How to ruin a perfectly good fruit salad

Cover it in coleslaw-tasting mayonnaise!

Mmmmm delicious!

Gag. Not worth $13.


Random homesick rant:

Foods I miss:

Grilled Chicken- yes, Chicken is junk food when it is primarily consumed deep fried. Try baked, grilled, anything but fried!

Hearty Sandwiches- a la whole grain bread, hummus, veggies, etc. Not with 3 slices of white bread stuffed with potato salad, egg, questionable lunch meat, pickles, a few slices of tomatoes, lettuce, and doused in mayonnaise. Overkill much?

Cookies- There's one chain of bakerkies- Paris Baguette- that carries freshly baked cookies. I'm assuming the dough is mass produced by the company and then they bake everything at the individual stores. However, the bakers need to realize cookies are not hockey pucks. There is one near me that bakes them perfectly soft. Oh heaven. Those are saved for bad days.

All produce. Cheap produce. I was reading a newspaper article on how the Korean government is watching food prices for the month of August, because suppliers tend to gouge prices right around the Korean holiday of Chuseok (their version of Thanksgiving). The article said in 2007, the price of a box of 12 apples went from $30 to $41.
Can I take these people to the lovely orchards of upstate New York where you can pick your own apples for less than 50 cents a pound? Please? Do you know how much apple crisp all those apples we would pick made? Gluttony. I think we spent more on buying the flour, butter, oatmeal, graham crackers, sugar and cinnamon than we did on the 30 pounds of apples. Yeah, yeah, 30 lbs, we were a little excited...


No complaining! Suck it up and take it like a real man, Murph!
I'm almost done with month 5, which means I'm almost on month 6, which means I'm almost halfway done! And Jeanie will be here in October so it'll be swell!



Murph out.

Market day!

I went shopping again...eesh!
Went looking for clothes. Came back with nail polish. Go figure. At least I fit the size of the nail polish. This one-size-fits-all country, not so much.

But this is a walk through video of Namdaemun Market. It's on the north side of Seoul, near City Hall. It wasn't that busy today, and a lot of the stalls were closed down. But you can find a wide array of things. There's housewares, clothes, souvenirs, bootleg handbags, and, when everything's opened, in one of the basements there's an imports market. Where you can get a stick of deodorant for a mere $10! And Swiss Miss hot cocoa. I'm not sure how much that goes for, but one of my co-workers was rifling through her desk and turns to me and says "You have to try this! It's the best drink I've ever had!" and hands me a packet of swiss miss.
Mmm, delicious. Even better with real whipped cream. Or bailey's. Depending on how irish one feels that day...

And there's no rain...

I got a new smorgasboard of postcards today. There's a store in Insadong, an area with a lot of galleries, and they have this crazy collection of comic book character type stuff. but it's tiny. I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad's closet is bigger than the store...
Anyways, I couldn't resist.

I also bought a new notebook because my other one suffered the same fatal ending as my iPod.



Outside



Surprise innards! Pretty much sums it all up.




The whole Olympics thing is pretty intense here. I've mostly only watched it on the internet because I don't have cable and get a total of 4 channels. And whenever I have turned on the TV, it's been Park Tae-hwan winning. Korea's done really well, so could we watch something else please?

I guess this is how people cheering for other countries feel when they're in the US. We don't really play other countries' athletes either.







Itaewon!
Shh, don't tell Shinzy I went there. She's convinced that the pharmacists are going to get me hooked on painkillers like Codeine.

I'm not a big fan of Itaewon, but I went on Friday afternoon with a friend because the Canadian bar has satellite and we got to see other athletes.

I'm actually more afraid of the religious zealots that frequent Itaewon, than the rest of the expats or GIs. You will not suck me into your vortex!

But I do go there...for postal services, phone cards, and falafel.
Mmmm, chickpeas.




better than peanut butter roasted squid!

Still nameless.

I've been trying to sneak a picture of this place forever, but they don't let you take pictures and yell in Korean. So I took this from afar:





Guess how much those watermelons cost??!!



If you said $10, you're wrong!



If you said $12, you're wrong!



If you said $18, you're wrong!


If you said $20, you're wrong!


But if you guessed the wonderful amount of $24, you're a winner!
For $24, I either expect it to be turned into one heck of a fruit basket or a watermelon keg, already filled.





Cat and I are getting along okay. Just okay because he still hasn't slept through the night. We've progressed about 1 hour each night though, so I'm hoping tonight he sleeps until 6 am. Please kitty?! I'm working on the not biting thing too. It'd be great to take him home and have him nip someone. eyeroll. Dad would probably emulate Gram and take him out to the creek :(

How to procrastinate

Well, it did last with me for about 3 years. Which in Michelle-years for electronics (think of dog vs. human years) is like 40 human years.






