"And that's why you don't ever trust red peppers."
Oh, hello from Korea! Sorry, that's actually the punchline to my story … so here goes: just yesterday (Saturday) I decided to do make it a productive day and do run some errands -- I finished writing a letter, I got my hair cut (which was pretty sweet … and now I look ballin' … haha), I restocked on vegetables and I used up all the vegetables that I bought last time in a soup. I described how when I got the vegetables the vendor was really nice, and she gave me a bunch of extra things, and that included about 8 or 9 smaller green and red peppers. Because I'm not a spicy/hot food kind of guy, I just left them in the fridge up until earlier this week. On Tuesday or Wednesday I made some food, and I cautiously cut up, tested for spiciness and used 2 of the green peppers in one dish I made. That left me with 7 more peppers yesterday. This time around I tried the same approach … I cut up one of the red peppers and tried a piece or two, and at first it was fine, so I ended up dicing the remaining 6. I even thought to myself, "I think that the seeds are the worst part … so I better take them out." You see, I don't cook with such things, but I was pretty sure I remembered that from somewhere before. So before the dicing, I carefully sliced open each pepper and used my thumbs to push out all the seeds and the core from each pepper. During this part of the cooking, I had just been cutting up vegetables, and I realized that rather than a vegetable stir fry, I'd be better off trying a soup, so I put my cutting on pause and made a quick trip to the store to secure a chicken (yes, that's right, I used a whole chicken in my soup), but as I walked home with my grocery store trophies (I also bought some BBQ-esk sauce to try out and some milk), I noticed something peculiar … my lips were kind of on fire. "Huh," I thought to myself, "maybe those peppers are a little spicier than I thought." I arrived at home, put the chicken and some water and seasoning in the pot, and sat down at my desk to wait for the water to come to a boil. And that's when it hit me -- my hands were on fire. The pads of all my fingers and even the back sides of both of my thumbs felt like I had dipped them in oil and struck a match. It was ridiculous. And annoying. And painful. And every time I had to go back and stir the soup, the steam only served to aggravate the pain. Basically, each time I returned to kitchen, the heat from cooking was saying, "Hey Ben, here's some salt in your wound." haha. My only consolation came from going to the bathroom, filling up the sink and just letting my hands soak. It took about 2.5 hours for the burning to go away; lesson learned. And that's why you don't ever trust red peppers.
That was part of my excitement yesterday. Granted, the day began really well -- I had such motivation to be productive -- but that burning juice incident really put the kabosh on my desires to do anything. On the upside, the soup turned out pretty well, and that makes the 2nd successful batch to be frozen. Yes! Ok, I just remembered this: sorry for that uber-long message last time; I write my messages from Mac when I'm at home, and then I copy/paste the message into an email. Unfortunately, as you might have guessed, I made a mistake with the copy/pasting, and I didn't realize until after I clicked send. I'll do better henceforth.
Back on the topic of food: last Sunday I ended up going with a group of teachers and one teacher's two daughters to a great restaurant about 30 minutes north of here. We had a BBQ duck meal, which was very good. That was the first time I'd ever really eaten duck, and I was pleasantly surprised. I'm a pretty big fan of chicken, so I figured it's be alright, and the meat had been marinated and cooked very well, and after everything was set, we basically had platters of meat and a bunch of side things to eat with it. I would take a leaf, put on some duck, add a slice of fresh garlic, pour in a little sauce, wrap it all up and "mmmmm, delicious." You get the drift. Of all the things we could add to the meat, one "condiment" towered over the others in awesomeness -- some sort of fermented garlic sauce. Apparently the garlic sits for a year before it can be used, and with that result, I can understand why. A few people over the years have commented on how much garlic I use when cooking (usually because they think I use too much … what a silly assumption), so as you can imagine, that sauce was just delightful. I do regret now not asking if I could buy a bottle to take home because according to the Korean teachers there, that's not a usual thing to find -- it must have been some house specialty, but I do wish I could put it on most things that I eat. Mmm. Hopefully we go back there again soon. haha. We finished the meal with rice dish called "Jook," and the flavor was something that I couldn't really pin down. Dianne and Sunny described it with a Korean word that they said doesn't have an English equivalent. And I believe it. I don't remember the flavor right now, but it wasn't what I was hoping. At this point in the meal, something became more apparent than it has been before -- I do miss dessert after a good meal like that. Having a sweet dish after a meal apparently doesn't really happen here, thus in the case of jook, I had been hoping for a sweet rice dish to follow up the duck, so I was a little disappointed after that first bite of not-so-sweet food. Meh, that's how it goes.
