Korea!

Right, so I know I said I would post something about the Philippines like... a while ago, and I haven't gotten around to doing that yet (or even taking them off my camera). I figured that during all this down time, it would be more or less the perfect time to do so (if I don't go stir crazy from sitting in my chair all day long).

My goal for March is to be ridiculously productive and churn out a bunch of things I've been sitting on for a while. Such things include but are not limited to:

1. Looking at scholarship information. Yeah I should do that soon.
2. Reading the Food & Culture Reader by Counihan. It's GIGANTIC. And I mean like, it's about as big as my neuroscience textbook, and that thing was huge. I'm getting it from my school on wednesday, so we'll see how long I have to get through that beast.
3. Study more Japanese (and turn in the test on time for once).
4. Write, speak, and read more Japanese. I really want to try to write more in Japanese, since I think it'll help me remember things like grammar and so on that I'm struggling with.
5. Read through Axis.
6. Get my stuff together for Okinawa. YAAAY.
7. Upload pictures from the Philippines, the hospital in Thailand (which had kind of amazing sunset pictures).
8. Write more blog entries (new goal: two or three every week!).
9. Write about the Philippines.
10. Look up crazy cooking projects
11. Attempt to make tortillas again (despite the fact I'll be stateside in about six months).
12. Study kanji via the kanjibox app - at least 30 minutes every day. (Or like... an hour. Split into ten minute segments, with 5 minutes drills and then doing the quiz portion. Also, good god, doing drills gets kinda boring.)
13. Study kanji from the JET book, at least one or two a day.... yeah about that.
14. Mend black pants (or find a tailor...).
15. Do silhouette paper cut out art with water colors
16. Write letters to people and stuff.

Right. So those are kinda goals for the month I guess... and not necessarily in that order.

Anyways, Korea! Korea gets written about first since it was more recent and also shorter (and thus, will take me less time).

Where to start.

Oh right. Korea was awesome. I went to Seoul for less than 48 hours - we left Okayama on a flight around 10 am on Sunday (which for some reason required us to leave Takahashi around 7ish), and left some time around 5 o'clockish Sunday. Oh wait, the 7 o'clock makes sense now. It was a (kinda) secret trip with the other female teachers at one of my visiting schools; none of the men at school knew about it. Or well, one did, since if something happened to us - all of us - the school would need to know something about where we were and stuff. So our vice principal had been informed about the trip.

One of the teachers who lives in Takahashi offered to give me a ride to the airport so that I didn't have to meet my Japanese Teacher (JTE) in the neighboring city, which I gladly accepted. She came over to my place a little before 6:30 am. I was... mostly ready, haha. I had been packing the night before (since I seem to be incapable of packing before the night before). We went to pick up another teacher, and then swung by the school to see if the other teachers were there. They weren't, so we assumed they had left before us (since we were a little late)... and turns out, we had assumed wrong. We actually weren't the late ones!

We flew out of Okayama Airport, which apparently, does international flights. The airport itself is kinda small, but not too bad? I guess it could have been worse. Security was kinda... yeah. For some reason they did a full body pat down on me. Maybe because I was a foreigner; who knows. But I thought it was kind of amusing they had a person standing there whose job was to hand baskets to people for them to put their stuff in. Ahhh, Japan.

From Okayama to Seoul, it actually doesn't take very long - a little bit under two hours, or not quite long enough to watch an in flight movie since the announcements (during which they paused all videos) were repeated in Korean, English, and Japanese. Korean Air also gave us food for the short flight (much to my surprise) and they had the in flight consoles in the headrest of the seat in front of you. Awesome. This flight was ridiculously better than pretty much all of my flights to and from Japan. Video consoles! Movie choices! I found myself wishing the flight was longer so that I could finish watching Cowboys and Aliens. They also had the Puss in Boots movie (which I really wanted to watch).

I liked Korean Air. Definitely will fly them again.

But on to actual Korea! Seoul's airport (Incheon) is really really nice inside. It reminded me a little bit of the domestic wing at Manilla, or the airport at Thailand. Nice interior, even if the walk towards the baggage claim and immigration took ages. Immigration was a speedy process as well, as was baggage claim (though I think the fact that our group moved slowly helped too). There were twelve of us on this Korean spa-shopping spree.

Actually, that was the whole reason (the majority of) the teachers were going in the first place: to take advantage of cheap Korean cosmetics (at least, cheap compared to Japan), eat Korean food, and do a beauty treatment. Some of the art teachers were going to a museum... but that was about it.

