the lost file: a secret (korean) garden

this is a story i started writing about in December, and I apparently never finished. so, it's a little out of date, but it's a wonderful tale about a lovely garden restaurant that jim and i were treated to over the holidays. so, here you go:

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about two weeks ago, jim's student, Swan, and her mom invited us out for lunch. at first, i thought she might be inviting us out to their farm as jim had told me all about the stories Swan has shared in their class. Now, Swan is about 6 years old. She doesn't have the most awesome reading and writing skills, but her speaking skills are more polished than most of our older students. She can tell a story with a serious dramatic edge (apparently the Halloween ghost story she told scared the pants off the kids) and is rather precocious for her age to say the least. She's got style, too. She knows what she likes and what she doesn't, and she's not afraid to tell you. She the kind of kid who talks to adults like she's one of you. And sometimes, I wonder if she secretly is.

But alas, no trip to the farm. Just a date to be picked up and taken off to lunch somewhere in the city. So, we made a plan for last Wednesday, election day. Swan and her little friend, a boy who is 5 and seems to have grown up with her, came to our door to pick us up. They were pretty hysterical. The boy whose name I can't remember was carrying a small blue lunch box which I would later find out didn't have any lunch in it at all, but rather was filled with treasures from his adventures of being 5. plastic toys, rocks, feathers, crayons, etc.

We were taken to a restaurant pretty far out of Gwangju. It's a galbi (bbq) place that doubles as a botanical garden. We arrived and headed into the garden to wait for our table. We immediately entered into this incredibly warm, incredibly lush, incredibly gorgeous greenhouse garden. In the maze of paths we discovered small traditional wooden huts with benches where people were sitting having a picnic and kids were climbing every which way. There were beds of tulips in bloom, giant tropical birds of paradise, star gazer lilies, and fabulous wooden folk sculptures nestled in between the vegetation. The kids jumped and zig-zagged over and around rocks and bushes. In one corner, we found a small pond with a water pipe fountain. The pipe seemed to be floating in mid-air, water spilling perpetually from its spout. It was nearly impossible to see, but a mirror covered the wall behind this fountain, creating the illusion before us. We found a desert garden full of agave and prickly pear. And we even found sage, rosemary and mint! Incredible. We've never been able to lay our hands on mint in Gwangju. I had hoped to grow some in our garden, but it never really worked out with the winter and all.

After taking in the garden, we headed into the restaurant and enjoyed a really lovely meal with the kids and the moms. It was an awesome day. I hope to get back there again before I leave.

cheese

a trip to the local Lotteria, the Korean fast food chain. who doesn't want clowns and turkeys looming above them in a pseudo-50's diner setting while enjoying a squid burger? please, tell me, who??!!

a holiday soiree

so, last saturday, we had quite the holiday bash at our place. it was apparently "the best party our apartment has ever seen" according to some long-timers. i didn't realize it until everyone was in one place, but we have a rather lovely collection friends over here in korea. foreigners and koreans. americans, canadians, aussies, kiwis, brits (scots and englishmen), poles, egyptians, folks from north carolina, la, chicago, pennsylvania, maryland, and oakland. we were told more than once that people met the most interesting people at our party, that people were sad they had to leave to go to some stupid party they had agreed to go to, that nowhere had they met such a fascinating mix of people at a foreigner's party. you know, we're pretty awesome people. is it any surprise that we've amassed a group of totally awesome friends? we did it in the states...why not here? it was a pretty damn good party, if i do say so myself:)

highlights of the event included having our own professional photographer to document the evening--our friend Seol Je (photos coming soon, so keep an eye out); a bottle of rumplemintz complete with an actual candy cane shot glass (not exactly a "highlight" but a bizarre addition to the party mix); and a rousing game of spud humper. now, i'm not sure how many of you may remember our fabulous new year's eve last year when we spent the evening with some old friends of mine from my mexico days eating cioppiono and playing this crazy game on a farm in petaluma, but let me explain.

the game involves tying a potato around your waist by a long string such that the tater hangs between your legs, just about 2 inches from the ground. a light object, like an empty cigarette box is placed on the ground. you and a competitor must swing the potato through your legs, hitting the box all the way across a room to the finish line using only the thrust of your hips. no hands, boys and girls. so, you can imagine the hilarity. and though the photos don't do it justice, you can check them out along with this video of one of the most talented players yet winning with an excellent "one shot, one kill" all the way across the room.

it was a great party. and it made me really happy to see how many amazing friends we've made here. i spent the next couple of days actually wishing that we could just go back to the party. it really was so fun. and feeling something that i never imagined would be possible here--that when I leave, i will be so sad to say goodbye to all these wonderful people. BUT i'm not gone yet!

just another thing to make living in the moment such a very valuable thing.

we're off to China on saturday. expect a bit of blogging between our misadventures, a spa treatment at an amazing place called zenspa outside of beijing, a trek to the great wall, an art gallery crawl to a huge Bauhaus factory turned art exhibition space, and many, many, many good meals.

happy early 2008!

