Mushroom Soup

Today I found mushroom soup in the store. This is a big deal, because Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup was at the top of my "American Products" wishlist. However, one of my co-workers told me that a local convenience store had Campbells, and another mentioned, "Don't waste too much money -- they have packages of mushroom soup mix here that are pretty good." So I went to the convenience store armed with my iPod, and played pictionary/charades with the sales clerk. Drawing with my fat finger on an iPod touch is not an exercise in precision, but it's a lot better than nothing!

They did not, apparently, have Campbell's soups. I wandered every aisle before asking for help, and couldn't locate any. But she *did* have the mushroom soup packets! $1.50 apiece, they make about 4 cups of mushroom soup :)  I have no idea how they taste on their own, but I used one tonight to make chicken/mushroom/rice casserole, and it turned out very well :) 

I'm so glad that a) I have an oven and b) the weather has cooled off enough that I can *use* it without dying!

Saturday we're walking to school at 6am to hop on a bus to Haley's soccer tournament. After she plays soccer all day, we're going to hop in Ivy's car (she's driving rather than riding in the bus) and we're driving up to Seoul for the rest of our 3 day weekend :) So I'll be able to pick up my garb etc that is cluttering up some nice person's house and meet the SCA people I've been corresponding with.

Hopefully while we're up there I can find a cell phone company that is used to dealing with foreigners so I can arrange to get an iPhone 5 when they come out!

Meanwhile, I have to do this weekend's lesson planning tonight and tomorrow, since I won't be around to do it this weekend...

Holy expensive soccer gear, Batman!

Haley will be going to play in a soccer tournament this weekend, so it was immediately necessary to purchase soccer gear for her. Although we were told that this particular event the kids would not be wearing cleats (artificial turf), she will probably need them for the next game. And no shinguards = no game for Haley, so off we went to purchase a soccer kit. Any US soccer fans out there are smiling and nodding at this point, but the rest of you may be confused. Every fall in the US marks a nice sale in the sporting goods stores: for $30 - $40 you get a package deal on soccer cleats, shin guards, and a ball. Not super high quality, but the kids outgrow the cleats *long* before they wear out anyhow...

Fast forward to Korea... No soccer kits. You have to buy everything separately. The cleats look the same, but the shinguards are these little plastic things you shove down your socks. No elastic, no ankle protection, and they only cover about half of a tall kid's shin... We headed down to eMart to check out the soccer gear there. The shinguards were the same dinky little things, but at least they had cleats in her size (9 - Mens!) The cheapest pair of cleats? $59 (this is the *sale* price!). So I order some american-style shinguards online. Together with a soccer ball, they cost $24. They came in two colors, black and white. My school secretary was helping me order, and she was very surprised when I ordered the black ones. "But Haley is girl!" "Yes, but she's playing *soccer*! White gets too dirty and ugly. Black is better. Also, they will match her shoes." This last argument was probably the most potent for her... Though she probably thinks we're crazy for buying black shoes for a girl...

Hooligan

In case you were wondering, this is why I can't keep my floors clean...

Seriously, I'm having trouble finding a kind of kitty litter that I like. There are really only 3 choices. There's clumping clay litter, absorbant crystals, and (my vet ordered this just for me) *flushable* clumping clay litter, made of finer particles. I like it the best out of all three by far. Unfortunately, so does Hooligan...

Culture Shock

Umm, yummy pizza with cheezy bites :) Hey, wait a minute... This tastes like... You mean that orange stuff isn't cheese... it's sweet potato?!?! AAAUUUGGGHHHH!*

*No, no I'm not fond of sweet potato. However, even Haley, who is, did not care for the cheezy sweet potato bites :p

Momentous Weekend

On Thursday my new (to me!) oven was delivered :) Then the lady from the gas company arrived to hook it up on Saturday. Alas, they apparently don't have y connectors here, so I can't have my new stove/oven and my old range top hooked up to the gas at the same time :p So the gas lady cut off the old range top's gas line and then attached the hose for my stove/oven. It's a pretty nice stove. 4 burners, a (tiny!) oven and even a broiler. It looks like I can select whether I want the flame above or below the food in the broiler. Neat!

