Do you find rubber penguins that light up when you squeeze them. They’re made to go on your cell phone. But mine is going to sit on my desk at work.
The pink one is mine, and the blue one is a gift for my Linux tutor. I mean, what else does the good Linux geek need?
Dear God… Costco is a beautiful place. I don’t know what the best part was. The pizza with enough cheese on it for two additional slices or the bounty of delicious western food.
I did well. I made it out spending only 65 dollars. I bought a big block of cheese, a large package of chicken breasts, a big box of Honey Nut Cheerios, a big box of Nutri-Grain bars, some Jello and a case of Eggo Waffles that I split with another couple.
I realize I could have gotten the cheese and the chicken here in Ulsan. But, it was a much better deal to get it at Costco. Chicken here is about 5 dollars for a half kilogram package. The package I bought in Costco was 10 dollars and weighed 1.5 kilograms. Same deal with the cheese.
I had a really good time. It was a long day, but definitely worth it.
Remember that old Muppet’s skit, “Pigs in Space“? Well, apparently there will soon be kimchi in space. A South Korean astronaut will be staying aboard the International Space Station sometime in the coming months. To help combat homesickness, guest astronauts are allowed to bring foods from their home country. So…
Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its pungency.
Read the full articles at the New York Times.
Seollal is the Korean Lunar New Year. I love Korean New Year. We get New Years Day plus the day before and the day after off. And the way it works out, with New Years being on a Thursday, means we have a five day holiday.
But now some information about Seollal. It’s the celebration of the lunar new year. Unlike in China, Seollal is pretty low key. People travel home to be with their families. Most of my students, when asked what they were doing for the holiday, said they were going to their grandparents’ house. They also mentioned that grandma would be cooking good food. That I can believe.
Many Korean families play Yut (pronounced yoot) during New Years. I’ve never seen a set, but I’d like to find one.
We had our first (and probably only) snow fall of the year the other day. The kids found it quite amusing. We don’t get much snow here in the southern part of South Korea. It’s a bit strange going through a winter without snow. The last time that happened I was a grad student in Austin, Texas (although we did have our share of ice storms).
Just for fun, I captured a few pictures of the “snow” (and I use the term loosely) from my apartment balcony.
As you can see, it didn’t stick to the ground at all and only a little to the roof.
I had written a few weeks ago that I was having issues with the service I chose to host my photos. I never managed to find a way to get in touch with the folks and the forums were less than helpful. I can’t complain too much because I had a free account. So I found a new service. I don’t even remember what I was reading, but I came across webshots.com. The free account isn’t a bad deal. You get 1000 photos initially and then an additional 100 photos per month of storage space.
Uploading isn’t too bad on Windows. Supposedly there’s a desktop program you can download. Doesn’t do me much good with my main box being booted into Linux 99.9% of the time. The web uploader crashed Firefox in Linux reliably, but it worked fine on Windows XP.
To get my photos uploaded without going back to Windows on my main box, I learned how to mount my XP’s computer’s hard drive as a network share. I backed up all of my photos to my XP box (a good idea any way) and used the web uploader from there.
To make a long story short, all my photos are now posted. Yes, all 706 of them. They can be found here.
Happy Pepero Day to all!
Pepero Day is celebrated here in South Korea by giving people “Peperos”. They are long skinny cookies sticks dipped in chocolate. Very yummy! If you’re a teacher, you usually end up with tons of them.
The legend is that Pepero Day started in Busan. A bunch of girls started exchanging the snack and wishing each other that they would become as tall and thin as a Pepero. Nice legend. But more likely it was started by the folks at Lotte who make Peperos. It’s a true Korean “Hallmark” holiday.
Pepero Day is always celebrated on November 11th. Why that day? When you write the date at 11/11, it looks like four Peperos standing side by side.
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