We met up with our tour guide lady, whose name I can't remember, and boarded the bus that would take us to Seoul. The trip took about an hour, and required us to wear these ridiculously large seat belts that made me feel like I was strapping in to a space ship or something. Seriously, buckle does not need to be that large. When we arrived at Seoul (after passing a cute place called Jessica's Kitchen, which I woefully didn't get a picture of), we went straight to the duty free shopping center, where you could buy things from Korean cosmetics to Korean souveniers (like chopsticks) to brand name merchandise (Louie Vitton anyone?). I don't think they were actually much cheaper than the states are... but Japan has this bad habit of making everything outside of Japan look ridiculously cheap in comparison.

An hour later, when we boarded the bus again, everyone had armfuls of bags with stuff except for me. I had a bag of... man, I don't even know what I bought. Korean spoons?

The next place we went was the hotel, where we were able to drop off our things and freshen up a bit before we set out to do our next activity: beauty treatments!

We walked and took the subway to this place called Este, and wow, just wow, the streets of Seoul are, quite simply, amazing. Along the thoroughfares, the sidewalk teems with vendor stalls selling small things, clothes, and food. The street food looked kind of amazing, and more than once, I saw a stall selling churros. Churros! There was life everywhere, but it never got the feeling of being too crowded, or too much. Totally different than Tokyo, or even Osaka. Osaka I just feel kind of lost in and I'm like ahhh I don't know what to dooo, but Seoul has enough small shops with friendly looking exteriors that invite you in without the throngs of people like Tokyo. It's weird though, because, like Tokyo, Seoul is a megacity, and the national capital area is supposed to be the second largest metropolitan area, and its subway the second busiest in the world, according to Wikipedia.

At the beauty place, we split into two groups so that we didn't overwhelm the place, and one group dressed up in Korean costumes and the other group (the one I was in) went in first. After changing into these pajama-y looking things, we went and dipped our feet in a little foot bath, then went into a room that we thought looked curiously like the entrance to hell (actually, I think it might have been named that too). The floor was stone and heated to a comfortably warm temperature, so we lay down on the floor and relaxed for a bit until they moved us to the next room. The next room was down a small hallway and through a tiny wooden framed door I had to duck to get under (yet still hit my head on). Inside, rock salt covered the floor with a blue towel laid out for the three of us to lay on, with small pillows for our heads. About halfway up this small room - I think it was tall enough for me to kneel and not smack my head, but it wasn't much bigger than that - the walls changed from giant pink rocks of salt to round charcoal pieces. Not like, grill charcoal, but you know the ones that look like wood? Those lined the top halves of the walls and the ceiling. It wasn't too long (especially since I was running on little sleep) before we all drifted off to sleep. I have no idea how long I slept, but I awoke to the soft sounds of snoring, and tried to fall back asleep, unsuccessfully. So I just lay there in a semi-meditative state, waiting for them to come fetch us. I swear, it seemed like they forgot about us or something. It was like a low temperature sauna in there, and I could feel myself starting to perspire from having been in there so long.

Thankfully, they came to get us not long after I woke up, where they led us back upstairs to the tables and had us lie down before covering us in a heavy blanket. Massages, facial masks, more lotion massages, and facial treatment followed. It was super nice and relaxing. The masks were kind of weird - it was my first time using one. They used this stuff that had snail essence in it (I swear, it's all the rage right now in Korea since practically every company had something that was snail essence they were trying to sell - and that people were buying). It left my face soft... but kind of sticky. Like a dry sticky, so it wasn't really a bad feeling?

After we finished, we changed and waited for the others to come down to the lobby area. They served us tea and snacks before I remembered that I had brought my makeup and figured why not. So I went back up and put make up on, and when I came back down...

You would have thought I had done something like transformed into Sailor Moon or something. The teachers were super shocked haha. I guess I never wear makeup to school - let alone purple eyeshadow - so it was really different than how they normally see me? I'm not sure what they were thinking.

I'm also not sure what they were thinking when they were like 'YOU SHOULD MAKE UP Soandso-SAN BECAUSE MAKE UP GENIUS." I am far from a make up genius. But we were in a fun kind of mood, so I agreed and we all ran upstairs and looked at what they had (not much) and what I had (even less). Another teacher did a makeover for this other teacher, giving her a very natural, light makeover with a bit of green and white eyeshadow (the teacher giving the makeover was an art teacher, go figure).