A video of the youngest kids I teach. I have one of them acting like crabs I may upload later.

22 years later...

Meet Cat:






Cat joined me today :)

Cat doesn't have a name. I'm pretty sure everyone remembers how creative I am with names. An assortment of Childhood stuffed animals named, Beary, Kitty, Bunny, etc.
It's a good thing those Cabbage Patch Kids came with names (Thanks Xavier Roberts!)

He's adjusting. Meowing like crazy and throwing his litter around.
He's fixed. Not declawed though, so when you touch his belly, beware!




Japan, cliff note style:


We took the ferry from Busan, which is on the southern tip of Korea, because it was about 1/2 the price of flying to Osaka or Tokyo. I'd like to see Tokyo one day, but this trip needed to be slightly ecnomical. And I'm sick of summer in big cities.

Anyway, the ferry takes a little less than 3 hours to go from Busan to Fukuoka. The original idea was to get a train pass and go to a few places throughout the country. That idea was nixed when I found out that traveling from Fukuoka to Mt Fuji was $200, and the all-over-Japan rail pass was $300. The price wouldn't have been that bad if it were for more than 5 days. Long story short: The main destinations were Nagasaki and Fukuoka.

When we got to the ferry terminal, we were all excited, thinking we were going to take one of these big guys:




Then our boat ended up being this one:



haha, it's so little! If you think about it, it makes sense, because we were taking the high speed hydrofoil, and there's no way the big one could get there that quickly. The big ones are overnight sloths.

But this is what it looks like when it goes:





First stop: Fukuoka: We spent 2 days there. It's a gorgeous, modern medium sized city. There are tons of temples like this around:




Or maybe that's a shrine. I really don't remember.


It had these things, which are prayers and well wishes, things like that:






We spent Tuesday(night) and Wednesday in Fukuoka, then we went to Nagasaki by train. It took less than 2 hours and was only $30 each way. Have I mentioned lately how much I love transportation outside of the states?

The train was mostly empty, and it went fast.


Amtrack needs to get on top of this:




Nagasaki is smaller than Fukuoka, but I liked it. You don't realize how much better port cities and ocean cities are until you're stuck in a city with a stinky river all summer long.

The first day, we went to the Atomic Bomb Museum, which was interesting. They don't allow photos in there, but I took some pictures of the Peace Park

The hypocenter:





This is what remained of Urakami Cathedral, which was 500meters from the hypocenter:




The cathedral, rebuilt:




There were a lot of statues like this one:



They were donated by other countries who have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty

A lot of it was under construction/restoration though. The anniversary is August 9th, so they were getting ready for that


This made me laugh because the dog's got a look on his face that looks like, "That didn't come out of me, run!"





That was Thursday, July last.

We went out that night for dinner at a cute sushi restaurant.

The owners were super nice and so surprised when we walked in. We were their only customers and well, I guess they weren't expecting 2 white tourists



and then we met a group of expat JET (Japan English Teachers, it's their Public School program) teachers, and one of them turned out to be from Binghamton. Small world. We reminisced on what we didn't miss (snow, Walmart) and what we do miss (Wegman's).


Friday, it was decided to go to the Penguin Aquarium.


I didn't like the Penguin Aquarium for the same reasons I don't like Zoos. They ought to be free, and they certainly shouldn't have clips on both their wings I mean, really, what are they going to do, fly away?

Grumble

Penguins, cute, but they shouldn't be there:




I don't really remember the rest of what happened on Friday. Likely more shrines and such.
There was a bit of a financial crunch because our ATM cards wouldn't work. Well, I never did actually try mine in Nagasaki because I had cash on me, but whatever. Long story that I won't get into because that'll lead to crankypants.

I did find this Cathedral, also rebuilt after the bombing



Giant camphor tree:







Statue at the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum. They had a few works by Picasso, Valazquez, and a few others, but it was cool to actually realize how much I remembered from Art History in High School, all 5 years ago.





26 Marytrs of Japan.






A few cute things:



2 headed panda, haha



If there's a fire, grab an elephant?





Not going to lie, this is how I feel most days.



More detail and coherency later. I need to get back to studying for my GRE.

It's a Kodak moment!

Japan photos:

Start with 4 and go backwards. Also, they aren't edited yet, so some of them are still sideways (read: A LOT) tee hee, sorry! I'll get on top of that soon.

Also, I do not suggest trying to sort through them unless you have a broadband connection.


If you want to access my pictures directly, instead of through the slide show, click here

Hellooo

Back from Japan! Thanks for all the birthday wishes. I will be uploading pictures and such within the next few days, but they are a hectic few days.

Love and miss you all!