Crap Now Available Night and Day

Recently Lotteria started staying open twenty four hours a day in my town. I was pretty surprised to see the sign and wondered how much business they were going to get "after hours." I passed by one night at about one in the morning and noted that they were indeed open, but really only "half-open." Enjoy a burger in the dark!



Last week I stopped in for something to eat, and had a discussion about why the 24 hour restaurant might be FAIL! Back home, revellers might leave a club or bar in the wee hours of the morning and head straight for a "street meat" vendor (hot dogs and sausages carts that set up outside in anticipation of hungry drunk-faces) or a McDees. Here, drunks tend to stumble home with full bellies as they've spent the proceeding hours downing shots of soju or beer whilst feeding on either a meal or plates of "anjou," which is mandatory food ordered with drinks. I don't know. Maybe Lotteria will see some business from truck drivers passing through here looking for a quick bite, but somehow I don't think so.

Lotteria sucks, anyways. I don't know why I ever stray from the "seo-burger" (shrimp burger) -the only thing on their menu I like, but last week I was tempted by the picture on the wall of the Hanwoo Steak Burger.



Bun, onion, burger, mushrooms, and a broccoli-cheese sauce. Looks pretty yummy!
In reality though,



not so much!

Inside there was a gristly meat patty topped with a glop of cold green vomit sauce.



Scrap that. So we went next door to the 24-hour 7-11 and picked up a sandwich. Thing.



Mmmm. Comprised of seaweed, rice, ham, cheese or egg?, limpttuce, condensation and presumably sand.



Dinner Fail.

I Keep Working My Way Back to You, Babe.

I've opened the "new post" window several times over the last week and then sat here resenting the cursor that blinked out "you...got...nothing" in a steady Morse code. The cursor lies. I got stuff. I just seem to lack the ability to covert all the stuff from my brain to the keyboard. That's not even true. I lack the desire? The motivation? Ummmm, maybe I lack the words, or rather - the right words.

I'm on the road to recovery from whatever nasty little bug I picked up a couple weeks ago. I lost my voice for two days this past week which rendered me pretty well useless in the classroom. I was really grateful to some of my classes that gave me a break and quieted down to focus on my whispered instruction. Some students really displayed a surprising amount of compassion and turned into little co-teachers, scolding their classmates for speaking Korean and not paying attention. Frickin angels. I rewarded them with candy.

I finally went to the big hospital and got a chest X-ray and some blood work. I'm not sure what the diagnosis was, but the instructions were "take these (eight pills three times a day) and much rest. NO TALKING." I relayed that to the manager who laughed at me, just like I knew she would. Still, I kept sound to a bare minimum that second day and was able to squeak out some noise in time for my adult classes, so I was pleased.

I'd type more now, but I'm venturing out for a "hwe-shick" (party) to celebrate my friend's birthday. It's late, and I'd much rather crawl into bed, but I promised I'd be there. The party begins once her restaurant closes, hence the owl-time start. She just called right this moment so I've got to go.

More soon. I promise.

Zoinked

I figured it as just a matter of time, and sure enough I started to feel it by Sunday afternoon. Last week so many of my students had looked feverish and miserable as they hacked their way through my classes mouths-open, germs-flying, child style.

So it was that I dragged my ass to work on Monday and then dragged my ass to the doctor for the one hundred and sixty seventh ass injection/spanking Ive had since Ive been in Korea. There's a new nurse at Dr. Dolphin's office and she seems very nice, but it unnerves me that she does not stop touching me pretty much from the time I enter the clinic to when I leave. I must have looked particularly pathetic on Monday because she came from behind the desk to sit beside me in the waiting area, petting my leg the whole time. In the doctor's office, I perch myself on the stool beside his desk so he can use the sonar in his forehead to diagnose me. That's not entirely fair. The nurse reaches into my shirt from behind me to yank my bra away from my chest while the doc places the stethoscope in four spots for exactly half a second per location. Then he says, "Nnnyyaagghh!" which means "open your mouth" in Lazy-speak, and he depresses my tongue for three seconds. When the nurse doesn't have her hands in my shirt, she's got them moving around on my back. It's distracting and I resist the temptation to turn and smack her hands off me.

The doc clicks some computer keys and holds up four fingers and says, "days" and then points toward his door and then to the left, which means I should head to the curtained area where the nurse is going to stick a needle in my ass and slap me bye-bye.

I head back to work and see my boss for the first time that day. "Are you okay?" he asks.
"Not so much," I reply.
"Odi appayo?" (Where are you sick?)
"Everywhere."
"Kamgi?" (Do you have cold?)
"Anniyo. Malaria."
"Huh?"
"Ebola."
"What?"
"Yellow gold bunsick?"
...