For my vict- I mean, subject? Volunteer? They kept calling her my open canvas lol. For the teacher I was working with, I decided - since I didn't have many options - to go with a blue that would match her sweater. And black eyeliner. As I was putting it on though, two awful thoughts went through my head.

1. Oh god, I'm going to make her look like a hooker.
2. Oh god, it looks like I'm giving her black eyes.

This was the first time I'd ever done makeup for someone that wasn't me... and now I understand how freaking hard it is. You're never sure (if you're using a pencil) if you're stabbing them too hard as you put on eyeliner. We couldn't find any black eyeliner... so I had to go with brown.

Overall, it ended up looking... alright? Not the best, that's for sure. I was worried that others would think she looked like a clown or a hooker. It was really... dramatic makeup. Really like, obvious too. Dark blue isn't the most subtle of colors. When all the other teachers saw her, they all had interesting... reactions. Most of them were shocked. Most also started laughing (which made me feel really bad). This was a teacher around my mom's age... so yeah, blue probably wasn't the best of choices. She took it in stride though, and gamely. I told her she could take it off if she wanted and I wouldn't be offended but she decided to keep it on. It did make her look a lot younger - like maybe, in her mid-thirties.

After beauty treatment came my personal favorite part: korean bbq. Oh man. They had 8 colors of pork that you could cook, and as much kimchee and lettuce/etc as you wanted, along with a spicy kind of hot pot soup. I love how like, everything in Korean cooking is red haha. BUt oh man, the food was freaking delicious. The best part is that it only cost about 1,000 yen - or like, $10. Or at least, it should have. It turns out, the vice principal gave us money to go on the trip (wtf? WIN.) so we didn't actually have to pay for dinner in return, someone was in charge of buying a gift for him haha. But holy cow. He just gave us money to use and we were all like... shocked. I guess he likes Korea too?

After food was more shopping in Myongdong, which is kind of like a cross between Harajuku and Shinjuku but so much more awesome. We passed a Taco Bell (!) and several vietnamese places (!!!) before arriving at this store that sold things students at the local design university made. They were pretty cool things, no doubt. We got about an hour to run around and shop, so I kind of wandered with a group who looked at cell phone and iPad cases... and along the way we found FRO-YO but I was TOO FULL (which was the other thing preventing me fromgoing back and buying a taco from Taco Bell).

The last thing we did that day was take the subway to the Lotte department store/super market, where we loaded up on nori, kimchee, and all sorts of other wonderful korean goods. I managed to find nacho cheese (!), jalapenos in a glass jar, and mondu or whatever you call those round tasty korean rice things. Oh, and ridiculously cheap shin ramen. I wanted to cry since I didn't have more space in my suitcase. I think my suitcase was half korean nori haha. In case you're wondering, Korean nori is sold in little plastic containers with enough for one person (or I guess two people sharing) for one dinner. They have the big ones too, but usually they're a little bit smaller than palm-sized (for medium sized palms). They're also flavored quite strongly, unlike their Japanese counterparts. Additionally, they're a little thinner and crispier, lending to a different eating experience. They're also really really tasty. So glad I brought a suitcase over.

Now, for the most part, people seemed to understand either Japanese or English relatively alright (at least, easy stuff) so we were able to get around using pretty much only Japanese with a smidge of English here and there. At the checkout counter, however, the girl I think only spoke KOrean, so when it came time to ask her for a bag (since you had to buy your own bags, or bring one from home) I did lots of gesturing and saying things in other languages that weren't Korean. She just looked at me dumbly. Even with pointing at the bags and gesturing that I needed them. Eventually though, she understood, but I was just kind of... shocked I guess.

We took the subway back to our hotel - by then it was almost midnight - but found out that the last subway train didn't go all the way to our stop... when we got kicked out of the train. Lame. We were about two stations away, and a relatively straight shot but seeing as how everyone was carrying shopping bags, we decided to hail a taxi and split the costs. So worth it. I was so dead on my feet at that point.

The next morning, we woke up bright and early, packed, brought our stuff down, and set out to an okayu place. Okayu is rice porridge, or as we call it in my family, jook. In my family, it's also known as sick food, but I guess in Japan they make it taste better so people actually eat it on a more regular basis? Korea too. They had things like abalone okayu, but I settled for boring potato okayu... which ended up tasting a lot like the jook I have when I'm sick, but slightly better. Oh well.

