Thanksgiving Dinner

We had a wonderful time celebrating Thanksgiving and having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with several of our friends tonight!!  As we were preparing by cleaning and setting up the food, we were quite concerned about whether or not our house would be big enough or if we would have enough food.  Fortunately, everything seemed to work out perfectly!  The dinner we ordered from a foreign market in Seoul came with a turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, green beans, cranberry sauce, and cheesecake (we opted for that over the pumpkin pie).  We also had rolls and I baked peanut butter cream cheese brownies and apple pie bars for some extra dessert.  Our friends brought drinks, sweet potato pie and a lot of fried chicken.  We had Americans and Koreans, adults and kids, and way more than enough food!  It was just like a real Thanksgiving with some great friends!!  Everything in our meal came precooked so we just used our oven, microwave, and crockpot to reheat everything back up.  We were worried at first when we saw the small size of the turkey but once Eric started carving it we realized we had A LOT of turkey meat.  Everything was delicious and the company was great too.  We are so thankful we had the opportunity to celebrate the holiday with some of our friends and continue to add to our memories of our time here!

 Our prepackaged dinner in a box

 It only took him over an hour to carve that little bird.  He said no bone would be uncarved and he was right!!

Our dinner table

Dessert: the most important part of any holiday dinner

Happy Thanksgiving!!

It’s America’s Thanksgiving Day and for the second year in a row we are spending it in Korea (working!) Although we are very sad to miss celebrating (and eating) with our families, we are very thankful we have the chance to be in Korea today.   The opportunity we have had to spend two years in Korea together has been priceless and something we would never change for anything.  We have learned so much, experienced so much, and grown so much and for that we are beyond thankful for the time we have spent here, not just on Thanksgiving, but forever.  

It’s not a white Thanksgiving here but we have been getting snow flurries off and on the past couple of days.  Yesterday it snowed quite hard but only for a short time so it didn’t stick long.  It is definitely cold enough now though.  I think my eyeballs froze on the way to and from work today…

We will officially celebrate American Thanksgiving this weekend when we have several friends come over to our house to eat a lot of food.  We have ordered a turkey dinner that comes with all of the essentials and our friends will be bringing things to share as well.  I'm also going to bake some extra desserts because it is very, very important we don't run out of dessert!  When we decided we wanted to have a real Thanksgiving dinner this year we knew we would need to invite everyone we knew in order to not be eating leftovers for the next three months.  However, once we started inviting people and counted how many were coming, we realized our small our house is and that a 12 pound turkey may not go quite that far…  So now all we can do is hope we can squeeze everyone in our little home, they don’t mind sitting on the floor, and there is enough food to feed us all!  One of my friends told me not to worry because it will be just like a regular Thanksgiving when the whole family is together.  Hopefully she’s right!  As our season in Korea is going to quickly come to an end in only three months, we are very thankful we have the chance to celebrate a special day with some of the wonderful people we have met during our time here.

We hope all of our family and friends have a wonderful Thanksgiving spending time with each other, remembering to be thankful for each day we can spend together!!  We miss you all!

Yongsan Garrison and Seoul Lantern Festival

This weekend was a busier one!  On Saturday morning one of my former kindergarten students stopped by our house because his mom had prepared some Korean meat, bulgogi and daeji kalbi, to give us along with some rice and fruit.  It is so nice that they still think about us and I'm really looking forward to meeting them for dinner another time or two before we leave.

I also met a friend for lunch on Saturday at the U.S. Army Yongsan Garrison base.  Eric and I have always wanted to go on the base to see what's it like but, of course, you have to have someone with those privileges sign you in as a guest.  A friend I met through some other friends a couple months ago works on the base so she and her family took me to a restaurant on the base.  I was excited to eat American food for American prices!  The base was really interesting to see also.  It's so huge that I only saw a very small part of it driving around with them.  There's no skyscrapers or high rise apartment buildings and it's so quiet.  The schools are huge as the elementary school has 1100 students.  There's very little traffic and few pedestrians.  It was fun to see!  I wish I could have gone to the commissary too but no guests are allowed in there...

Saturday evening Eric and I met up near the Seoul City Hall area to go to the Seoul Lantern Festival.  I went to this same festival last year with a friend.  It's a really nice festival with lanterns along Cheonggycheon, a stream that runs through the middle of the city.  I think almost all ten million Seoul residents were there walking along the stream, which is below the main street, so we decided to walk above it and look down.  This way we could take much better pictures and take our time with our space.  We had some dalkgalbi (spicy chicken and vegetables) for dinner which was very yummy.