Another food thing: pizza! This has been a very comfortable/pleasant aspect of living here, and I'm very glad for it. I just did a quick search of previous messages, and I didn't find anything … so hopefully this is new for most of you. Pizza here is really good by my standards. So far I've had it from two different shops with one being known for a higher quality product than the other, although it's from the lower quality (and cost) joint that I've had the most so far. For the past few weeks now I've been having "Pizza Sunday" (which happens just before Mondu Monday … which has been a great way to start each week), so after I finish all of my things, I'll go order a pizza from "Nan Ta 500" where the cheapest pizza is ₩5000 or about $5. I feel that it's pretty comparable to Papa John's pizza back home, and you know I'm a sucker for that stuff. This pizza, though, uses a different dough than what we have back home. I think it tastes a little sweeter, although I'm not exactly sure. So far, my pizza experience hasn't been too much different than back home, except for this: the use of sweet potato on/in the pizza. Sometimes, just inside the ring of the crust, one can find a smaller orange ring … which is sweet potato. And there's even another pizza that has sweet potato stuffed into the crust. Oooh … that one is good. I bought it expecting there to be cheese in the crust because that's what the picture looked like, but nope, it was definitely sweet potato. So … for those of you back home, mash up some sweet potato and add it to your pizza next time … you won't be disappointed … unless you don't prepare it well … but that's your own fault. haha. Speaking of this interesting topping on pizza reminded me of another interesting thing I ran across: at the grocery store one day, I got to sample a cake with some things on top. Can you guess what those things included? I'll give you a hint … one I don't actually remember (so we'll just skip that one … I forgot it because it was a less-unusual-to-me topping), the second is orange and grows in patches and the third is green and grows in pods. Yep, that's right, pumpkin and peas … and … something … else. The cake was really light like an angel food cake, and on the top, baked into it a little bit, were a couple slices of pumpkin and some peas. After discovering this, Dianne mentioned that pumpkin is apparently a big food around here, and that wasn't really so surprising, but that peas really made me wonder. I've been a fan of peas for a long time … especially fresh ones that I'd sneak from Grandma and Grandpa Graves' garden when I was younger, and although they are often called, "sweet peas," I never would have thought to include them in a dessert. Look at this, my culinary preconceptions are being challenged left and right over here. Whew, what a great thing!
I'll think I'll write a little bit about schoolwork, and maybe I'll just send this out to you all tomorrow. Who knew that I could embrace this kind of brevity in writing? haha. On the student front, I met with Dianne again Friday night, and we studied, for the first real time, conversational things. Woo hoo! Now I know how to say, "Hello. My name is Ben." Which is, by the way, approximately, "annyeongha-seyo. j/cheonun Ben-imnida." Also, quick note about pronunciation: what I've quickly realized is that reading the Korean letters is so much better than trying to read the English versions of things. This especially applies to names for my students. For example, the vowel ㅕis pronounced as "yaw" … at least that's how I would write it. Often, when it appears in names, it's written with an "eo" like in this name: Seo Yeon. Maybe my mind's a little screwy (ok, actually that's a given), but when I first saw that, I pronounced it like "So Yahn." I obviously didn't pick up on the "awe" sound. Now that I know what the vowel sounds like, though, I'm able to do a better job. I write this now because I'm sure that I will continue to write Korean words in my messages, and I'll try to consistently use the English spelling that I regularly encounter here … even if it doesn't seem to fit as well with how I naturally would read it. Also, sometimes I will use a "/" in the pronunciation, which comes from how the words sound. I wrote about this at the beginning of last month (a month ago the day, actually) with one example … the "t/d" issue. The same happens for some other sounds as well: "g/k," "b/p," "l/r" and "j/ch." This has been one of the harder aspects of learning correct pronunciation for words because to my untrained ears, I don't hear the distinction as clearly as I should. Nearly every time I study with Dianne or try to have someone else say a word slowly so that I can write it down, I feel a flashback to phonetics class at Calvin during my junior year. In that class we extensively considered different sounds that appear in languages around the world, and we talked about how, essentially, the switch in one's brain to allow that person to fluently use different sounds is thrown pretty early in development, and ultimately for some people reproducing certain sounds -- or even being able to recognize those different sounds -- remains especially challenging or almost impossible … especially as they get older. And so there have been a few times when I'll say something, and Dianne, for example, will say "No" and pronounce it correctly. And I'll try again, but it still won't be right, and that'll go on a few times until it either sounds good enough … or we just move on. Again I find myself thinking and writing, this language learning business is going to be to a lot of work. But I think the payoff will be great.
