How we live: Friends

Like I started talking about before with attitude, living in a foreign country is a tough thing. I would like to write about another thing that has made living abroad a lot easier and fun! Since coming here to Seoul we have met up with some fun and interesting people. I will be the first to jump and say that we have made some really neat friends so far. I consider my students to be friends of mine. I had 5 students (I currently have 4) and all are very different in personality. I spend a couple hours a week with each of them and so we have become comfortable with one another. Having my students also be my friends has made English teaching a lot more fun for me. Daniel has also made many friends while taking Korean classes at Seoul National. I think the first friend he made was with Aaron McKenzie, another fellow American that was in his 3rd level Korean class. Aaron is also interested in a lot of similar things as Daniel and he has a wonderful wife, Na Young. You can see a picture of them here. (Just keep scrolling down to the end of the post). Aaron has helped Daniel a lot, I think. He has introduced Daniel to the Royal Asiatic Society, which they attend together a couple times a month and he has introduced him to a lot of different sites and resources to help him in his research and in learning more about Korea. You can see a link to his blog, Idiot’s Collective, in our links entitled “friends.” Thank you guys so much for everything and we hope to get to know you guys better!

Another friend that Daniel made was also in is 3rd level Korean class. Her name is Megumi and she is from Japan. She’s married to a very nice and fun Korean man named Joo-Young. They met in Canada while studying English and they are so fun to talk with. We invited them over for Thanksgiving dinner and we have been friends since.

What made me think about friends as being a way to make life a lot easier in a foreign country was dinner last night with Megumi and Joo-young. They invited us over to their apartment for dinner and we chatted the night away. The time really did fly since we had to catch a cab home at about 11pm. Megumi made some delicious Japanese food: Japanese-style curry with rice, Dongkass, a Japanese-style pork cutlet, some home-made naan bread (to give us an Indian flare), a wonderful green salad and fruit salad. Everything was absolutely delicious!

Here is a pic of the dinner setting:

what I love about Megumi is that she is so nice and she has a lot of similar interests as I do. We both like to cook (especially trying out different recipes and different countries’ food) and we both like entertaining guests and having fun with our hubbies.

Here is a picture of the chef extraordinaire (can you believe that she is 3 months pregnant?):

Here is Joo-young. What he told me before I took the picture: “I am really shy in front of cameras.”

Thanks so much guys for everything and for such a fun evening!

Friends are definitely something everyone needs, especially when you have to live in a different place. We are definitely looking forward to meeting up with these wonderful people more often and with meeting even more new people!

Dumpster Diving

A couple nights ago found me reluctantly gathering the trash for a nightly trash run down to the apartment dumpster on level B2. I gathered the goods and walked down quickly hoping to get it over with so I could jump into bed. After I separated the trash into plastic and paper, and after dumping the food, I spotted something quite amazing…..

Now, before I go on with the story, let me just tell you that I don’t normally take things from the trash. However, here in Korea (especially in the big apartment buildings) there is always someone getting rid of their furniture or other “nice” things. A lot of times you can find some pretty nice stuff. Also, I would like to note that it is quite common for people to take the aforementioned “nice” stuff as their own. Oh, can I mention something else? Furniture can be a bit expensive here.

Anyway, where was I?…oh yes…so, I spotted something quite amazing. After looking over my shoulder to make sure no one saw me, I cautiously inspected the item in question. I quickly took the elevator back to our place and told Daniel that he had to go down to the trash and see what I saw. I informed him that there was a sign taped to it that mentioned something about 4,000 won (approx. 4 dollars).

note: after translating the sign later, we found that it was a notice to the owner of the aforementioned good to pay the 4,000 won dumping fee.

Daniel went down and found the good to be very nice and worth the trouble of asking the security/maintenance guy (관리서) whether we could take it (since we weren’t sure what the sign actually said). To our luck he said sure and we found ourselves with quite a nice new addition to our living room.

Here is a picture of our “new” really nice entertainment center. It was a lot heavier than we thought and it is a really nice piece of furniture. The two cupboards on the side are rather large and you can see that it is rather long—great for some future plants, and, of course, our tv. Another good thing is that I guess we saved the former owner the 4,000 won dumping fee…as we later found out after translating the sign.

Just to note, I did find some other things down there in the trash before.

1. A bag full of pretty nice hangars

2. A cabinet-like piece of furniture that has housed some of our books (I plan on dumping this now since we found this nice little entertainment center.

3. Our “new” entertainment center

Some new words we learned:

장식장=cabinet

주인=owner

경비실=guard office

신고하다=to notify, report

폐가물비용=waste fee