Now I Know What My Shirt Says

We were going through the checkout line with some friends at the PX one evening after shopping for playing cards and Tupperware. While the older Korean cashier man who's kinda my friend because we always smile at each other and so I like him cashiered our purchases, me and Joe and our friends talked about what language was written above the English on my beloved-Christmas-present-from-Joe shirt.

"I don't think it's a real language," I said. "I think it's, like, off of a sci-fi show or something."

Mr. Cashier Man looked at the writing. "That's Japanese," he said.

"Oh, cool," I said. "It doesn't say anything bad, does it?" Because I've always wondered about that.

He took a few seconds to interpret it. "Talk...nerdy...to...me." Then he looked really awkwarded out. Or confused, maybe, about whether that qualified as something bad. But I think he was awkwarded out.

"Oh, good," I said, now feeling slightly awkwarded out, too. "That's awesome. Thank you very much!"

We got our receipt and I bowed my head to Mr. Cashier Man the way I do with Korean people because I think they bow to each other but I'm not really sure but that also works great as a greeting and as "thank you," and we left. I tried to look at the Japanese words on my shirt while we walked out. And all the way home I was happy that my shirt had Japanese writing on it, and also that it didn't say anything bad.

By the way, I was wondering why no one ever subscribed to my blog. Then I noticed that it's never had a Subscribe button. Don't worry, I fixed it. Now there's a button on the side over there. Click on "Join this site" now so I have more than 3 subscribers and can feel even better about myself. (I used to have 4 subscribers, but then I removed myself from the list.)

 If the button isn't there, try refreshing the page.

IT'S HERE!!!

When I traveled the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon to get to Korea from Virginia, all I could bring with me were my most precious belongings and the things I'd need for my new life in the wild west. I was allowed only what would fit into two suitcases and two carryons and my purse. Also, I had to keep within a weight limit. I brought one Teflon skillet, one Teflon pot, half of our silverware, steak knives, a cheese grater, some measuring cups, a vegetable strainer, a cookie sheet, some silicone bread pans, my large crockpot, some tongs, four bathtowels, five books, my Bible, a book of puzzles, twelve pounds of DVDs, a set of bedsheets, not enough clothing, a keyboard, a mouse, and some computer speakers. I was not, however, able to bring our photo albums, my sewing machine, any lamps, enough clothing, or my desktop computer.

Now, the computer thing wouldn't have been that big of a deal if I could play computer games on my laptop. Unfortunately, I can't play computer games on my laptop, because Lappy prefers lounging around on Facebook and browsing the Web to doing all the hard work involved in playing silly games.

I would've been okay with that. Except that, for me and Joe, games kinda put the "happily" in "happily ever after."

For the past month, I've seen what life would be like if I didn't share my husband's hobbies. It would be frustrating and boring and full of resentment. I'd spend our evenings lounging around on Facebook and browsing the Web after sulkily making dinner while Joe played games, then we'd watch laptop-TV together after dinner and go to bed. It would be a dull, depressing, hopeless existence.

But! Shortly after I arrived here, Joe ordered a new computer for me. We decided not to ship the old one to Korea, because I hadn't gotten an upgrade for, like, two years, and it was just time for a new one. So Joe ordered it and I've been waiting for weeks and it finally came today. (If you want the specs, scroll down to the bottom of the post. If you don't, I'll simplify: it's encrusted with diamonds and was designed by NASA to break the speed of light barrier.)

I'm downloading my games and other necessities right now. Once that's done, no more Facebook and resentment for me! The upcoming 4-day weekend be a glorious nerd-fest of diamond-encrusted marital bliss!

Remember, flashing the peace sign in a photo is Korean for "I'm cool."

The small print: CybertronPC Fortress TGM2221F Gaming PC - AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 3.20GHz, 16GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, Blu-ray ROM, AMD Radeon HD 6850, LCD Touch Fan Control, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

A New Flavor

Joe signed the lease on our apartment a little over a month ago. After the technicalities of the paperwork were over and their business was concluded, our kind Korean landlord offered Joe a celebratory drink. Mr. Landlord poured for them a thickish green liquid full of floating translucent things, and they drank in businesslike companionship of contract-signing happiness.