Saturday afternoon we walked to the farmer's market. I got my Korean friend, Hye Sun, to tell me the words, and then I walked down the street asking people "farmer's market?" in an inquisitive tone of voice and getting them to point me in the right direction. Finally we found it :) It was pretty neat :) It was a permanent structure so that the merchants don't have to worry about rain, and many of them had a permanent storage structure/shop, but most of them had their goods spread out in front. As we walked in, we could see a bunch of American products in the store to our left. It turned out to be a kind of kitchen store, which is exactly what the owners of a new oven need! Muffin tins, pot holders, baking dishes, parchment paper, a rolling pin... It's astonishing how much kitchen stuff we needed! Our best find was a pile of "handkerchiefs" -- we bought 14 of them for $7 and now we have cloth napkins!!!! This has really been bugging me, so it might be second only to our new oven as my favorite part of this weekend :) $160 later, we asked the shopkeepers if we could leave our two giant bags of stuff there while we browsed the rest of the market! 

We passed a fruit vender, and got a bag of nectarines for $5, and then picked up some mushrooms for $2 :) I expressed interest in a weird product, and ended up inadvertently spending $3 on something I'm almost positive I'm not going to eat. And I still have no idea what it's called! Anyhow, the market was fun, although it ended up being very expensive... 

Then back home to drop off our stuff and eat a quick (and very late) lunch. Then on to Emart. My first stop was to try to get my Emart card validated -- I'd gotten one last time but didn't have time to stop by the service desk and get the paperwork filled out. So I walked up to the service desk, only to be told by the nice lady that she was signing people up for credit cards, and the service desk was over there. Oops. So I went to the service desk and got my paperwork filled out. Koreans have very small signatures, so it's hard to fit an American signature into the box. I signed it 4 or 5 times, with no idea what I was promising. I guess they'll be by to pick up Haley any day now... Then, as I was walking back into the main part of the store, I paused by the credit card desk... You see, I have no use for a Korean credit card, EXCEPT Costco here ONLY accepts cash or credit cards. Nobody here uses checks, and Costco doesn't accept debit cards :p And shopping with cash isn't much fun because I have to keep up a running total to make sure I don't get to the register with too much stuff :p So I decided to sign up for a credit card too! It's supposed to arrive to Tuesday -- we'll see how that goes. I got a free polka dot tote bag for signing up with the credit card company; Haley immediately claimed it. I also got a free gift with the Emart card. I'm pretty sure it's dish soap; I guess I'll find out when I try to use it *grin*

Then we got to try to figure out clay. I know that in the US we have several kinds of clay. The two big contenders are Playdoh and clay. Haley has to make a model of the Earth (crust, mantle, core, etc) and Playdoh won't be good cause it doesn't really harden up properly. So we got some help and hopefully what we picked will work. Then on the the kitchen section where we picked up a cookie sheet and a tiny pizza pan. Finally downstairs to the grocery section. Apparently they don't have pancake syrup anymore (they did last month) which was a bit of a blow, since we just bought a *huge* bag of pancake mix at Costco :p Also, they have a zillion kinds of flour and I'm having a hard time telling them apart. Who knew that cookies required a different kind of flour than noodles? Stranger yet, it's the noodle flour that has "All Purpose" on it in English, though I am definitely taking that with a grain of salt. I bought both just in case! Speaking of salt, all the salt here seems to be sea salt. It's not bad, just different.

Finally, we took a taxi back home. Since it was already 8:30 and we were both pretty tired, my plans of making a potpie out of the leftover chicken stew crashed and burned into the reality of a "forage for yourself" night.

Sunday dawned. I'm sure it did, but I didn't see it until much later, since I had stayed up until 3 researching pie crust on the internet. You see, my favorite pie crust recipe requires shortening. Shortening may or may not exist here, but I haven't seen it. So I needed to figure out how to make a pure butter pie crust. I actually found a great recipe online, called The Food Lab: The Science of Pie Dough. Yeah, it turns out to be written by one of the guys who helped write my awesome cookbook that's got all the whys and hows and "what happens if you try it this way"s of cooking :) So that's the pie crust I ended up making today. It turned out pretty well, I think. Flakier than my usual pie crust for sure. I think it was maybe a little overdone, since I like my crust a little moister... I think I need to calibrate my oven... The only number on the dial that's still legible is 200˚ C. Which is great, since that's the temp at which I wanted to bake my pie crust. However, it didn't get done and didn't get done so I ended up just turning it up a bit. I'm not sure how much each of the rest of the tick marks is worth, so I'm not sure what temp I ended up at. Maybe a thermometer should be my next purchase.