On the teacher front, last week was my most stressful yet. I won't go into details here, but I'm realizing that teaching is more taxing that I'd hoped it would be, so especially by Friday, I was spent and ready to end for the weekend. Friday did still end on a fun note, though, when my last class changed English names. They'd been asking about it for a while now, and I had promised them that if they could go one week doing well and being good, we'd change. Granted, it probably helped that one of the more energetic students missed 2 of the 3 days last week, but ultimately we still did have a solid week, so we spent the first part of the class choosing the names. I gave each student a choice between 2 or among 3, and each got to pick the better/best name. Also, I used this opportunity to talk a little bit more about how naming and nicknames work back home. I intentionally chose name that were a little bit longer and could be shortened to a nickname, such that I'll be using both full and nicknames, and I plan to have the students only use nicknames when addressing one another. Additionally, I did gain 2 more students in that class on Monday, so now I have a class consisting of: Susan, Zachary, Katherine, Jessica, Hunter, Sophia, Hector, Sally and Samuel. All in all, I'm pretty pleased with these changes, and the students were especially amused by Hunter … as was I. The one student who was missing still will have the option to change his name tomorrow, so I have to make sure to give him some great options … we'll see how that goes. I've been toying with Ignatius (Iggy) and Constantine. Those are solid, great choices, right? Yep, exactly. haha. Maybe he'll get a more contemporary choice as well. We'll see how gracious I feel by the end of day tomorrow, for that will ultimately determine what I do.
Look at this. Maybe I'm just incapable of being brief. Because I did nearly forget one thing: a little bit about banking, although this should still be quick. As I mentioned before, I did start a bank account last week. Woo hoo! As I set up everything, there was one random interesting thing and another one that's more Korea-specific. The first one is this: in setting up my account/debit card, I had to create both a 4- and 6-digit password. Right now the ATMs use the 4-digit one, but apparently in the foreseeable future, that'll be switching over to a more secure system. I found that interesting, and I wonder if that's a bigger shift or something that only happens here. I don't really know. The next one is this: updating bank books here is amazingly simple. This is one of things I've encountered that makes me think America's way behind the times. At this bank I have a book that looks like one I've used for other accounts back home, but here there's a machine in the lobby where I can slide in my book, and it will print on my pages showing me all my bank transactions, thus I'm ultimately responsible for keeping my bank book and updating it, but by simply stopping by the bank lobby, I can get a complete and accurate record right there. Whew. So awesome. When the bank teller first gave me the bank book I still had the mindset that it was like mine back home that, let's be straight here, I used for about the first month and a half … when I was a 1st year student at Calvin, so I immediately was thinking about where to stow it away because I figured I wouldn't use it … again. But with this sweet new system … my book's gonna be so up to date. Just you wait. haha.
Alright. That's it for me. Who knows what the next topic will be or the when the next time will be that I write to you? I don't. So I guess you'll just hear from me again whenever you do. Keep it real, and remember to shoot me an update sometime so that I can hear about your life and (mis)adventures -- even if they seem mundane and potentially meaningless -- because I do like to get emails and read about you.
Much love to you all.
pfn,
bg
ps- if you want to see the BBQ place, visit:
No comments:
Post a Comment