Ever since, Joe has been addicted to the thickish green liquid full of floating transparent things. The transparent things are slippery and nice to mush with your teeth. I myself enjoy half a glass when I'm making dinner. We go through like four bottles of this stuff per week.

What? No, we haven't found an alcoholic beverage we enjoy. This stuff is juice. Usually when you think "juice," you think grape juice, fruit juice, grapefruit juice, orange juice, apple juice. But this stuff...is aloe juice.

Sweetened aloe juice is actually widely dranken here. Drunken. Drank. Whatever. I even saw an aloe juice bottle by the side of the road earlier. There are at least three different brands, but this is the kind we like:

Note the abundance of delicious pulp!

If aloe juice seems to be out of stock at your local grocer, just ask for Guaeelchon brand aloe juice.

Assuming I interpreted that L correctly in "Guaeelchon," and that it's not an R, because L and R are the same character and you just gotta know which one is being used in your word. Also assuming that the G in "Guaeelchon" isn't more of a "K" sound, because they share a character, too. But the sounds are so similar that it almost doesn't matter.

So, yeah, ask for it. They probably just have it in the back. Shouldn't be a problem.

Our Five Minutes of Fame

Here, where it's been rainy most of August and you actually get excited when you wake up to sunlight, "Let's go to the beach this weekend" isn't as good of an idea as it sounds. Still, we put our names on the list for the Jong-Sa Beach Tour.

The morning of the expedition dawned hot and cloudy. Me and Joe and a bunch of people from Joe's unit got on a bus at 8:00 in the morning (and Joe bought me a bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuit while I found seats for us, but I was still kind of sad 'cause of having no drink, but then I would've had to use the bathroom halfway through the drive, anyway.) A couple of hours on the bus went by, and it started raining, and then the bus drove 200 feet off the highway and parked in the beach's parking lot.

It had just stopped raining when we got off the bus and claimed spots under umbrellas so our stuff wouldn't get wet. Then we went to the water and walked in it. Me and Joe found a lot of cool rocks and I put them all in the pocket of his bathing suit, which was bright green and had palm trees on it, which you may know isn't exactly Joe's style, but there wasn't much of a bathing suit selection at the PX. I love Joe because his pockets are usually for my stuff.

The water was so clear you could see your feet even when you were knee-deep. Even once we got in the water up to our chins, we could see our feet down there.

Joe and some other guys tossed a football around, then I joined in but was too scared of the ball to catch it and I really couldn't throw very well, but it was fun anyway. Then we all played in the water for a while. Then we rode an inflatable water-thing towed by a JetSki. Then I got to go in a shower tent which had warm water and felt phenomenal after I was cold and sticky from the ocean. Then we ate lunch, which was a buffet of baked beans, rolls, mac & cheese, and delicious barbecued beef and some ribs, all of which was only $8 per person. I went back for seconds on the meat and would have gone back for thirds if I hadn't been so worried about looking like a weirdo.

Then we ran out of things to do.

The beach we were on was actually a smallish part of a larger beach, and the larger part of the beach was the Korean part. We decided to walk over there.

The Korean side was a lot more crowded. There were about eight of us, and I don't know about the others, but I felt really outnumbered and out-of-place and also the bottoms of my feet hurt because the sand on those beaches was pretty sharp.

We walked past a big group of young Koreans playing a game which seemed to involve trying to prevent the opposing team from hitting the females on your team with a ball that was being thrown back and forth really hard. We stopped to watch. A few of the players waved at us, and we waved back and kept watching. The group of the eight of us spectating drew more spectators. We moved along once that became boring.

It was still awkward being the only Americans on the beach (except for one other couple we passed.) Then, when we were walking past a large tent where an event had been held and people were packing up the stuff under the tent, one Korean guy in his thirties or maybe forties noticed us and got INCREDIBLY EXCITED. He started fluttering around us, saying "Oh my gosh" and "Wow" and other American-ey phrases which I don't remember, and I think speaking Korean. There were some older ladies under the tent who just gave him disgusted looks. He had us all hold up our hands with peace signs and took a few pictures of our group. Then he had someone take a picture of him with us, again with the peace signs. (It seems that Koreans consider the peace sign to be super hip, and, oddly, it's used WAY more over here than it is in the U.S.) The whole time, he was smiling and fluttering and "Oh my gosh"ing.