After this, we split up, with some people going shopping, others going to a museum, and others (like me) kinda wandering around. Or well, my plan was to go to the river canal, then to the Gyeongbokgung Imperial Palace and then back to Myeongdong for some lunch and shopping. A couple of teachers had nothing to do, so we all went around together for a bit. We stopped by this old church place (I think, as they were starting service) just to take a look at this old cathedral in Seoul. After that, we went down to this canal (cheonggyecheon) they had turned into this cute walkway with painted walls. During the summer, some people take a dip into the stream. I was also told there were shops along the canal,.. but that must have been outside the canal area proper. I did spy a place that said 'Dos Tacos' and was like OMFGGGG but managed to hold myself back.

While there was no beautiful vegetatation when I went, the canal was still there, and along the canal they had created this amazing frozen ice sculpture... thing. They had made it by letting water drip down and freeze so that it froze in things that looked like icicles on a tree. Really really gorgeous (though it also drove home the fact that it was absolutely FREEZING). Eventually, we left the canal and went off to look for this oldtowny place two other teachers wanted to go to, passing this amazing looking temple along the way.

Korean temples, like Japanese temples, tend to have the same kind of shape as Chinese temples, but the colors they use for all of them are really different. Korean temples were really brightly colored, with a green base kind of color. I noticed this on the palace ceilings and roofs and walls as well. It was a kind of... tealish green, but there were also lots of bright primary colors. I forgot what Chinese ones were like (probably lots of red) but Japanese ones don't tend to be so brightly colored (excluding the 'gold temple' and the 'silver temple').

Along the way to our destination (am I even saying that right? Look what staying in Japan has done to my English!) we walked through this little shopping district, and something caught my eye so I made the other two teachers also stop haha. What caught my eye?

Shin ramen socks.

Heck yes. They were white socks with the shin ramen logo on it. I thought it was hilarious. The shop also sold an assortment of knicknacks and gifts and souveniers, like chopsticks and spoons. I found a really gorgeous spoon and chopstick set with flowers on it that cost somewhere around the neighborhood of eight dollars. Probably on the expensive side. But they're metal and oh-so-pretty. I also found turtle chopsticks, deer chopsticks, and cellphone charms with things like kimchee or korean BBQ on them haha. Oh, and another really cute pair of socks with a bunny on it! I'll have to try to get pictures of them up sometime. :) Fingers crossed!

Dang, this is getting kinda long. I'll wrap this one up and finish talking about the Gyeongbokgung Palace in the next entry. :D

Part II here!

Cheese (._. ) (and other interesting foods)

I don't know if I've written about cheese in Japan (probably?) but today's adventure to the grocery store prompted an entry. I think I've written about the melty cheese before... but maybe not.

Right. Let me backtrack a little and start off by saying, I love cheese.

Japan - at first glance, anyways - does not love cheese.

Let me be more specific. I love hard cheeses and I also love really flavorful cheese; blue cheese, feta, pepperjack, goat cheese (oh god, goat cheese). Japanese people, I've found in general (and in the supermarket), prefer cheese with creamier and more subtle flavors than a giant mouthful of OHAI THERE BLUE CHEESE.

So I got really excited today when I saw something that was was labeled gouda and looked like black cracked pepper. So excited I bought it.

cottage cheese... kinda

the top is all smooth...
this does not bode well

Then, I saw a little tub that said, カッテージチーズ, or cottage cheese. I got even more excited. I haven't found cottage cheese since I came to Japan. So I bought that too.

It tastes... uh, interesting. This was after I mixed it up. But it's kinda like cottage cheese... without the liquidy stuff you usually find in the can with it. So it's kinda dry? Interesting tasting. It's not quite as strong or tangy as the cottage cheese I'm used to... and it's more crumbly. But it's not bad I guess? I mean, I'm still eating it...

Actually, a couple bites in, as you chew, it starts to taste more like cottage cheese, albeit slightly creamy cream cheese.

Apple juice shots!

My other grocery store find (and subsequent impulse buy) were apple juice shots made by the same people who make that probiotic yakult drink. Shots of Aomori (the Japanese equivalent of Washington, as far as apples go) apple juice. So I figured, WHY NOT. I bought a pack; it had six of these little things. I guess the name of the brand is "chichiyasu" and on the bottom in Japanese, it reads "APPLE AOMORI"

Hooray Japanese!