I tried going to the health food store, while I was chilling my pie crust dough between making it and baking it. However, the store owner didn't have any of the things I was looking for. No coconut oil, no flax seeds, no Dr. Bronner's soap, no henna. She sent me to a cosmetics store on the next block that very definitely didn't have any of that eco-friendly stuff :( I'm a bit worried about that, because there's no way my flax seeds will last me a whole year, and my hair is desperately in need of a touch-up henna job :p As a country mouse, I tend to think that cities will have lots of big stores. It seems that (in Busan, at least) they just have a ton of small stores, so that each neighborhood is like a small town. So the quest for a hippie store continues...

Anyhow, after all that business about buying the clay, Mom mentioned on Skype that I could just mix salt and flour and water to make baker's clay. Duh! A good thing too, as we didn't buy nearly enough of the official stuff. Luckily I had a big bag of flour. I'm not sure what kind, though Hye Sun says it's not the regular flour I thought it was. It makes great dough though:) Alas, we ran out of salt (yes, that bag I *just* bought!) and when Haley ran downstairs with our empty bag of sea salt, the basement claimed not to have any. So we'll have to buy more salt to make more dough tomorrow. Yes, a half-sphere that is 20 cm across uses a *lot* of dough!

Oven & Power Outage

Yay, we got our oven! Today after school the delivery guys got the extra stove+oven from the basement of the school and brought it to my apartment. Yay, now I have an oven. Hopefully the gas company can send someone over tomorrow so I can have a *working* oven *grin*. Anyhow, when we got to my place, the power was out. I wasn't able to find out why until the power came back on so I could look it up on the internet. I did bump into one of my students outside (woohoo, someone who speaks English!!!) and he told me that he was on the phone and he had friends in Seoul who were also without power. I couldn't imagine what could cause the power to go out across a whole country! Part of the problem is that I forget that Korea is more the size of Kentucky or Indiana, and states in the US have been known to have a statewide power outage.

Apparently, several Korean power plants thought the hot summer weather was over, so they shut down for some maintenance before needing to supply power for winter weather. Unfortunately, the temps came back up; it was 85˚ (30˚ C) all night in my apartment, and it got hotter during the day. So lots of air conditioners got used and the national power level dropped so low they had to cut off power to certain areas. Now it's back up, but there's no guarantee the power will stay on -- they might have to cut it off again to avoid a national shutdown.

Happily our stove is gas, so we'd be able to cook. Unfortunately, our fridge won't do so well. Alas, I don't have large quantities of ice, nor do I know where to buy ice locally. So for the sake of my groceries (and my internet connection) I hope the power stays on :)

Praying Mantis

Today we found a praying mantis hanging onto the bars outside Haley's window. I guess he must have climbed up. Haley didn't want him hanging out outside her window all night, so I caught him to release him back down on the ground. Well, that was the plan! I caught him, but underestimated how amazingly fast praying mantises can sprint! So he got away, and crawled under Haley's bed. Oh yeah. If outside her window is bad, releasing him under her bed earns me "Worst Mom of the Year Award". So I picked up her mattress and eventually found and caught him. This time I covered up the glass with a piece of paper since he can climb the unclimbable! We took a photo and a movie, so you could see him too, and then released him downstairs.

Our latest

Yesterday was Meet the Teacher Night at Busan Foreign School. We got the option to leave early (as soon as the kids left) and go freshen up etc for our long night. Since Haley had a bunch of homework, we just stuck around. I got caught up on scanning class notes to post on my web page, and Haley worked on her homework. We did walk home briefly, to eat dinner and snag Haley's laptop.