After the pictures, we said 'bye and walked away, giggly and confused.

The people we thought were staring as we walked along the beach...actually had been staring. It wasn't just paranoia brought about by being the only Americans among 24,536 Koreans.

As we headed back to the American side of the beach, I was still in awe. "If we were in the States and saw a group of Koreans, we wouldn't have gotten all excited or starey," I said to Joe. Then I had a brilliant thought. My theory: "America's a melting pot. Tons of different cultures. I guess we're used to seeing all sorts of people, and they're not."

So that was my culture lesson for the day.

And the Pacific Ocean is cold.

Oh - something else cool - the sun came out as our bus left the parking lot to take us home.

Our Korean Apartment

We live on the "5th" floor of an apartment building located in a cluster of apartment buildings. That one with all the yellow is ours (and the window with the white box, second from the top, is ours.)

Our building has an elevator. Check out the numbers on the keypad:

Yeah. There's not a four. In Eastern Asia, 4 is their 13; their words for "four" are similar to their words for "death." It's not uncommon for hospitals, apartment buildings, and other public structures to omit number four from the floorplan. So, we live on the "5th" floor.

Here's our little foyer/entrance thing. It has a cabinet for shoes. People don't wear shoes in houses in Korea. When the cable guy came to our house to hook up the internet, he took off his shoes in the foyer. Our landlord had to come over a couple of times, and he removed his shoes, too. Two restaurants we've visited had shoe shelves at the door.

Say you're visiting someone's house with your shoes off, and you have to use the bathroom. Do you want to walk on their bathroom floor in your bare feet? EWW! NO! That's why there were already bathroom shoes in our guest bathroom when we moved in.

One of the shoeless restaurants we went to had bathroom shoes in their bathroom for people to use. I was barefoot. I didn't use the shoes. I ended up wishing I had.

We have a couple of smallish spare bedrooms, one directly across from the foyer and the other directly across from our bedroom. One's for Army stuff and the other one is for other stuff.

Here's the kitchen (and computer room, since we only have one table):

Here's the living room, right across from the kitchen:

(Our landlord was kind enough to provide us with the couch, the TV stand, and the table & chairs.) The small white boxes next to the TV stand across from the couch are electrical transformers. There's also one under our kitchen table/computer desk and one in the kitchen. Almost everything we own gets plugged into transformers because the electrical outlets here don't speak English.

The tall white thing in the corner by the couch is our air conditioner. None of the Korean buildings we've visited (except for a museum, I think, and the Crown Hotel) have had central heating/cooling. Here, if you're lucky enough to have air conditioning, it's one of these individual air conditioner things or an A/C unit sticking out of a window. In Korea, electricity can be ridiculously expensive, so you try not to use it, which means trying not to use your A/C unit, which means opening your windows and wearing as little as possible and hoping it's a breezy day.

There's another A/C unit in our bedroom. We only run it at night. It's the white thing in the upper right-hand corner:

Those things on the floor are Army kneepads. They're to hold the door open.

I can remember our dad yelling when we were growing up, if we left the back door open when we came inside from playing, "In or out! Close the door! Are you trying to air condition the whole neighborhood?" Now, at night, if Joe leaves the bedroom to go get something from somewhere else in the apartment, if he leaves the door open, I yell "Close the door! Are you trying to air condition the whole apartment?"

 

The above picture was taken from the window of the porch outside of our bedroom window. It's the garden on the roof of the building across from us. Some mornings, we see a shirtless Korean man walking around up there, smoking cigarettes and tending the plants.

In this picture, you'll see the little room between our bedroom and our bathroom. In the little room, there are two wardrobes. The wardrobes and the shoe cabinet in the foyer are the apartment's only closets. Also in this picture, next to the light switch, you'll see the panel that controls our water heater. You have to push a button when you want the water heater to come on. The water heats up fast - you can be taking a shower three to five minutes after you turn on the water heater - but the water temperature of the shower is very inconsistent. I adjust the faucet every two minutes or so to balance out the random temperature changes. This panel also controls the apartment's heating system. There's pipes or something under the floor, and heat comes from them.

That's our bathroom. The walls and floor are tiled. The ceiling - and all the bathroom ceilings I've seen here - are made of plastic panels. The showerhead is on a hose, and you can detach the showerhead from the wall, which is how they build showers here. In Korea, showerheads don't just come out of walls.

