Out and About

Street food- cheap and delicious (and hopefully, maybe, gluten-free).

Nothing like a refreshing bottle of "sweat" on a hot day.  We thought it was water but it's really Gatorade.  Like, old school style.  Sick.

Too-spicy-to-eat rice noodles, sweet bean dumplings, more dumplings, and dumplings.

Live snail face cream.  Yes!  Emily Keele and I invented this in the 5th grade, but I can't remember what we called it. I wanna say Jeempa-Ju but that's not right.  Jeempa-Ju is oatmeal with chopped up spaghetti noodles.  Anyway, we were robbed!

I don't know what this is, but you can buy it in the subway.

Sitting on the floor at little teeny tables.  Hurray!

Our first day here someone told us "Korean food is great if you eat a lot of meat.  Are you big meat eaters?"  My response?  "We are now!"

Meat.  Its' what's for dinner.

A friend took us to this awesome restaurant the other night.  We walked there in the pouring rain and arrived in time for the dinner rush.  When it was our turn to be seated I was a little disgusted to have to take off my shoes and go inside.  Everything seemed wet and germy.  Don't worry, I got over myself.  We sat on the floor and piled our grills high with a little bit of almost everything.  The family sitting next to us was grilling long chords of intestine.  We're working our way up to that.  It was delicious!  Bean paste might be my new favorite food.

Everything else about Korea is just as cool.  Folks here are enamored with our kids.  Asher learned to say "hello" in Korean and has perfected his bow.  He's darling on the subway and people flock to him.  He bows to everyone and they all touch his face and bow and laugh.  The subways are easy to navigate and a great way to get around.  We sold our cars before we came and plan to use public transportation to get around.  Nate occasionally gets called into work at odd hours though, so we may buy a little "hoopdi" to have on hand for emergencies.

School doesn't start until the end of August so we still have lots of time to explore.  Seoul is so big we could probably see something new every weekend and still not see it all.

Yesterday we found out we'll be living in Army housing about 20 mins away from main post (Yongsan).  We'll probably move in sometime around August 1. They don't have any empty apartments to show right now though so we don't know what our new place will look like.  We walked around the neighborhood and there are two nice playgrounds and a great pool.  We can walk out the front gate right into a busy shopping district and there's a shuttle that will run us to Yongsan anytime we need.  It's gonna be a blast.

I can't think of much else to say so here a few random facts about Korea so far.

• Watermelons cost as much as $20!  They're on sale at the commissary for $16.  Whoo!
• Crocs are taking over the world--seriously about 1 of every 5 people are wearing Crocs.  Not just ugly ones either.  Peep toe crocs, crocs heels, crocs boots.  I want some.
• Red foods are hot, white foods are not.  Pretty easy, except there's no way to to tell how hot something red will be...
• There are over 2,000 different kinds of Kim-Chi.  So far my favorites are radish and cucumber.  
• They eat raw octopus.  We've been warned several times to eat it carefully because the suckers on their squirmy tentacles can stick to your throat when you swallow and choke you.
• Um, I already ran out of facts.