Props to Dr. Dolphin, though. I pop a handful of pills and a shot of cough syrup every eight hours and don't feel too rough. However, about five or six hours later the potion starts to wear off and I'm reminded that I actually feel like crap underneath it all. The thing that can't be covered up with the medicine, though, is the bone crushing fatigue. I've had trouble keeping my eyes focused this week. They keep involuntarily rolling toward the back of my head. Like they've done six or seven times since I started typing this. So I'm off to bed.

Bloody TGIF, huh?

You Wanna Laugh?

Please head over and view Roboseyo's translation work. Outstanding. I peed my pants.

Turnover

We're losing another teacher at the end of the week. So that's three teachers who have quit in two months. Unfortunately, the latest one to leave has grown to be one of my favourite co-workers ever. I pretty much knew I was going to like her once I found out her family has five dogs and a cat. Out at a hweshick a few weeks ago we got to talking about our cats and I actually convinced her to take her young girl-cat "Nabi" (Butterfly) in to get spayed. Her cat was driving her nuts with all the yowling and rubbing, but she hadn't realized it was because the cat was in heat. I totally sold her on the surgery when I warned her that if her cat did manage to escape the house she was going to come back pregnant. So score one for decreasing the unwanted pet population.

I'm bummed shes leaving to open up a "kalguksu" restaurant. My boss isn't pleased that she only stayed with us a couple months, and I think there's some worry about what the parents are going to think about us burning through so many teachers in such a short time.

My newest co-worker remains unimpressive. She doesn't speak often, but when she does it's in "baby ga-ga coos" in both English and Korean and she still does the jiggly dance thing all the time, which I had hoped was just a nervous habit she'd get over after a while. Apparently it's not. I asked her, when we were picking out an English nickname for her, if she'd ever been given an English name before. She replied that she had and then struggled to remember what it had been. I almost choked when she finally recalled it was "Morticia." I asked if it had been a guy who'd given her that name, and sure enough it was. "What a jerk," I thought, but now I sort of understand.

At her welcome party she sat hunched over looking downright miserable and saying nothing until she finally excused herself at 11:15, saying her mother was going to worry why she was out so late. Shes a wild one, that Morticia.

Speaking of wild, I've got this student who has been a constant thorn in my otherwise fairly lovely garden of good little students. I've been teaching him for about a year now and I inwardly groan when I've got to deal with him. I know I should love all the little children, but I actually sort of hate this child. I've got five other students in that class who are eager, enthusiastic, and well behaved. I resent that I have to spend so much time micro-managing this one boy and the two other boys he riles up every class. The kid has absolutely zero impulse control, and no, I'm not a clinician - but I'd venture to say he displays obvious signs of ADHD. I stressed him out yesterday by first confiscating his toys, and then denying him a sticker because he made several mistakes while whizzing through his work because he needs to be "!FIRST FIRST TEACHER I'M FINISHED I'M FIRST I'M DONE FIRRRRSSSTTT!" He sulked back to his chair and proceeded to, while he thought no one was watching, yank hair out of his head AND EAT IT! Ohhhh. ADHD/OCD. Great.

Tomorrow I'm going to change his name to Damien.

One of my adult students is a private tutor who helps kids with developmental and learning disabilities. She was telling me in class tonight how she'd had a bad day because one of her students threw a desk at her and then bit her shoulder. The kid drew blood. So I guess there's always someone who's having a worse day than you.

Big Wheel

Perhaps there's no better way to snag a panoramic view of the glorious city of Ulsan than to ride the giant fancy neon Ferris Wheel that sits atop a building adjoined to Lotte Department Store in Samsan-dong.



We approached the behemoth wheel and the fellow manning the booth gestured to my companion and said, "Who he?" I replied that he was my friend, and the Ferris Wheel man shook his head and nodded in the direction of a sign.



See the bottom part? Hmm. The ""Wheel" is only to be enjoyed by family and lover. The man in the booth would not be moved. So my friend and I had to sneak into a bathroom stall to make a happy sex time. Luckily, his wallet bore the circular imprint of a long stored condom, as further posted rules were even more specific.



There were a whole bunch of rules:



just The Man trying to Bring You Down.
IMO the best way to enjoy the ride is to be drunken. Very very drunken.

So, anyways we reappeared and affirmed that we were now lovers and no, I hadn't been got the pregnant, and we were allowed on. I wanted to jump out the locked caged car almost immediately because our in-car music thingie didn't work and as we slothed our way further from the ground I had trouble hearing the "gee gee gee gee baby baby baby" that blasted from the speakers below.