You know what else is cool about our bathroom? The floor drain where the water from the sink goes. I can hose down the walls, the toilet, the floor, everything, and it all just washes into that drain. That's even where the shower water goes.

This is a picture of the little spot of mildew in the grout over the mirror, and the medicine cabinet, and the bathroom window. When you look out of that window, you see this:

The green grassy patches aren't grassy. They're rice paddies. Here, rice paddies are as common as cornfields are in Virginia.

This is the laundry porch that runs the length of the apartment behind the kitchen and one of the spare rooms:

The washing machine is a washer/dryer combo. Because of how expensive electricity is (and because of the inefficiency of that machine,) our clothes are dried on a rack. That takes a while. I can only do a couple of loads of laundry per day.

That's the other side of the laundry porch. It's the trash side. In Korea, they recycle aluminum and plastic and other stuff, of course, but they also recycle food.

Your food goes in the green bags, your non-recyclable trash goes in the white bags, and your recyclables go in a giant pile on the floor until you get around to sorting them. The trashbags are expensive; four or five white bags and three or five green bags cost me about $8. When they're full, you put them outside and someone comes and picks them up once the stray cats are done eating out of the green ones.

This (zoomed-in) picture was taken when I was at the laundry-porch window. Mist was rising from the mountains at sunset.

I'm living in a country where air conditioners are an afterthought and I can't read the trashbags and there are mountains outside my bathroom window. Times like this, I'm pretty glad Joe joined the Army.

Four Years To The Day (Except It Was A Friday)

 "Psalm 126:3: The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy."

Hey, Joe, remember everything I said about Passat the other day? Like how I love it and need it and we've been through so much together and I love to stare at its body? Well, I feel all the same things about you, except stronger. (Oh. Oops. Erase that last thing. There's some things our families don't want to know.)

Since our wedding day we've had a picture-perfect marriage...if you ignore the few disturbing, randomly-placed grayish-black bruisey smudges on the landscape. Ours is a painting of sunshine and massive blue sky and probably lots of fruit because fruit is good and delicious, and watermelon, and hugs if you could paint them, and green grass everywhere, and a galaxy painted in the sky because galaxies are shaped cool. It's bright and happy and in a rectangular frame, because it's long, because our four years together have been long (but only take a few minutes to look at, like most art.)

Just...there are those black marks in the picture. You hardly notice them for all the pieces of candy lying around, but I won't pretend they're not there. And we've found that you can't paint over something you've already put down.

Overall, though, the canvas is bright enough to make your eyes hurt. Those black marks, they make the rest of the colors glow.

11/2008

01/2009

06/2009 - Renaissance Faire

06/2010 - Basic Training Graduation

You're so good to me. I trust you. I love you. I'm in love with you. I want four more years with you (and four more after that, and then four more, and another four, and probably even more.) I don't have a clue what work we're meant to do together, but I hope we do it well. I want to somehow, in some small tiny way, begin to repay the incalculable gift we've been given in each other.

08/2011 - Hiking in Korea (and that's a worm on my hand)

So, darlin, thank you. Thank you for always loading the groceries into the trunk in the rain so I can get in the car and watch through the windows as you take the cart back while I munch whatever I managed to grab out of a grocery bag. Thank you for holding my hand in unfamiliar bathrooms while I turn on the water in the shower to make sure nothing bad will happen. Thank you for carrying that biscuit in your pocket so I could feed the geese. Thank you for running back up the mountain again to see if I left my camera up there.

I can't believe how much I love you.

And, really, I can't believe how much you love me.

Happy anniversary.

On Our Anniversary

Today is our anniversary.

I know I say it all the time...but I just want to tell you again that I love you. You're everything I wanted and exactly what I needed.

We've been through so much in the past couple of years. It's been an amazing journey. Four moves, countless trips, so many holidays, every kind of weather a relationship can experience. I feel so secure when you're holding me. You've kept me safe - and bailed me out of a lot of situations I shouldn't have gotten out of so easily. You've been with me, always there, always ready, anytime I needed you. You take me to my happy places. Yeah, we've had our fair share of issues - maybe more than we really should have had - but we always pull through stronger than ever. You take care of me...and I take care of you...as well as I possibly can. I wish sometimes that I could do better for you.