~catie

a sobering opinion

i haven't posted much of anything political on this blog as of yet. but this morning, when i sat down to check email, i saw that benazir bhutto had been assassinated while we were asleep. the situation in pakistan is one that we've been following pretty closely (or at least i have via jim who reads several international papers every day). a week or so ago, i finally got to a July issue of the New Yorker with this excellent article about Asma Jahangir, a human rights lawyer in Pakistan:

Letter from Pakistan: Days of Rage

Today, while scrolling through Gawker of all places, I found a link to the Wonkette site (the Gawker D.C. syndicate) and this very powerful op-ed concerning the editorial decisions about photographs of the carnage from the suicide bombing attack. **The photos in this piece are very graphic, so be warned. But they're all the way at the end, so you can read this without actually seeing the photos if you choose to.

Before and After the Assassination, in Photos

the story of stuff

what an opportune time of year to come across this fabulous 20 min video about all our STUFF. it's a great perspective on some things we need some perspective on. check it out when you get the chance. and share it with everyone you know!

The Story of Stuff

merry merry from korea!

just a little shout out to all you good folks around the world for the holidays. sending you all lots of love.

we worked today at school. yeah. christmas eve. kids in korea only get christmas day off. that's it. so it was santa con time at the school. jim and i, along with a handful of other teachers, got to play santa for the kids in the school. a seriously whirlwind, running up and down three floors of the school, delivering presents to every boy and girl in our school. surreal. and here are some choice shots of us. can you tell who's who??


here's a shot of the tree i created in our living room out of a discarded trellis that we found on the sidewalk. i love it. it's really ghetto and crafty.

and last, but certainly not least, a shot of us at our holiday party at our place this past saturday. it was a serious hit. people claim it's the best party our apartment has ever seen. it was awesome to have all our friends in one place. we've collected a pretty fabulous set of friends here--koreans and foreigners alike. this is a shot of me and jim with our friends seol je and young jeong along with their friend.

missing you all very much. happy holidays!

xoxo

catie

election day

so, today is a day off for us. today is the presidential election. it is expected that candidate Lee Myung-bak will be elected. he's pretty conservative force, part of the GNP (that's Grand National Party), much more conservative than the current administration. The kicker is that he, like many a political candidate, has been under scrutiny for shady business dealings. The investigation was conducted by members of his own party who, amazingly, found that nothing was amiss. But the opposition has demanded an independent re-investigation. Last Friday, there was an actual brawl among lawmakers.

Check out the video!

"The fight started after GNP members barricaded themselves inside the National Assembly's main chamber with tables and chairs.

Prosecutors said last week they found no evidence that Lee, the front-runner in South Korea's presidential race, was an accomplice in a stock price manipulation case - an outcome expected to cement his lead in this month's vote."

an evening with friends

jim and i have been lucky enough to meet two very talented and very fabulous artists in gwangju who have become new friends. we met them at the festival downtown when jim's mom was here, and we've managed to meet up a few times since then. Young Jeong is a fabric designer and site installation artist. Seol Je is a photographer. both have great talent. jim and Seol Je have been talking about making a book together: jim's poetry and Seol Je's images. should be very cool. Young Jeong will have an exhibition in Daegu beginning on December 27th. I took some shots of the work she will display. I'm in love with these pieces. Delicate, ethereal, beautiful.




we spent the evening eating samgipsol, drinking soju, chatting about art in seattle, new delhi (where they were in January), jakarta (where they will go in February), new york. their little dogs, mochi (big ears) and luki (fluffy white ball) bounced from their home in the suitcase to our feet walking deftly on their hind legs in search of some treats. young jeong used our korean koddodi cards to read our fortune. it was all wonderful. and all in their art studio. i fell in love with that, too. bookshelf bulging with magazines and art books and remnants of this and that. thread, oil paints, dress models, canvases, plants everywhere. photos, patio umbrella in the middle of the room painted with little scenes of korea.

our holiday party!

our party! if you're in ko-rea, come on over.

a thanksgiving gift from jim's mom

we got a package from jim's mom a while ago, and in it were these two little thanksgiving figures. they have amused us to no end. fabulously weird! they're sort of like nutcrackers, but definitely not strong enough to do the job. do check out the fashion on the native guy. wonderful.