The lights of Ulsan are pretty, but I'd recommend riding the Wheel of Yawn during daylight hours. Because hopefully that's more interesting than riding it at night. Which is what we did. Which was yawn inducing. And just so you know, standing in your overheated car (air-conditioned in the summer, yee-haw) and rocking it back and forth is heavily frowned upon. Your music-less speaker will somehow crackle to life and yell at you to sit the hell down.

Drag

When I was young, I'd cross the bridge every day from my apartment building which yawned over one of the major highways in Toronto. For eight years, that bridge crossing would lead me most days toward school, but the weekends were different. I'd stop short just at the other side of the bridge and head to the arena.

Public skate was held in the afternoon and I was there most Saturdays and Sundays, sporting my furry brown skate-covers my mother had made on her sewing machine. I didn't care that they were different from the super popular baby blue store-bought versions, mine made me feel like a skating bear.

I had a crush on one of the guards. I think his first name was either Dave or Mike, but for sure his last name was MacKenzie, which was what all his other skate-guard buddies called him. That was the name I'd calligraphy onto my duo-tangs at school and surround with a heart. I was Mrs. McKenzie in my head, and we'd whirl around Olympic style during the couples skate portion of the afternoon. Of course, that never happened, which is well and good I suppose - as the Zamboni would have had to scrape my jellied splattered too-happy heart off the ice. No one wants that sort of mess.

Instead, what happened was that once they'd announced the start of couples skate over the intercom my friends and I would skate away, refusing to get off the ice. For sure it was some negative attention seeking, and would result in McKenzie and one of his buddies carrying me off the ice by the wrists and ankles. That used to thrill me, because I had absolutely no sense of grace or dignity. I was eleven, so I understand that I didn't know any better.

McKenzie used to compliment me on my ability to skate backwards and I'd glow. "Can you show me how you do that?" he'd ask, and I'd enthusiastically glide away from him.
Then he'd skate away in the opposite direction. I fell for it every single time.

As for the "couple's skate" I'm not sure how old I was when I suddenly did know better, but I remember struggling against McKenzie and whatever guard that week had drawn the short straw to round up the renegade losers off the ice. My gingham top rode up and my too tight Mac jeans were starting to slide down over my hips. I realized that not only was I being carried off the ice (for the umpteenth time) but I was going to be naked by the time we reached the penalty box. I stopped struggling, and grabbed McKenzie's arm after he deposited me to squeak out an "I'm sorry," before he skated off. After that I didn't need to be asked twice to stop skating when the time came.


So here I am, fast forward almost thirty years later.
I wrote this a week ago and I keep opening it to edit. There are a bunch of reasons why I'm going to type the next sentence, but I just can't share right now. Still, I often wish I had someone who would just drag me the fuck off the ice already, pants be damned.

Gummy

I'm worried about Kami. One of his teeth fell out this morning - a bottom fang. I've got to take him to the vet and he HATES going to the vet. They'll have to put him under to clean his teeth, and that's risky.

Worry worry worry.

Fleurs

Happy April Fleurs Day!
Did you get punked yet?

It's a good thing I took some time to appreciate the blooming magnolia trees outside my apartment building, because those lovely flowers die so quickly. Here's a picture I took exactly one week later.



And from yesterday.



They're melllllting!

No matter, though. There are plenty of other pretty things springing to life these days. The cherry blossom trees still need another couple days or so, but in the meantime there's a bat-like thing hanging from the forsythia.



I wonder what's inside.

There are pink flowers.



And red cousins of the pink flowers.



Lots of cousins.



And perfect roses.



Pay no attention to the ubiquitous mounds of trash.



Focus on the pretty!

Voodoo Child

I know there's someone out there with a little voodoo doll of me. That is the only logical explanation for why it felt like a needle was being poked through the side of my left nipple all day long Sunday. I know I wasn't in a tattoo shop getting my nipple pierced, because I checked. I was in pajamas in my apartment. So someone was somewhere else sliding a needle in and out of their Jelly-doll. Maybe the button nipple had fallen off and they were just taking a really long time sewing it back on.

Then sometime last night the same someone who lives somewhere did something to their Jelly voodoo doll - I don't know what voodoo trick specifically,...maybe the smearing of strawberry jam or just pressing some chewed up gum under the right eye which resulted in my waking up with a little bump. That was irritating. Throughout the day, though, more voodoo juju must have been performed and the bump turned into a stye that sits under the full length of my eye like a big peach leech, or a blister's angry sister.

So now my thought process pretty much goes like: *blink* "ouch" *blink* "ouch" *blink* "ouch" *blink* "&^%&ing OUCH!"