We've come a long way, haven't we? Miles and miles. And you've never failed me.

I miss you. I think about you every single day. I don't know when I'll see you again.

We're on separate continents...but you're still mine. I'm so glad you're still mine.

Happy second anniversary. You really are the best car ever. I love you, Passat.

The Korean 7-11, or, Experiments in Snacking

After we were done with our first Korean-food meal, we were still hungry. The food had been good, but there hadn't been much meat and the beds of lettuce under our meats weren't very filling. We had seen a 7-11 on our walk to the restaurant and decided to stop there and pick up snacks on the way back to the hotel.

I don't think it really occurred to me that the 7-11 was going to be carrying Korean snacks rather than normal food.

We couldn't read the labels, which were all written in Hangul, and we didn't recognize any of the packaging, except for:

We didn't buy this one, but it was funny enough to take a picture of:

An angry chicken? Okay. But why are those two creepy obviously evil guys dancing? And why do they have bubbles coming out of their heads?

We probably spent twenty minutes in that store, looking for stuff we recognized and figuring out what Korean foods we wanted to try. Here's what we ended up with:

First, I'll tell you about the green and white sparkling Tropicana drink in the can. It's actually been one of my favorite things I've found here so far. It was fizzy and cold and tasted like a sour apple Jolly Rancher. And it has English on it, so I bet you can buy it in the States, too. Somewhere.

Then there were the triangle things in the two similar-looking bags (left corner.) They're made by Kellogg's. They were like crunchy triangular cookies. I liked the apple ones and Joe ate the honey cranberry ones. (At least I assume those are cranberries...you never know, in foreign countries where you can't read.)

Next: The orange and white bag. These were sweet puffed rice and peanut snacks. They tasted like Quaker rice cakes, with peanuts. I liked them and would have liked them even more if they hadn't had peanuts in them.

Then there was the chocolate ice cream inside the plastic tube. (It's inside the package in the lower left-hand corner of the picture with all the food.)

It was delicious. It was like a Fudgsicle stuffed into a Mondo bottle minus the popsicle stick.

Next: The Soft Chocolate (upper left in the big picture.) It was one of two things we bought that night that had an English name (on the back of the box.) I wasn't impressed with Soft Chocolate. The candy came individually wrapped in powdered-sugared, bite-sized pieces and tasted exactly like the creme inside of a Keebler's E.L. Fudge cookie.

And then, the next day, there was one Soft Chocolate left, and I put it in my purse, and then a few days later it was mushed and flat and I opened it to see if it would taste good and it didn't.

I saved the weirdest food for last. The round thing in the upper right-hand corner of the big picture. We tried to figure out what was inside this frozen container before we bought it, with no luck. I guessed that the things illustrated on the outside were beans, though. Little black beans. The container was in the ice cream freezer, so I thought I was probably buying some kind of bean ice cream with colorful little square chunks of something in it. Unfortunately, I was 100% right.

The best way I can describe this concoction is as very sweet shaved ice studded with black beans. The pink square things covered in white sugar to the left of the tip of the spoon - I don't know what those were made out of, but I'm pretty sure it was bean paste. Joe liked the stuff and ate it all, which was good, because I certainly didn't want it. It didn't taste bad...it was just too weird to eat (like many foods I've found here.)

We were excited with each new package of food. We never knew what was inside or if it was something we actually wanted. It was like opening presents.

And that is what filled us up on the night of our first Korean-food dinner.

Shriveled Yellow Things: Our First Food Adventure

Our first night off-post was the first night we went to a Korean restaurant. When it was dinnertime, we left the hotel, chose a direction, and walked that way.

We went past a few restaurants before stopping. "This one looks classy," Joe said, so we started to read the menu posted over the sidewalk. (Actually, we just looked at the pictures; the menu was in Korean.) While we were staring at the pictures trying to decide if we wanted to go in there, a man came onto the restaurant's porch and started setting up some sort of Hibachi grill. Then a woman came out and smiled and waited for us to say something, and we hadn't really decided if we wanted to eat there or not yet but we followed her into the restaurant anyway.