tales of turkeys and underbaked pies

when you last heard from me, i was getting ready for a bake-off extravaganza with our borrowed convection oven. (the irony of this wasn't fully appreciated until rob said in an email yesterday, "How can the Koreans live without ovens??? That's insane. Even funnier that you 'borrowed an oven' to bake. Who borrows an oven? The very concept is so out there. " indeed. so very out there.)

well, we managed to get a good night of baking in. made some banana muffins, two batches of brownies and two or three pans of lemon squares. overall, a very successful evening. and tons of fun with priya, joy and jim. we even had a moment of telling each other what we are thankful for. how very...thanksgiving.

i got home Friday night, ready to bake it up again. Made some awesome pie crusts and got ready to preheat our little white stallion for an apple pie and persimmon tart. and, ah, korea, you never disappoint. the oven would not turn on. it was broken. fully broken. we plugged it in a bunch of times, and finally realized that it was, in fact, broken. i had a bit of a breakdown about it. that feeling of, oh my, i think i broke the oven. obviously i didn't break it, but i was the last one to touch it, and then i thought, oh my, i don't have $300 to replace the oven. and we've got to bake a turkey, and on and on. a little spun out, yes. working on it.

so, we called the owner of the oven, and plans were made to deal with it tomorrow. saturday comes. and we get the word that the place where he bought the oven will a) not refund the money; b) not give him a replacement; and c) not give him store credit until a repairman comes out to the house to check it out and confirms that it must be replaced. and we can't bring it to the store. the guy has to come out and look at it. and he'll come at 3:00.

right, so in the meantime, i decide that i'm going to buy an oven. i'll split it a few ways with some people, but we've got a 13 lb turkey in the fridge and we've got to do something with it. so, priya and i go out shopping for ovens. but alas, we are thwarted at every turn. you see, in korea, appliances are ridiculously expensive. the oven our friend bought was about $250, but everything else we saw ran anywhere from $400-$900. silly. and SMALL. super small. and the fridges are the same way. you really can't find anything that's less that $500. and everything is super fancy. it seems to me that most of the korean experience is about show and presentation. so everything is always really fancy. there doesn't seem to be a basic model of really anything. so, alas, the trip to find an oven was a bust.

the repair guy showed up early and determined after much confusion that the LCD screen on the face of the oven was broken and could be fixed on Tuesday. After a few back and forth phone conversations with the store representative, we figured out that our other option was to buy a different oven for about $90 more. So, we went for it. And Jim disappeared for about 2 hours trying to get the new oven. They tried to take off the face of other models to try to replace the part on ours. And finally, after all was said and done, we got the new oven. Slightly smaller and black. I named it Black Sabbath, seeing at we were cooking on Saturday, and all.

oven. Jim rocked it. He was a star with the basting and the checking and the cooking and the constant vigilance. He really made it happen. Even spilled a considerable amount of turkey grease all over himself while carving it up. We got the turkey in the oven with a little creative maneuvering. The top of the turkey just about hit the top of the oven. We ended up burning the hell out of the top side of the turkey, but after changing some settings, we worked it out. Cooking a 13 lb turkey in a 35 gallon convectionWe tried to bake a pie and an apple crisp, but the oven was a little wonky again, so i burned the hell out of the top of the persimmon pie and never actually cooked the crust -- a sad realization when we tried to cut into it at the party later. very sad.

while we were cooking the turkey, a friend from the states called us to say that she had just arrived in Gwangju. She had moved to Korea five days earlier to a town called Cheonju to the north of us. She made it down to our place for our Thanksgiving feast, and it was awesome. Bad Kitty (Lisa) is her name. She moved from Oakland. She's fabulous. It was so refreshing to have a new face around, and it was a great boost to my emotional experience. I had been having a really hard day, missing home, feeling frustrated with Korea, and chatting with her was really wonderful. She's definitely a kindred spirit in her love for all the same kinds of things that I dig --women's health, sex education, etc. etc. etc. I'm glad we got the chance to meet her (thanks Curtis, Christine, Steve and Juicy!).

The dinner went off quite well. tons of food. good company. funny you tube videos of japanese practical joke shows. excellent thanksgiving all around. definitely a 100% Korean Thanksgiving, folks.

convection oven bake off!

so, one of my coworkers decided to buy a small convection oven, just in time for turkey day in the other part of the world. since jim and i are the only ones who appear to know anything about turkey cookin', he dropped it at our house (it's a very portable oven, as you can see). now, i have this oven for about four days. and i think i'm about to go bakin' crazy! you must understand, such things are unheard of in this country. no one, and i mean no one, has an oven. a list of delectable treats that i will be making this evening and beyond:

• cornbread
• persimmon tart
• apple pie
• sweet potato casserole (sans marshmallows)
• brownies
• herb and apple stuffing
• and two lovely turkeys!

wish me luck. i've got a serious head cold, and i can't breath well enough to taste anything. so, we'll see how this goes. i'll give the full report with photos later!

catie

winter is here!

we spent the weekend in Seoul, visiting some friends, eating yummy food and walking around in extremely cold and windy weather (the news said it was -3 degrees Celsius yesterday which is 26.6 degrees Fahrenheit. woohoo!). the pictures and a fuller description to come, but here are some highlights:

• jim bought a fancy butterfly knife on the street in Itaewon which was available for purchase among a fine assortment of hand-held weapons, most of which definitely gave me the heebie jeebies--catering to the military crowd, i guess?
  