Remember when I wasn't dreaming of blue turtles? I've had the crumbling falling out teeth dream twice more since then, and I know that the shattering fangs in my mouth sound exactly like LEGOs® being bounced around in a bag.

*Blink.*
*OUCH!*

Are you Earth Houring?

Tonight at 8:30 pm in their local time, people all over the world are going to be turning out their lights and turning off their appliances for sixty minutes in support of Earth Hour. I can't see any link to Korea on their website, and haven't seen any advertising on Korean television channels, though I didn't look very hard. I talked to my co-workers and they hadn't heard anything about it - so I don't know how many people will go dark here for an hour tonight. I told my friend she should turn off all non-essential lights at her restaurant and she thought I was funny.

I will be in the dark though. I'm going to do one better, even, and turn off all my stuff and settle in for a nice evening nap pretty soon after I hit publish on this post. That'll be about 3.5 hours worth of energy conservation. So, if 2.5 of you didn't participate in Earth Hour don't worry. I got your back.

Oh, I read on the web yesterday that many famous landmarks are going to be turning out their lights and participating, including the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House, Golden Gate Bridge, and the Great Pyramids and Sphinx. Pretty cool. Je fais dodo maintenant. Night night!

What Happens to Ice Cream

One of my students invited me to touch the tongue on the cover of her massive pop-up book. I wasn't so excited because the rubbery tongue was sticky and covered with lint. The kid in the story was eating an ice cream cone.



His tongue was very stretchy!



And so began the story of what happens when you eat an ice cream cone. Here are the highlights!
Blah blah blah mouth, tongue, teeth, saliva blah blah.



Blah blah blah your insides stomach acid blah blah blah



Blah your intestines and your ice cream is turning into poop.



Springy intestines! Poop wants out!



Let your poop out! Blah blah Nnnnnngggaaaahhhhh!



The end!

Metrosexual Flower Man

James, over at I Spy Shanghai just returned from weekend journey to his old stomping grounds in Seoul. In his Shoe Tuesday post he writes about the Metrosexual Flower Men who abound in Korea. In his very next post he mentions The Face Shop. I'm hoping he isn't planning on tying those two things together in his next post, because I'm going to beat him to it.

Bae Yong Jun, (aka Yon-sama in Japan) was the star of the very popular drama Winter Sonata (겨울연가) from a few years ago. It seems he hasn't done too much acting since then, but he is the latest Face of The Face Shop. He is also the Quing of Metrosexual Flower Men.



He was the absolute darling of middle aged Korean and Japanese women. For some reason, he's turned into one of them, pretty much. See the flowers? See the metrosexual? That strap he's fingering over his shoulder for sure must be a giant murse.


See the metrosexual marvel at bamboo?



How much do you want to bet he's wearing the L'ame perfume pictured at James's?

Spring Hath Sprung

These trees were bare on Monday, which turned out to be a nice mild spring-like day. The previous Monday we overnight temperatures fall to below zero and there was a 30% chance that it would snow. It did not. It snowed ONCE here during winter. For about five minutes.

Anyhow, by Tuesday the magnolias had just POPPED! Yesterday they were in full bloom.



They smell delicious, and I would gladly spend the whole day with my face smushed into them, inhaling through my flowerxygen mask.



But work beckoned like it always does. My walk is going to be enjoyable over the next few weeks as flowers blossom and green returns to the countryside. The forsythia has busted out on the way down the hill.



Today must have gotten up to about 20 degrees even under cloudy skies, and it was MUGGY! Spring doesn't last very long here, so it's a good idea I enjoy it while I can. Soon enough we'll be back into the sauna of summer, and I'm not a big fan.

Who's the Boss?

My cat Kamikaze walked over to where I was sitting at the computer and meowed at me. I leaned over to pet him, asking "What?" He meowed again. "What, Kami?" He meowed louder as I scratched behind his ears. Very Loud Meow. "What?" "MROOOOOWWWWWW!"

"You're nuts" I said, and I got up to turn off the washing machine. Kami jumped up onto the chair I'd just evacuated and plopped himself down, glaring at me.

I can't believe my cat told me to "MOVE!"

Moth

Working in a Coalmine

Only instead of coal, our main byproduct is yellow dust. Nasty stuff, that. I'm in Day Five of "The Constant Headache" and I'm going to blame all the toxic shit in the air.

I haven't written about work for a little while, other than the thought that I need a vacation from it,...so here goes.

