Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Indoor gardening

So I wanted to start a garden. I don't have a lot of time to dedicate all at once to this sort of thing, so the process was a little extended. Now we have finally started a wee garden in our laundry room.
We went to the park to get dirt, of course we stopped to hula hoop. The hula hoop is as tall as me!

Eric scouted some nice lookin dirt and filled up our bowls 

Careful not to dig the burial mounds in the park we finally found some good stuff.

In addition to the tomatoes we planted my wonderful mother sent us some oregano, just add water. The oregano just sprouted! I am glad to see it doing so well!


So here are our tomato plants chilling on a suitcase in our laundry room.

We even have tomatoes on them!

I am excited about our yield!

Thursday, May 24, 2012

My school

So maybe you wonder what its like to teach English in Korea? I'll tell you about it. I work in the original branch of the chain of schools Eric and I work for. Eric works in the most prestigious. My school is about 4 years old. We have 9 classrooms. Each room has 6 to 12 desks. Classes range from phonics classes for 6 or 7 year olds to vocab classes to writing classes, to speaking, writing and presenting classes. I teach the range of it. My school doesn't teach high school students. There is a reception area where there is a TV that rotates between a slide show of all the teachers and videos of student presentations. There is one bathroom with two toilet stalls and two urinals (in a stall) and one sink. There are white boards (that are actually sea foam green) and markers galore. 


This is a staff dinner. These may be reiterations, but they're the only pics I have of the other staff. So deal with it. :-)


There is almost always food hanging out waiting to be eaten. These are presents from other teachers, students, the director, businesses, past teachers, who knows. People don't often tell me who the treats are from. They range from cakes, to vegetable juice, to cookies, to ice cream treats from Lotteria (pictured below) to lemonades, to chocolate, to vitamin C drinks. Pretty much anything edible they'll share.

Our school chain has a set of buses that go around and take the students from school to home or vice versa. One Saturday I was met with the surprise of a field trip. We all climbed on this very pink bus to drive across town to Eric's school.

We got out and walked to a park where the students went to a seminar entirely in Korean. I'm not sure why this happened, but cool right? 

 But the other English native and I didn't have to watch the seminar. We got to chill in the park. So here are pictures from my Saturday at the park I got paid for. Not too bad.





Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Eric's photos


from September 2010

Monday, May 21, 2012

Continuance

So this is just to give you some more insight about what I'm doing over here and some things I've found interesting about Korea while I was doing them.


I went to the doctor's office. They had an incredibly plush waiting room. This seems to be a trend. As I noticed while I waited  in the hospital reception area when I went for my initial testing. It was also nice, but I didn't take a picture of it. There's a lot of differences between American and Korean doctor's offices, but I don't want to get into it here. We can talk about it in person sometime if you're interested.


I've been wary of Korea's infamous yellow dust, but can't avoid it. So I decided to make best use and take pictures of the strange things I see because of it. So below (left) yellow dust swirls near a drain in the road. Below (right) a church's glowing cross floats ominously in the dust one night walking home from school.

A bit ago I tried to make perfume. I read a couple recipes (and as usual) decided to try my hand at it freestyling the recipe. I used: 
Sunflower oil 
Some mystery alcohol I found at a store for fairly cheap
A grape juice bottle (after I drank the grape juice)
Essential oils (which don't matter right now)



 I mixed according to the proportions and let it stand in a dark cupboard for 2 weeks, shaking occasionally.
It smells like grape juice. Lesson: sterilize the bottle first? I don't know, so I'll try again and hopefully have better results next time. I'll keep you posted.




Along similar lines to going natural with things like our toothpaste and recently our shampoo, we decided to be more Earth friendly and start composting too! Here is a picture of the first things in the compost bin!

Thanks for reading. I hope you all like it. I really like writing things for people who like to read things. I think we make a good match.

xoxo Claire

Saturday, May 19, 2012

weekend in Daegu

So I went to Daegu to visit Dory over Children's day weekend.  (May 5th) It was oodles of fun. We cooked things, ate things, and did fun things! This stuff below perplexed us with its Korean only instructions, but we persevered and made it anyway. 



Then we took it to a park with us. We wandered about and then settled down to chill and eat our food.

This is when we found some time for a Claire and Dory photo shoot. 
We look pretty good I'd say!





We found the visitor's center in the park.

Then we found what we were looking for: the bike rental place. 
So we rented a tandem!


After being sufficiently terrified by speeding children and poor steering 
we settled on a bench to watch the children and eat some ice cream.



Then we continued to wander around the park

We met up with Jay and ate some delicious dumplings, kimbop and ramen.

Suddenly out of nowhere Jay produced a can of rootbeer out of his bag.
What a lovely surprise!

We wandered and took pictures. We tried to go to a discussion group. 
Turned up; it was cancelled. 

Went out dancing and honestly saw some pretty crazy things. 
It was enjoyable for sure.
I woke up to find a kiwi waiting for me the next morning. 

and cookies ready to be made

Cookies for breakfast :-0


Then we met up with Jay again (who claims he is an expert shopper) to go to the oldest market in Daegu. He took us there and we wandered saw some interesting things and found some baby clothes...



Subway mall...

There are signs to tell you how many calories you've burned walking in the subway.

Then we walked downtown to the Medicinal Herb Festival
A blanket store on our walk downtown



For the festival a mound of dirt had been put in the road and a load of medicinal herbs were planted. At some point a couple of  hungry rabbits snuck in there and were chowing down on the herbs. Instead of trying to scare them away people were just taking pictures. 




This might be a picture of the last burger I will ever eat.
 It caused so much pain in my belly.
 I guess I can't eat beef anymore.

So this is a brief synopsis of my trip. There is really so much more, but I think facebook covered that, (1) turkish food, where I was the only one who ate anything (2) open mic where I met wonderful people from Wales (3) watching Girls (the show) and Amelie
etc... etc...

xoxo Claire