  So, we get to choose every time we go into town.  But the second one is newer and has phased it's soft chairs out, so we never pick it.  Always the one in Galleria Time World.  Also, the latte we always share, is maybe the best Starbucks latte I have ever had.  Including back at home.  The only thing we can think of is that they have the old, old machines.  The ones before the last old ones that they have in America.  Whatever it is, their lattes are killer.

That was Saturday, totally boring but good.

Sunday was.. weird.  And awkward.

We'd seen somewhere that an Irish movie was playing at The International Center in Daejeon.  And it was free.  And in a part of town we'd never been to.  And we got Colin Farrell and Colin Firth confused, so we thought we might actually like the movie.  Unfortunately, we don't like Colin Farrell at all.. and we love Colin Firth, so the confusion was of a particularly bad sort.

But The Int'l Center does have a very small lending library of English books.  Basically, when you're done living here or done with the books you brought, you can give them to the lending library and then other foreigners can get a membership and check those books out.  There is one shelf of DVDs too, though.. we can download anything we want in minutes, so that's what we usually do.  Ben was very excited about the English books.

The movie was..  well, it was called Intermission, and it was... sort of like a cross between Crash and, I don't know, maybe Love, Actually and then comedy thrown in between violence.  But with a lot less Love, Actually.  It was a real weird mixture.  I was never sure whether I should be horrified or laughing.  In all, we decided to make an effort in future never to confuse The Colins again.  It does not turn out well when we do.  Everyone in the movie dies, and then it's like you're supposed to laugh or something.

I knit a good piece of sock during the crazy though.  And we got to try this Korean Cola (can't remember the name) that was like coke and coffee with the caffeine of a red bull.  It was scary stuff.  If someone ever offers you a drink saying, "You should like to try this, this.. cola.  It is like a Korean kind of Coca Cola."  If anyone ever says that to you, do not do it.  You may not quiver at the mention of the stuff, but you will afterwards when you are suffering caffeine tremors.

The movie was weird, definitely, and very awkward when, once the movie was over and they had us trapped, they tried to commission everyone to commit to some program involving the Korean school system.  All I know is that the paragraph on the flyer they handed out went like this,

"We have performed the multi-cultural educations with many foreign friends to Korean school students for years.  According to that fact, we are currently looking for many friends who were not born in Korea and be glad to share their culture with Korean school students.  We would like you to consider doing it with our teams.  Plus, we'll provide small bonus for your favor."

All very awkward, yes, so.. we sort of just walked out and left without saying goodbye.........

The Int'l Center was on a really cool side of town, though.  To get from the side of the street our bus dropped us at to the side with the center, we had to go through an underground crosswalk.  Which went straight past a mall.  This big hallway underground, with all kinds of people shopping.  It was crazy.  We should have gotten pictures.

And, after the movie, we stopped and got what we thought were steamed buns (I don't think Korea makes them, but they're the best part of China -- like a chewy roll with barbecue pulled pork inside), but ended up being more of a giant mandu (dumpling).  Not the most awesome, but fun to try anyway.  Inside they had ground pork and green onion and maybe some scrambled egg.  They're pretty big, maybe the size of a large mandarin orange, and super oniony, but they were good.

Everything here, really, is either super oniony or super garlicy.  We notice the garlic the most when we go to the grocery store in search of garlic cloves by the milligram and can only find either a giant sack unhusked or a styromfoam platter of maybe 20-30 peeled cloves, shrink wrapped in plastic.  They eat a lot of raw garlic here.  And raw, marinated onions, too.

The mandu place was cute.  It was very tiny, probably ten feet by... 15 feet?  It had two doors, one on either side, and two tables right between the two doors.  It was so tiny that their kitchen was also the dining area with no barrier between the two, so we got to watch them make our mandu while we waited.  Again, we should have taken pictures, but that was a situation where we sure they liked us and didn't want them to be offended, so.. it was better not to take pictures.

On the way back to our bus stop, we came across this poster all about delicious Autumn food at a sort of Starbucks-esque, gourmet little Korean cafe:

[caption id="attachment_205" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="what a colorful autumn table..."][/caption]

Wow, such a colorful autumn table.  There's red food, yellow food.... maple food?

[caption id="attachment_206" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="red food, yellow food.... maple food."][/caption]

Maple food.  My favorite.

They must have thought, "maple" was synonymous with "brown"...?  Which could normally be true.  Except when you're talking about food...

That was our weekend.  Not incredibly exciting unless it's been a month since you last saw green beans!  But it was fun and we got to take the subway once, too.  Always a fun time.