Three weeks ago we hired a new teacher. She's a young, pretty, recent university graduate. Her English was quite decent, which made me happy. What didn't thrill me was that she was given the desk right beside mine - which has been empty for all the years I've worked at my school. I used the space underneath it to store some of my stuff, and the drawer held contents that all the teachers used. So I had to squish more things into my space. Almost five years teaching means that I've acquired a lot of materials. I also teach double the classes of any given Korean teacher, so it stands to reason I needs me some space. The other thing that I was wondering about was why we needed a new teacher. Our student numbers don't warrant it at all, and I know my boss is in quite a financial pickle - so I'm questioning how the added salary is being justified.

Our "manager" doesn't want to teach. It appears that she needs more time to sit at her desk pretending to be busy when she's not studying her fingernails and torturing me by turning on the heater she parks right beside her.

Three days in, the new teacher got an interview for a position she really wanted at some other company, and three days after that she was packing up and saying "bye!" The advertisement my school had placed had gotten more than one response, though, so they moved down the list, got another young recent uni grad to come in for an interview and hired her right away. She started the following day so there wasn't even a gap where my manager needed to resume working teaching.

The new teacher's first question to me was, "You is name Jelly?" so I had a sense of what her English is like. Blah. She's only been working a week now so there's not too much that I know about her except that she seems to want to even further reduce the amount of space I have in the Teacher's Room by standing most of the time between me and her chair. I get to have her bum in my face quite a lot. She also does this strange jig all the time. I really don't know what that's all about. To get from the place where she's sticking her bum in my space to the photocopier, say, she does this waggly jog with her arms all askew and her shoulders shaking. It's sort of like the whiny dance that goes along with the "Opppppaaaa" protest/whine. I think maybe some ex-boyfriend told her she's super cute when she throws a playful mini-tantrum and she decided to incorporate that cuteness as her mode of general transportation. Like I said, I don't get it. My down-to-Earth other co-teacher shares my confusion. She doubled over laughing when I nodded toward the new dancing teacher and raised my eyebrows like, "What's up with that?" Tomorrow we've got a "hwe-shick" (work party) to welcome the new teacher. She doesn't drink, which is no fun but okay. More for me.

Something's going to happen soon at work and I'm not sure what it is. My boss is tapped out and can't afford to keep losing money. I hear an axe being sharpened somewhere, but I'm assured it shan't fall upon me. I don't think the end is nigh for the school, either - but I could be wrong. My pay, which has already been delayed by five days for the past few months came up short yesterday by more than half. This isn't good news, but there isn't much I'm willing to do about it right now. I trust my boss, who complimented me yesterday by saying I'm the best teacher he's ever met and he'd like to work with me forever. I can't agree to forever, but I'll keep showing up for the next thirteen weeks or so.

And then what?
I don't knooooowwwwwwwww.

Rainbow Poodle Judges You

For not believing in the !MAGIC! that is RAINBOW POODLE.
I managed to take this picture just before Rainbow Poodle (and his shopping cart) flew away. Fer realz.

I Love Chicken Food

Don't you?

Dreaming not of Blue Turtles

I just woke up from a very real dream where all my teeth were crumbling. I'd just touch my tongue to them and they'd shatter in half or more and I was spitting the chunks out into my hand. They looked like little blood soaked bits of bone. When I opened my mouth and looked in a mirror there were just gums and holes filled with blood where my teeth used to be.

I was SO relieved to wake up and discover I still had teeth. I can't even tell you how shaken yet pleased I was. Did you ever have a dream like that? Bloody awful.

Looking online, I found this interpretation of a teeth-falling-out-dream: "Perhaps you are having difficulties expressing yourself or getting your point across. You feel frustrated when your voice is not being heard." That might speak toward the fact that I thought all day about what I should write about and couldn't seem to come up with a damned thing.

That's not even true. I've got plenty to say, but I'm feeling like I'm under some kind of self-imposed gag order. Sucks.

Last week I had a dream that a whole field of asteroids was heading towards Earth. There was nothing anyone could do about it. The Earth was going to explode and death was imminent for all. The atmosphere had already changed and was glowing bright orange and outside people were panicking, knowing that they just had a few short hours left to live. Inside, I was teaching class of kindergarten students. I kept having to scold the kids to "come away from the windows already and open your books!"

I don't even need to look that one up. I think I need a vacation.

Long Time John

He's back!

Finally my pal John at Long Time Gone is back! His original site got stolen, pretty much. You should head on over and read all about it and say hi!

Welcome back, John!

Craptastic

I woke up stiff and stuffy, much too early for a sleep-in Sunday. Quite the perfect recipe for crankiness. I'd promised to get up and out into the sunshine, but I wasn't feeling like it at all. I was growly when the phone rang and startled me awake just as I was drifting off into "Sleep: The Sequel."