On Sunday I had to spend part of the day completing the last big assignment I have to do for my online graduate class and for dinner Eric BBQ'd some of that meat we were given.  It was very good!!  The weather is getting cold but not unbearable yet.  It gets below freezing at night and in the morning but our house is still comfortable, though Eric did pull the space heater out of the dusty corner last weekend.  But we've only used it for ourselves once or twice and Friday night I used to help dry the clothes that still weren't dry after 24 hours.  Soon we will be taking a Costco bag full of wet clothes to the laundromat dryer every weekend since the clothes just won't dry in our house with the windows closed.

A nice view from our roof while BBQ-ing tonight

SAT Day

Thursday was the day all of the high school seniors in Korea took the college entrance exam, what they call the CSAT.  It is the equivalent of the SAT test in America except much longer, much more difficult and carries much, much more weight.  It is only offered one time a year so when that day comes its a big deal.  We didn't know anything about it last year but since I work at a public school this year I learned a few things.  First of all, I got to sleep in an extra hour (to make up for missing that extra hour everyone back home got with daylight savings time last weekend) because all government offices and organizations cannot start work until 10:00.  This is to prevent too many traffic jams that prevent students from getting to their test site on time.  Extra buses and subways run and the police department has a hotline students can call if they are desperate for a quick ride (not sure how quick it really is since no one pulls over for police cars anyway).   Also, no planes took off or landed anywhere in Korea from 1:00 to 1:40 because that was when the listening part of the English section took place and there were no military drills during the entire testing time.

Many believe this is the biggest day of a person's life.  In Korea there are three universities that are the best.  By best I mean companies like Samsung, Hyundai and Daewoo (everyone's dream job) only hire people from these universities.  They are known as the SKY schools: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University.  In order to have any kind of chance of getting into one of these schools you have to score very, very high on the CSAT.  The pressure to do well and get into one of these schools is enormous.  And when some students simply can't live up to the expectations or succumb to the pressure it proves disastrous.  Suicide is the leading cause of death in people between the ages of 15-24 in Korea.  For those who do get into a SKY school and land a job with a company like Samsung or Hyundai, they can expect to make very good money as they work eighty to a hundred hour weeks.  The statistics don't change much after age 24, unfortunately.

Here's a story Eric heard from a parent he tutors for about the CSAT:  Apparently there was a student who was in a car accident on the way to the testing site.  Somehow his mom convinced someone in charge to let him take the test at the same time as the rest of the country while in the hospital.  I don't know if this shows their dedication to education or just the insanity of the pressure and expectations from society.

If only there could be a nice balance between the extreme dedication of Korean culture to education and the seemingly zero stress / laid back-ness of American education...

Plane Tickets are Booked!

Now that November is upon us, it means that we only have four short months left in Korea before the contracts with our schools will end and we will be headed back home.   Before we get there though, we have decided to end the two years we spent in Asia by taking a "super vacation" (at least that's what we have decided to call it).  We have been scouting out flights for a little bit now and officially made the move this weekend and booked our plane tickets.  It's still hard to believe the time is close enough now for us to do that and that the tickets are actually booked and paid for.  So here are the destinations of our super vacation: 
March 1st we will leave Korea and fly to Koh Samui, Thailand to spend a week at a resort.
March 8th we will fly from Koh Samui to Siem Reap, Cambodia to explore Angkor Wat and the temples.
Around March 11th or 12th we will take a bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, Cambodia where we may spend a night or two to see the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge regime. 
After spending a day in Phnom Penh (or not, we may just decide to pass through on the bus the same day) we will take the bus across the border into Vietnam and spend a couple of days in Ho Chi Minh City.
On March 16th we fly from Ho Chi Minh to Portland where we will arrive that afternoon and officially be home.

There's actually quite a few thoughts and emotions that come along with booking the tickets and realizing just how close it actually is!  On the one hand we are very excited to be going home to be closer to family and friends and starting that next chapter in our lives with careers and getting ourselves established and such.  But at the same time it won't be easy to leave Korea.  We've met a lot of great people and have made countless memories during our time here and it will be sad to see it come to an end.  Fortunately, the memories (and thousands of pictures!) will go with us into our next journey.