Archive for the 'Fun things' Category

May

Chon Dak

On Saturday, I went to Samson Dong for lunch. One of my favorite places to go is Chon Dak. I love their spicy chicken dish. It’s chicken, small rice cakes and vegetables in a spicy sauce. They top it with cheese, a hard boiled quail egg and a few shrimp.

They start off by giving you some pickled radishes and a cabbage salad. The dressing somewhat resembles French, but I highly doubt it is. The chicken comes with a bowl of rice.

One of the ladies who works in the kitchen speaks a little bit of English so we usually have a short chat. Between her limited English and my limited Korean, we get by ok.

Enjoy! Just don’t drool on your keyboard.

Outside of the building

Close up of the sign

Salad and radishes

The whole meal

Chicken close up

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Fun things,Home Life,Korea,Off time,Pictures and have No Comments

May

From the Heart

This is a picture of the note on the balloon Julie gave me for Teacher’s Day. She’s a genuinely nice girl. I’m glad I’m teaching D4. I was dreading it based on past experience with some of the students in that class. But they’ve matured a lot in the last year or so.

From Julie

posted by Kathryn in Celebrations,Fun things,Holidays,Korea,Little Campus,Students,Teaching and have No Comments

May

9 Course Chinese Meal…

… but only 8 pictures. In my excitement, I forgot to take a picture of one of the courses.

Backstory: There’s a little Chinese restaurant right up the street from where I live and work. It’s owned by a very nice Chinese couple. Prices are very reasonable and the food is pretty good. You can get an 8 course meal for 15,000 Won per person. I’ve never seen so much food in my life. We actually got a 9th course. The four of us greatly enjoyed ourselves.

Pictures of the food. I don’t even remember what was in the dishes. I was too busy eating, and eating and eating.

posted by Kathryn in Food and Drink,Fun things,Home Life,Off time,Pictures and have No Comments

Feb

Kitten!

I have an adorable ball of fuzz. I’m so excited. It’s only in the last couple weeks I’ve felt like I’ve completed the grieving process with Sparkler. I loved her so much. But, I knew I didn’t want another guinea pig. I knew I wanted a cat. Now, you have to understand, Korea is not a cat country. No serious. It’s really not. I went to a dozen places before I found one with a cat for sale. And dear lord was she expensive. But she was totally worth every won I spent. She’s been in my life less than 12 hours and I can’t imagine living without her.

Right now, she’s curled up in (on?) one of my shoes. Once I coaxed her out from under the bed, she started to play. She has one of those mice on an elastic string tied to a stick. She loves it. She was going crazy. She’s purrs like no cat I’ve ever heard before.

I’m still working on the name thing. I know her Korean name will either be 눈(noon) which means snow (and eye) or 구름(goorum) which means cloud. I’m sort of leaning toward 눈. I’m just not sure what English name to give her. I’ll take suggestions.

So here are some pics of my new baby.

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Home Life,Just Wow,Off time,Pictures and have No Comments

Feb

Save the Words

see more puppies

I came across “Save the Words” a few days ago (warning, obnoxious website). The premise is that words that are less common in every day language will be removed from dictionaries. The people who made this site want to save those words from exclusion. I doubt the site would do much to save some of these words. However, it could serve as an interesting teaching tool for advanced students. Many of the words can be analyzed to find their meaning from the word roots. This is something I’ve worked on a bit with some of my more advanced students.

Personally, I adoped “nidifice” (noun: a nest)

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Language,Teaching Resources,Web sites,Writing and have No Comments

Jan

Moving

Soon my blog will be moving. I’ve bought a domain name and hosting. Yay for entering the real world.

I have a few things to do before I make the switch over. Hopefully it’ll be no later than this weekend.

Everyone cross their fingers. We’ll see how I do. If it’s too confusing, I can always come home to good ole wordpress.com.

You’ll be able to find me at http://esladventures.net/

Cheers!

posted by Kathryn in Fun things,Just Wow,Moving,Off time and have No Comments

Jan

The 12 Days of Christmas — Korean Style

On Christmas Eve, I took my turn in the cycle of teaching Ivy. Not wanting to do a boring discussion class (oh how I hate trying to get teenagers to talk), I decided to turn them loose on The 12 Days of Christmas lyrics. We listened to the song a couple of times and I told them they could work in pairs or small groups to come up with their own lyrics. The catch was the things they used as gifts had to be tied to Korea in some way. Here’s what we came up with in the end.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a big pot of spicy kimchi.
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me, two shots of soju.
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me, three orange restaurants.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, four Taekwondo belts.
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, five hand phones.
On the six day of Christmas my true love gave to me, six lovely hanboks.
On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me, seven rolls of kimbap.
On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, eight bags of ramyan.
On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, nine taxi drivers.
On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, ten chewy rice cakes.
On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me, eleven English hagwons.
On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, twelve bowls of rice.

I think it’s really cute. True, some of the things aren’t unique to Korea, but they are popular here. Try to find anyone over the age of 7 without a hand phone (aka “cell phone” to you westerners). I’ve seen quite a few elderly men and women with them. And the taxi drivers? Well, that was my contribution. Every time I get into a taxi I say a quick prayer to get out in one piece.