I wasn't able to cancel, but managed to re-negotiate and whittle down the day's events. Unfortunately it meant cutting out the best parts: a nice drive in the country and some springtime frolicking on a beach. Instead, we set out to work on the filling out of many government forms on-line. We headed to my school, where there are three computers that don't crash every five minutes like my home PC (which is short for Piece of Crap) does. I've got the key to the school, but not to the door leading to the second floor which we found locked. Grrrr.

So we went to an overheated loud smokey PC bang (Internet cafe) and spent over two hours trying to sort out faded faxes and strangely translated documents. There were five forms totalling eleven pages and they can only be printed out once they're complete. You can't save them to any computer. You can't copy them and forward them so you can finish them later. Must print.

I'd taken note of the printer behind the front desk when we'd entered the PC bang. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to ask if it was working.

It was not.

So I spent another thirty minutes or so picking through the forms, cutting and pasting the details we'd been arguing over for the previous couple hours, "I think you spell it Mung-hwangae." "No, it should be Mun-kwangay." I copied our work to notepad, saved it to the PC, opened my e-mail, attached the file and sent it to myself. Then I checked just to make sure it had gone through. Refresh. Nope. Refresh. Nu-uh. Refreshrefreshrefresh. "#*&^%$^, where IS IT?!?" I check my "Sent" box. Yes, it had been sent. To my father.

Which wouldn't be a problem, except that I haven't spoken to the man in a year and a half. So now I've sent him an empty e-mail with an attached file filled with jibberish and a bunch of personal details for someone he's never met. At least it wasn't porn, I guess. Not that I send out porn. Much porn.

I think "porn" is a funny word.

Still, now I worry that in short order my father is going to pop up like one of those little brown mounds in a "Whack-a-Mole" game and I'm going to have to root around for my big spongey mallet.

I really should have stayed in bed.

Locked Out

I apologize for the lack of posting. My computer is a pile of crap and it tends to crash if I even look at it in a way that displeases it. The other night I gave it the finger and threatened to throw it off the balcony after it had crashed for the twenty-fifth time, and so I think my computer contacted my ISP who then threw up a barrier page to connect to the innernets that requires an ID and password which I was never given.

So for the time being, I'm locked out. Technology is conspiring to keep me isolated and out of the loop. My face is all -----> :(

Meanwhile, please enjoy my pussy cat.

Specnaanular

I decided to hit up the tiny lone Indian restaurant in my city the other day for some spicy international cuisine. Check it out!



Mmmmm! Looks yummy, yes?

HA! I totally fooled you! That pictured above is indeed some delicious Indian fare, but it was not prepared or consumed at a restaurant. I made that there food, I did - and the photo is of my breakfast yesterday morning. Lemme tell you, it was scrumptacular.

One cool thing about where I live is that my little "town" is surrounded by big factories. There are a lot of foreigners working at those places, so some grocery stores have set up little areas offering ingredients from places where the factory workers hail, namely The Philippines, Indonesia, China, and Pakistan. I got the ingredients for my curry at the one little shop that's dedicated exclusively to selling foreign food. I bought the last two bags of chana dal, which is a young split chickpea without the seedcoat. You have to soak or slow cook this bean to soften it, but it still doesn't turn into mush, which is a very good thing as far as I'm concerned. I made the curry with some chopped onion, tomatoes and chillis, and added generous spoonfuls of turmeric and curry powder (a mix of red chilli, coriander, cornflour, turmeric, black pepper, clove, cardamom, cumin seeds, cinnamon, curry leaves, and salt.) Both the turmeric and curry powder are from Pakistan!

Seriously yummy.



The naan I made was only my second ever attempt at making it, and it was a huge success. The first time I tried to make it a couple weeks ago was very "meh," but this time the dough raised wonderfully and the result was so tasty and sort of reminded me of pita.

I had googled some naan recipes and pretty much threw together whatever I felt like. Naan is a very forgiving bread and there are loads of varieties you can make. I dissolved about a teaspoonful of yeast into warm water and poured a mound of flour and a bit of baking powder and salt into another bowl. After the yeast had bubbled up a bit, I poured that into the dry ingredients and then added a small container of plain yogurt. That stuff is sweetened here, so I didn't bother with sugar, and i think I added a little oil as well and then knead it all up into a nice soft dough. After it doubled in size I divided it into six balls and let them rise too. Then I flattened them with my bottle-of-gin-rolling-pin and cooked them in a very lightly oiled skillet.

You know it's time to turn them when they start to puff up and the underside starts to brown.