Ben: Navigating the Daejeon

We're still learning how to get around our sprawling city of 1.6 million people (which is a little bit bigger than Boise), but we're getting much better. We've figured out which bus to take to get from our suburb to the main downtown area called Dunsan Dong, which is where all the cool stuff is. It is Blue Bus 301 and it stops about a half block from our house. I made a discovery this weekend, which I am probably way too excited about. It turns out that if you enter in your starting point and destination into the google map of Daejeon, it will tell you which buses to take and where you need to on and off each bus. It's still on in Korean, but it is pretty easy to figure when and where to get off and transfer and such. That combined with some maps that we have found (thanks to socious) and made is making getting around Daejeon must easier.

Here is a map of our neighborhood, so that you can get an idea what is around us.

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=110857219951873525850.0004751d85afa0edad822&ll=36.429946,127.387282&spn=0.011861,0.003492&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

Here is a link a map of the whole of Daejeon (we live in the small cluster of tags north of the main city):  Greater Daejoen

Hopefully this will help anyone who is trying to visualize where we are and what is around us. Come visit use, we know how to take buses now!

-ben

Catie: HappinessChurch

[caption id="attachment_77" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="we are here. in daejeon, which was formerly spelled, T-A-E-J-E-O-N. but now it's not. okay."][/caption]

When Ben was looking for jobs in Korea, we were thinking a lot about where we wanted to live: big city or small city?  And what sorts of resources and transportation we would have access to.  We were also -- sort of -- thinking about whether or not there would be familiar food available, because so many people in the onlines told us there would be absolutely none.

And let me just give a quick disclaimer:  We have been eating Korean food!  We are just super poor (and have been pretty much since we arrived) until tomorrow.  Which makes things difficult.  When you have a certain amount of money allotted for each meal, with no groceries at home to cook, and you are in a foreign country, knowing nothing of what tastes good and what is mostly squid tentacles and onion greens with fire-hot red pepper sauce.. you have to be careful.  One wrong move and you've got scary food in front of you with no backup plan.  You just have to skip that meal.  So, we haven't been eating familiar foods because we are afraid of Korean food -- what we've tried so far has been real good -- we're just afraid of running out of money at the moment.  We will be posting many delicious Korean food excerpts once we get paid.  Rest assured.

Now, moving forward.  We moved to Daejeon (the fifth largest city in Korea), knowing the

[caption id="attachment_78" align="alignright" width="300" caption="delicious spaghetti -- yum!"][/caption]

transportation was good, that the cost of living was significantly lower than that of Seoul (the only reason we aren't living in Seoul), and thinking it would very likely be impossible to find familiar food outside of Costco.

Well, as stated earlier, everyone on the internet lies.

And this is our proof!

Look at that delicious food (assuming the red, wormy stuff is ground beef -- the jury's out on that until we taste it)!  And we bought it all at the Dream Mart, which is.. maybe three blocks from our apartment?

They sell everything important.  Peanut butter, jelly, bread (only white though - eh.), everything for spaghetti, and.. we just found grated mozzarella the other day!  Real cheese.  Not the, "processed cheese food product" american cheese, or whatever it's called -- which is mostly all they have here.

So, tonight, we get to have delicious spaghetti.

[caption id="attachment_79" align="alignright" width="300" caption="happinesschurch!"][/caption]

In closing, I give you.. happinesschurch.

I don't know if you can read it.

But it says, "HappinessChurch". What kind of a church is HappinessChurch?  I do not know, but it sounds pretty sweet to me.


It was left in our apartment by the previous couple who taught at Ben's school and we think it warrants a little blog recognition.  It's over our bedroom door.


Who knows where it came from.  but it's shiny, gold and it makes me laugh.

- catie

Catie: The Mirror of SHAME.

We finally took the trash out last night.  We are unsure as to whether or not we did it properly, but we did it!  Hopefully we do not get arrested.

Trash here is very tricky because nobody follows the rules, so everybody has been grounded.  Us, too, even though we weren't here when the initial rule breaking happened.  Totally unfair.

You have four trash categories:
- Biological
- Metal
- Paper
- Plastic

And then furniture, but... that doesn't really count since it doesn't fit in a trash bag.

Everyone was supposed to separate their trash into these groups and then place their trash bags into the respective cans, which were located on every street.  But, no one liked to do it.

And, for a long time, no one did, which is never a good idea in Korea.
So, the government took action, putting, "The Mirror of Shame" up behind each trash can.  Naturally, this was designed to cause each person who broke the trash separation rule to feel such shame that they would want to take apart their trash right there on the curb and separate it.

But, mostly, it just gave each person an opportunity to groom themselves.

This, of course, did not delight the government (it delights me, I think it's awesome).

So, we all got grounded and they took away ALL trash cans from the street -- indefinitely.

Making rules about trash very hazey.

But, I think we've finally got it down.