She asked if we wanted a table or a room. We saw the rooms to our right. They were walled off with thin wooden partitions covered in paper with flowers in it, and had sliding wooden doors with translucent panels. I got all excited because I wanted the most Asian-ey experience possible. We took a room.

We had to remove our shoes before stepping inside, because we walked on the knee-high platform where we'd be sitting. At first glance, it looked like we were entering a tiny room with an elevated floor where we'd be kneeling at our table.

The waitress seated us and brought menus. We stared at them. She came back and took our drink order, and we were still staring at the menus. When she came back five minutes later...still staring. She said in poor English to let her know when we were ready, and closed the door. She had left two small bowls of food on the table.

She shouldn't have brought the two little dishes. They just distracted us from our menus.

One dish held a vinegarey sauce with raw white onion chunks and two pieces of spicy pepper. The other dish was yellow, and the things in it were kind of shriveled and smelled like a beach at low tide and were cold and chewy and kind of fibrous, like cold chewy shriveled fibrous pieces of...I don't know...celery or something. It was some kind of vegetable, and before we got here everyone always talked to us about Kimchi, so that's what I assumed it was. We asked the waitress what it was. She had to think for a few minutes of what the stuff was called in English and, after a few moments, said "Yellow beet?" The taste wasn't bad, but I couldn't get past the consistency.

Once we identified the weird yellow things, we asked the waitress to translate a few items on the menu. We ended up ordering by pointing at pictures. I pointed at a picture with beef, smothered in a thick yellow sauce, over lettuce-like vegetables. Joe ordered something with chicken in it.

My meal was delivered first. It was beautifully presented. Small slices of beef were arranged in a circle over a bed of lettuce, with a flower made of beef on top; also, a slice of cucumber, some lemon slices, and a little tuft of what I think was sliced lemongrass. The dish didn't have a thick yellow sauce at all. The beef looked uncooked. The waitress left the room after placing the dish in the middle of the table. I looked at the red meat and then at Joe. "That's not what the picture looked like," I whispered. He shrugged and smiled like, what do you want me to do about it?

I picked up my chopsticks - this was the first restaurant we'd ever been to with no forks - and used them on a piece of meat. It was partially frozen. Not enough to be inedible, just enough to where you could tell it had been frozen or on ice. Cold, lightly-cooked beef. Mmmm.

It wasn't what I was expecting, but it wasn't bad, so I kept eating. Joe helped. Five or ten minutes later, when the waitress brought Joe's food, the Beef Tataki and its bed of lettuce in another vinegary sauce were almost gone.

Joe's food tasted like normal food. It was chicken deep-fried in a thick batter, over a bed of lettuce, with lemon slices.

We eat off each other's plates anyway, so it was pretty convenient that the waitress placed each dish in the center of the table. From what I understand, that's how you eat in Korea: Everything goes in the middle, and everyone eats from each dish. That's why there was a small plate for each of us on the table.

I had caught a brief glimpse of the clothing of the men seated in the room next to us. They were wearing business clothes. Their meal had been going on before we got there, and through the time we spent staring at our menus (ten minutes,) waiting for our food (twenty minutes and then another ten minutes,) and eating (maybe fifteen minutes,) the businessmen were loudly talking. After we'd put down our chopsticks and began to thoroughly inspect our little room, bored, we heard them still eating and talking. We'd been done for at least ten minutes. In the States, we would've paid our check and been getting ready to leave by that point. Instead, our room's thin door was closed and Joe had begun to make faces and poke things with his chopsticks. We felt like we'd been forgotten by the waitress. We came to the conclusion that meals here take much longer than they do in America.

Finally, we opened the door a crack to signal that we needed service. A few seconds later, the waitress came to the door. "Do you have any dessert?" I asked. She smiled and looked away for a second, figuring out what I was saying, I think. Then, sounding unsure: "Like...ice cream and cake?" "Yeah," I said, "Except...like...Korean." They didn't. I was sad. But we asked for the check.

When it was time to leave, we climbed out of the room and put our shoes back on. We hadn't left a tip on the table. In Korea, apparently, you don't leave tips. I read that, generally, the only workers in Korea who collect tips are strippers. So don't leave money for your waitress.

Walking out of the restaurant, I asked Joe if he was still hungry, 'cause I was. We both were. We stopped at a 7-11 on the way back to the hotel. I'll tell you about that in the next post.