Flip them over and this is what you see:



Naantastic!

You know what's pretty funny, though? If you (with your crystal ball and mad fortune tellings skillz) had told me just a few weeks ago that I'd be eating (let alone enjoying and I daresay even craving) those legumey split chickpea thingies I'd have told you you were stone-cold mental. I grew up being forced to eat peas and beans at the dinner table and I ALWAYS washed them down, pill-style, with a swig of milk. I wasn't keen on the milk either. After I got to an age where I could decide on my own what I wanted or didn't want to eat, I avoided vegetables like those. I should have keyed in to the idea that perhaps my palate has expanded, since I love dried peas, beans, and legumes - and think fresh shelled peas are pure deelish. So a few weeks ago my boyfriend cooked up a similar curry with naan (and he's far far better at those dishes than I) and gently urged me to try a bite. I thought, "What the hell?" and tucked in. YUM! So I pestered him to make it again - and again, "YUMMY!!" So I decided to try making it on my own, and my first attempt wasn't that bad at all. I'll try to make it have a stronger flavour next time.

Anyhow, because I've never eaten this sort of thing before, the little ditty "Beans, beans, the magical fruit; the more you eat, the more you toot," was really lost on me. Let me tell you, though - I get it now.

Holy cow!

I did not have to walk home last night. I just pointed my feet in the direction of my apartment and let my ass motor me along. I spent the rest of the night astounding myself with the frequency of the trumpeting of my butt. Thankfully, I wasn't reeking the place up at all - but even the cat was staring at me like, "Dude! What's up with all the noise?"

Aftershocks

I watched a movie on Thursday night and bawled my face off. For good measure I watched it again when it started back up on PPV and wept again, sort of surprised I still had tears to squish out of my eyes. I woke up Friday morning with fat puffy painful red eels blinking over my pink eyes, and solid blue rings underneath to complete my version of haggard. And you know what's funny? It wasn't Schindler's List or Terms of Endearment or even E.T. that got me weeping.

It was Wall-E.

The movie isn't even very sad. It has it's moments, for sure - but overall it's terribly cute and quite humorous. Still, within the first few minutes in I found myself swiping at my eyes with my hands, and to be honest I haven't been able to get a firm grip on the weepy over the last twenty four hours. My right eye leaked pretty consistently all day long.

I guess that's what happens when you try to shove down your legitimate worry and sadness about what's going on over ten thousand kilometres away with your disintegrating family. I held that shit out at arms length for almost a week. Dangling between my thumb and forefinger I tried to regard everything dispassionately as if it were something that I'd read in the morning newspaper about strangers far away in a strange land.

The truth is, however, the participants in this drama/trauma are people I love - and even though the circumstances don't immediately affect me in my day to day goings on (or so I'd like to think) they affect my core.

So Wall-E caused my pipes to burst.

And I just about blew a gasket or two tonight trying to talk to my family who have had a bit of a chance to let their shit fester and have now either chosen to batter me because they're so pissed off, or completely cut me off because I'm not worth trusting.

I've got NOTHING to do with it all, but it impacts me greatly. In the meantime I'm wondering if this is a view to what my people really think of me or if this is just how they're re-acting when they're in pain: like crazed little rabid raccoons in a trap. I ended two phone conversations tonight with "Ya, okay, whatever. Fuck OFF!"

Valentines Schmalentines

The message on my student's bag makes its annual appearance.



Just for you!

Meanwhile

Back in Canada, my family is imploding. Exploding? Disintegrating.

Valentines Schmalentines, love's not cutting it. For the last ten minutes I've sat here, eyes shifting and shoulders shrugging. My hands are forming signal-words trying to figure out how to express how I feel.

I can't, except to say "FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
fuck!

Seriously.
fuck!

**UPDATE: A day later.....FUCK with capitals and a pile of worry and heavy heart. It's like an earthquake. This situation sucks so heartily,...I don't know what to do with myself.

Out of It

I've never really learned how to use my washing machine here. There's probably a button to push for a delicate cycle, or another that lets super dirty clothes soak for extra long - things like that. But I never learned what they are. I have a second-hand washing machine that replaced my second-hand washing machine that broke a couple years ago. It tends to get the job done, at least inasmuch that when the beeps happen - letting me know that the machine is finished - I find my clothes damp, smelling of detergent, and wrapped in a ball so tight it's like solving a laundry puzzle every time I have to untangle them to hang them on the drying rack.