Trash days are Wednesday and Friday and we can just leave stuff on the street if we sneak it down when no one is looking.  I don't yet understand the sneaking, but I don't dare not sneak for fear of getting caught.  I don't know why I'm afraid of getting caught if this is just the way it's done, but I, for one, don't like to mess around with the Korean government, especially not on such an apparently sore subject.
In other news, the apartment is becoming much cleaner.

When I got here, the wood slat patterned linoleum (it's quite a convincing pattern) was covered -- covered -- in slime and stick and crumbs and dirt (and cockroaches).  And this was after Ben had swept and mopped it!  The cabinets had sticky, yellow grease splatters on their fronts and sides and hard, green mold on their handles.  The fridge looked like a hairy tomato had climbed inside for a shave and then exploded (weird, but surprisingly true...).  There were cockroaches (though since we put out hotels, we're just finding them dead on their backs) and the bathroom smelled like the sourest of sour bath towels mixed with... I don't know... rotting flesh?
It was delicious.

Since then, I have sparkled the kitchen (two days worth of work) and we revamped the bathroom by pouring nearly a full bottle of bleach down the drain.  I spent ALL day -- from 2pm when Ben went to work until 9pm -- scrubbing and spraying bleach and wiping down.
Now the kitchen is mostly clean and the main room's floors are done, plus our shoe room is clean and the bathroom is liveable -- though we are having to pour bleach down the drain daily right now, as well as spraying the walls with bleach after every shower.

You still can't walk barefoot inside your own house, but that's just the way it is.  Nobody can.  That's why we all have built in shoe rooms.

All your shoes live in this little entry way between the front door and front front door and everybody has a pair of slippers that are kept there, too.  On your way in, you take off your shoes, put them in this little closet there in the shoe room, and then put on your house slippers, and on your way out, you do the opposite.

When I first got here, I thought that was just paranoia, but now I know better.  The streets outside are sick.  It's common practice to use them as a bathroom (there just aren't many public ones), people spit in them; the gutters are a bad, bad place.  And all that gets tracked inside on our shoes.

It is for this reason that most of the restaurants and even some shops are raised up higher than their entryways.  You slip your shoes off in the entryway, and then step up into the shop in your sock feet.
I like it.

We also have veranda shoes and shower shoes.  The shower shoes are just because no one wants to step on their own bathroom floor (I certainly don't want to step on mine).  And the veranda shoes...

Well, everybody has either a veranda or an outside portion of their house.  We have a veranda.  I like the word, "veranda".  I think it sounds nice, and a little affluent, or at least upscale.  But our veranda is not nice, like you might think.

It is where keep our washing machine.

In America, you put your clothes in the washing machine and then you hit some buttons and you walk away, coming back 45 minutes later or so to find spun clothes, ready for the dryer.

In Korea, you have choices to make.

First you have to decide whether you want hot water or cold water. If you want hot water, you need to switch the hose to the other spicket and screw it on.  For this reason, we have decided never to want hot water.

Then you need to turn the spicket on, which is a trip because it sprays you in the face.  So, before you turn it on, you need to make sure there are no clothes hanging on the clothesline that will be sprayed, and then you need to lift the washing machine lid and balance it -- just so -- so that you don't get sprayed in the face.

Then you have to wait until the washing machine fills because you have to turn the water off or the machine will overflow.

THEN... you have to start hitting buttons.  God only knows which one is right because we can't read Korea, but it seems like hitting this one button on the far left hand side works.  You just have to hit it a lot, leaving enough space between each poke to make sure that the machine's not going start, because there's nothing more frustrating than getting the machine to start and then, because you're on autopilot, hitting the button again and stopping the machine so that you have to hit it a million times all over again.

Then.......... you have to be careful not to slip when you walk out onto the veranda for the rest of the day so that you don't slip because the water from the washer drains through a tube onto the tiled floor and then through a drain in the center.

That's why the veranda shoes.  Because nobody wants dirty washing machine water anywhere in their house, but if you have to have it on the veranda, you sure as heck want to keep it quarantined there.

Also, the verandas all have giant, screened windows from floor to ceiling so that you can open them to get air circulating and dry your clothes faster (it doesn't do much -- still takes half a year for stuff to dry), but what it mostly does is allow dirt, dust and pollution into the house to mix with the dirty, floor water.

But.. I'm actually having quite a bit of fun.  I like the difference and there's something about having to work to make things happen.  Washing clothes is a huge ordeal, but all that means is that you feel really accomplished once it's finally done and you watch to keep your clothes clean for longer because you have to wash them a day or two in advance of wearing them to allow for drying time.

Anyhow, I walked down to Family Mart for some coffee and breakfast cookies before I started typing, and I really want to ice the coffee and eat breakfast, so...

I'll post pictures next time.  We have a few of the market and other stuff.

- catie