  
• we had actual real grilled hamburgers and bacon and onion rings and french fries at a tiny little place called Smokeys Saloon in Itaewon.
• ate delectable chicken tikka masala and a lamb curry at an indian place in Hyehwa with some really great friends of ours
• spent a long evening at a great hookah bar in hongdae, chillin on sofas and relaxing on pillows. they made a korean style mojito that sort of approximated a real one in the states. there were actual mint leaves in it this time, but still, the use of peppermint schnapps eludes me.
• ate some great feta and gyro sandwiches for lunch and headed home.
  

Seoul is fun. Seoul is crazy. It was definitely overwhelming to be there. The subways are really much more insanely packed than i first thought during our other trips there. Saturday night is a mob scene. And there is a TON of stuff to do and see at every minute. It's a great trip, but at this point, kind of like vegas for me. I can only be there about 48 hours, and then i need to come home. living in Gwangju is really chill and easy. We don't see a lot of foreigners, and we're still the anomaly. In Seoul, there were Westerners everywhere. A Korean woman we hung out with on Saturday night said that just in the past three years, the foreigner population has exploded. We have apparently been flooding the city in droves at a very rapid pace. And until the recent sexual abuse scandal wit the teacher from Canada, there hasn't really been a thought towards a screening process for all these teachers. There are no background checks or any other sort of filter to determine your eligibility as a teacher. But in December, the government will make it much more difficult for Westerners to enter as English teachers.

so, once again, back and ready to head to work for another week of madness. feeling pretty sick again. but this will be a good week:) much love from across the world.

catie

a trip down the river

one sunday afternoon in october, jim and I took our new-ish bikes out for a spin down the path along the river in gwangju. we had a lovely day, meeting funny teenage girls who i tried out my newly acquired korean vocabulary on. found a group of old guys drumming under one bridge, and a slew of forty or so playing kododi (korean card game) under another, fully set up with little mats to sit on and mats for their card game. the flowers were in full bloom all along the river. it was a great day. here are some pics.

a random store

just a random funny store in gwangju. the toilet, of course.

my new coat

i had to post this. i found this coat while walking around downtown a couple of weeks ago. i love it. it's very 1940's meets korea.

the monster mash

And so, after the week was over and we had some time to rest, it was out to the party downtown for all us adults. We headed to a foreigner bar that we don’t frequent too much, and I was definitely reminded Saturday night just why we don’t. I pulled together a slightly more adult version of my skeleton/dead lady costume sans the white makeup. The party was fabulous – it was awesome to see lots of good friends we’ve made since we arrived here and to find other people wearing crazy costumes aside from me. There was a Scotsman dressed as Braveheart. An Aussie who made a fabulous devil. An American who made an Optimus Prime costume entirely out of cardboard boxes and poster paint. And a Korean girl who pulled off an impressive Borat-in-his-one-sie.

Altogether we had a great time. I met some great new friends, but I definitely was put off, once again, by the multitude of yahoos that I meet here, particularly the boys. They seem to be the type who have very little ability to function normally in a social environment but are quite skilled at acting as creepy and sleazy as possible whenever a woman is around. This particular bar is really awesome for its unisex bathroom. There’s a stall for the women with a fully closed door, which is nice. But the men have this urinal that’s just open to the tiny room you have to stand in to wait for the stall. And the sink is right on the wall behind the urinal. So no matter what you do, you can’t really avoid it. So on the night of this crazy party, it was especially an awesome experience since the guys were extra creepy in their bizarre costumes and were pretty much extra drunk. During my first trip, I was forced to stand there in my hot pink wig and slightly revealing top while not one or two but three of the sleaziest dudes in the place piled in to the bathroom. They asked me such awesome questions as “Hey, who would you rather do? Me or him?” Right. You’re kidding, right? How old are you? Wow. Made it in and out of that place in a flash and left laughing at these very silly, stupid boys.

It was a much needed very late night that ended with the only kind of junk food we can get in Korea – McDonald’s – and resulted in a little bit of a downturn in my already sick state. I’m nursing a cold with some meds from the doctor this week. Getting lots of rest, and definitely feeling good that Halloween is finally over.