I usually just turn the thing on, hit the big button that clearly means "play" (indicated by a forward looking arrow slash double-line pause symbol) add some soap, and lower the lid to let the machine do its thang. Today I accidentally touched another button before hitting "play." I now know that there IS a setting for "never drain and wash these clothes forever!" When it finally occurred to me that I hadn't heard the finishing beeps, my clothes had been agitated in the same water for about six and a half hours. Awesome.

The beginnings of a nasty cold have all but laid waste to my natural ability of staying conscious. I was bone achingly fatigued today. Tonight after coming home from work, I was absolutely unable to keep my eyelids open. I crawled into bed for big huge nap and dreamt that I had fallen asleep while teaching my new adult class. My eager and polite students just sat there in silence waiting for me to re-animate. I must have been asleep for awhile, because when I lifted my head off the desk I had to wipe an embarrassing amount of drool off the side of my head with the back of my hand. I then tried to "recover" my lesson by speaking as if I'd totally meant to fall asleep, explaining "so you see, in English - that's called a nap and this is called drool, and what I was just doing is known as snoring. Any questions?"

Foreign Food

I used to get so annoyed with those Jokers on Survivor. They were out, what, thirty nine days on their little island or desert and it would only be a couple days in before they started to fantasize about their favourite foods from back in civilization. Granted, they were pretty much starving on a diet of rice, lentils, bugs and grass or whatever. But, still.

I understand them now. Sometimes a craving will not be satiated, even if you manage to find and consume that thing it is you're jonesing for. There are days I think I might justify killing someone if it meant I could get me some cottage cheese and English muffins. I have no idea why these two things are what I miss most from the giant selection that could be found in a Western grocery store, but crave them I do.

This past week I was inspired to create a meal that I don't really miss at all. I haven't had perogies in probably twenty years and I had, in fact, pretty much forgotten they existed. I got to thinking about them, though, while I was chatting with a friend in Warsaw on Facebook. She likes her perogies filled with fruit and dusted with sugar. I'm not Polish, but still - that sounds blasphemous to me. So I searched for a recipe that would recreate the perogies of my youth served hot and unassuming at little hole-in-the-wall diners in Toronto's Polish-town. This is one of those foods that you can make and enjoy if you're living in Korea because it doesn't require an oven - which most people here don't have.

First, you gots to make the dough. I used a combination of flour, warm water, a tablespoon of oil and teaspoons of salt and baking powder. Simple enough. Don't over-knead. You then let the ball of dough rest in a warm place for half an hour. I then covered it with saran wrap and shoved it in the fridge. My intended half an hour or so nap extended to a five hour sleep and three o'clock in the morning is far too late to make dinner.

The next night I napped for five and a half hours. D'oh!

And, the following night I was dragged to a "hwe-shick" (work party) to welcome the new teacher who officially started on Friday. Bye-bye Amy teacher. And for the record, soju is evil. Pure evil delivered up to restaurants through pipes leading directly from hell. Just so you know.

So Thursday night I finally got to perogie making. You gots to roll in the dough. Ummmm. No. Roll out the dough. I don't own a rolling pin, so a bottle of gin was my flattening tool. I should have used a bottle of vodka for authenticity sake, but I don't have one of those. I don't even have a spacious flat surface, so I divided the dough and rolled it flat on my cutting board.



I've gotten ahead of myself.
Before even making the dough, I cooked up a batch of faux ricotta. I've posted about this before and it's very easy to make. Yummy, too!



Back to the dough, though.
I rhyme.
I used my Korea coffee mug to cut circles.



And then I spooned on some filling.



This was a mixture of mashed potatoes, mock ricotta, crumbled "McLelland seriously strong extra-mature cheddar" (bought at 13$ for 200g at HomePlus, yikes) and an egg yolk. Yum!

I used a fork to seal the edges.



And then dropped these puppies into a large pot of boiling water. They're finished cooking when they start to float.

Meanwhile I fried up some onions and bacon. Really, the bacon is just glorified ham here, but whatever. We must make do. Once the perogies were floating, I dumped them into a strainer, sang them some Jimi Hendrix and threw them in the onion/faux bacon pan.

And this was dinner.



It wasn't an awesome success. The dough should have been thinner. I was hampered by it's refrigerated state and my stupid gin rolling pin. Still, these tasted like perogies, even though the "bacon" and onion made me flash on liver, which grossed me out. These are totally do-able and I recommend giving them a try if you're in Korea and in need of a culinary mix-up. If you venture to make perogies (or pierogi - however you want to spell it) let me know how yours turn out!

Red

Mixed Messages

A little girl.

With a bunny for a hat,



And a dalmation for a coat.
(Menacing purple flowers waiting to pounce.)

--------------------------------------------------------

A clothing store.

Named after a short story by Tolstoy.



In a banana logo.