Food & Living

We just reached the 3 week mark here in Seoul yesterday. Seems like we've been here a week and time is definitely going by pretty quick. Certain milestones include our first load of laundry, hung to dry in our screened-in foyer, and the location of a new vegetarian buffet about a 15 min walk from our house. Very nice to have some veggie options within subway walking distance. This one has somem pretty interesting options, including japchae (stir-fried sweet potato glass noodles with veggies) and dotorimuk (acorn jelly, with the consistency of jello). We've become friends with one of our Korean co-workers who speaks very good English and has been really helpful in taking us around our neighborhood, buying us Asian pears and insisting on giving us bottles and bottles of water for our drinking water supply. At work, people are constantly bringing in snacks and mini bottles of vitamin C drink. It's pretty easy to get sick working with lots of little sick kids and breathing some pretty funky Seoul air, as I found out when I had a nasty fever/achy body that came and went in 24 hours.

We've been mainly doing some food exploration, in combination with setting up the kitchen in our apartment. I cooked a nice Italian meal, which was like a little taste of home (Prego does make a good sauce even if it doesn't pass Marcella Cucina muster). We've also been eating lots of ice cream, mainly from the local convenience store, including the swimmingly good "waffle bean fish" (see earlier post) and loads of green tea ice cream. In fact, we're really expanding our green tea horizons, an easy task when EVERYTHING here has a green tea variety. We've recently bought green tea ice cream, green tea dunkin doughnuts (see pix below), and green tea paper towels. We're building up for green tea corn flakes, which are, in fact, a nice appetizing olive green flavor.















The fabled waffle fish



















A chewy and strange green tea dunkin



















Dunkinz is EVERYWHERE!

































Va bene!



















Jon enjoying some (baskin robbins) green tea ice cream




















This was a kid's art show in the park outside of our apartment complex. I was hoping the stuff would be for sale because our walls are pretty bare...






































Some Seoul Stream Scenes














This pic probably deserves a longer story... the kid in the middle approached us on the street, asked us if we were 'comos' (homos?), if Jon was my 'sexy boyfriend', showed us straight porn on his cel phone, offered to take a picture of us, threatened (jokingly) to throw my camera over the bridge if we didn't speak English with him, refused to let us leave, then asked us to meet him again the next day at the same place. Yeah.



















Me out front of the veggie buffet restaurant (price = $5.00)





































The veggie buffet. Soooo good.



















A pumpkin, rice, and red bean porridge for dessert.