Dinner was Chamchi Kimbap -- tuna kimbap, which is a lot like a sushi roll with veggies and canned tuna. Then as we left the kimbap restaurant carrying our rolls, there was a big oven on a truck with meat on spits rotating. I asked (using mime and sound effects) and the man told me it was pork. So I bought $10 worth, and he sliced it for me into a container. We ate our kimbap and dipped the pork into the sauce it came with. Very good, if a bit fatty. I would definitely buy it again though :)

Then we came back to school for Meet the Teacher Night. The parents followed their kids' schedules, except we shortened all the periods to 10 minutes. Haley hid in the back of Ivy's room and I did my roaming teacher thing. Luckily, the order in which we ended up doing the 2 days worth of classes meant I only had to move rooms once. It was pretty funny though, since several parents came to 2 or more presentations. Some of them have more than one kid in my classes, and a few kids are taking 2 math classes at the same time. I didn't really do anything different, so they got the same speil twice.

After the big meeting in the cafeteria, we were able to leave at 9pm. Bleah. Haley walked home with Ivy and Zoey and went to bed. (It's really cool having a keypad to open our door -- it totally eliminates the worry about your kid losing the key.) Meanwhile, I caught a cab with another teacher and rode down to Emart. I bought a toothbrush holder and a vacuum.

No, I have no idea why Haley has two toothbrushes...

Brooms here are weird; most of them have a very short, 2 foot handle. They are used one handed, and the sweeper bends over at the waist to sweep. They do have long-handled brooms, for outside use. I bought one, not knowing what it was. However, the bristles are stiff plastic, good for sweeping stubborn twigs but not so great for catching grit and dust. Watching the fluffballs wafting away from the broom was so disheartening that we didn't want to sweep. Our floor got pretty disgusting, so I talked to some other people and found out how they cleaned. Most of them said that they bought one of the little vacuums that are sold in Emart. They're very, very lightweight upright vacuums intended for use on hardwood floors (because nobody here has carpet).

Our new vacuum is pretty neat. It's a cordless vacuum with a charging station. Not having to worry about a cord is very liberating! I'm not really worried about the battery life; I just vacuumed this morning and it took less than half an hour. The floor part has a rolling beater, the dust goes into a cup that I empty into the trash (not a bag that I have to replace), and the middle of the vacuum comes off and is a little hand-vac dust buster thing, to get in crevices and vacuum the couch. This is going to make it much easier to keep our apartment clean. Now I just have to find a place to store all of my groceries and get my trash and recycling figured out, and we'll have it made :)

Guess What?!

In Korea you can't really do anything until you have your alien resident card (like a green card in the US). You can't sign any sort of contract, so there's no way to get a cell phone or open a bank account or get internet in your home. We applied for our alien cards just a few days after we got here, but they didn't get here until yesterday. After school I helped a few students who had math questions and then Haley and I hiked over to the nearest branch of the expat bank. Except, it turns out that that "branch" is a couple of ATM machines (though they're fancier here and do more things). The gentleman in the business next door told us about another branch with real people in it, about 10 minutes away. Except it was already 3:50 on a Friday afternoon and banks close here at 4! Well, we walked very, very quickly, and made it to the bank just as they were closing. They graciously let me in and helped me open an account. Yay! So now I have a purple debit card :) It will be nice to have an account that is in the same currency that I am spending; it gets hard to keep track of my expenses otherwise. Hopefully my school will be able to direct deposit my paycheck -- that would make things very simple :)

Anyhow, we then ambled back to school and asked Miss Jin (one of the secretaries) to help me set up internet at home. She was able to find me a good deal *and* to set up an appointment for Saturday! So the internet guy just came and we are online!!! I am posting this from my home!!! I brought my Airport Express router with me, so both Haley and I are wirelessly on the internet right now :) :) :)

Anyhow, this is excellent because I will be able to Skype people in the morning before school, and not be doing it during my prep periods when I'm too busy to hold a good conversation :p So feel free to give me a call around 3pm Pacific time :)

My next thing will be to get a cell phone. I'm holding out for an iPhone for my permanent cell phone, but I figure I can get a cheap flip phone and give it to Haley when I get my iPhone :)