Oh yeah. On the topic of weird foods... or well, not weird, but interesting foods, I recently went to Korea (maybe I'll get to that soon, since I don't have classes right now, so in theory I can work on writing about them...).

The food there is fantastic. Needless to say, I came back with a suitcase full of shin ramen (Best. Ramen. Ever.) and Korean nori, which is cut into more bitesized pieces of salted (and sometimes flavored) dried seaweed.

Another thing I brought back though, was this:

CORN!

This is one of the things a lot of other teachers bought: corn tea. The aftertaste in your mouth is literally like you just took a giant bite of sweet corn. It's a really... peculiar flavor, to say the least. Tasty though, which is why I came back with a giant box of it. 

Augh, I can't stop eating the cottage cheese! It just tastes so... weird at first but then as you chew (and that feels kinda strange too) you forget that you were initially freaked out by the creamy hardness of the cream cheese. 

Creative minds

So somehow I ended up with a bunch of papers to correct at 10 pm on Monday night (the fact that I didn't do any work this weekend probably had something to do with it). A lot of my classes are doing "how to" projects/presentations where they have to write about how to do something or make something and then (most of them) present it to the class.

This was supposed to be with a recipe unit, but we decided to open it up and let them choose whatever they wanted to (especially at the schools where students actually have electronic dictionaries, or even Japanese/English dictionaries). Personally, I think food is the easiest, which is what we suggested to most students, and why I've had to read through a bajillion different "how to make curry/omurice/hamburg" papers, since I swear, those are two of the simplest things to make in the Japanese student repertoire (and in general). We set a rule forbidding them anything that was already written in the book, which thankfully meant that we didn't have to tell them that "How to make instant noodles/ramen" or "how to make spaghetti" were off limits. We did have to clarify to them, however, that "Tamago kake gohan" or, as my brother calls it, "Egg gohan" or as my students call it, "TKG" was way way too easy. TKG, if you haven't seen it before, is a raw egg, soy sauce, and white rice mixed together. So were rice balls. Sorry kids, too easy.

Some of them have been pretty good. One group wrote how to do this Chinese dish that I don't remember the name for, and another did freaking pescatore pasta. That was pretty impressive. Then again, that kid is one of the ones whom I'm pretty sure has a secret love for English (or at least, really genuinely tries in class, which I really appreciate. He's such a sweet kid too. Kinda a brown-noser - like I'm pretty sure he's on the student council, but he's really polite. And really like.... embodies the country boy feeling lol. I'm not saying that to be mean either! But I mean, seriously, any kid who makes their group look up all the words for the seafood in pescatore... yeah. I'm going to miss having him in class next year.) Someone also did how to do a jump shot in basketball, which I thought was pretty clever.

Others have been more... interesting. Not necessarily in a bad way. Among the interesting ones, there's "how to please a person with a dog" and "how to be a bad kid." We also had a entry for "survivor curry" - which I'm pretty sure was the group (which has another pretty smart kid in it) just kind of dicking around. Their curry included ingredients such as parrot (wtf?), potatoes, pork, and alligator. I don't even know.

We also let them have free reign at drawing pictures to go along with their recipes. Once again, the Design students have exceeded my expectations. Their drawings... most of them are really good or really cute. The hamburg one had a gloomy bear with a (human?) hamburger steak. Another had this really... interesting... comic almost with this guy and a human-faced steak in it. I'll have to see if I can get a picture of that, because that was really really interesting haha.

The first years this year are really really interesting though. I'm definitely going to miss them when they move to second year. I think the boys in the electronics class were genuinely really really disappointed we weren't doing valentines day, because I'm pretty sure they all were like "CHOCOLATE FROM JESSICA?!?!?!?!!!!!???!??!" since in Japan, V-day is a girls giving guys chocolate day. Silly silly boys. I'm giving everyone chocolate next week, hahaha, since it's the last class and a kind of belated v-day. I really like this group of first years. :)

Oh, that kind of reminds me of something else I noticed in class. So there's this Brazilian kid whose English is actually really decent and even - dare I say it - good. Probably the best pronunciation in class. He started off the year as a kind of wild and loud kid who didn't always come to class, but recently I think he's changed. He's still loud, sure, but he actually gets the other kids to shut up, unlike the really loud kid in the back of the room who's just constantly shouting things about sex out (though I'm not entirely convinced he knows what he's saying). At least the Brazilian kid is polite when he talks to me, and actually does the work and stuff. So when my JTE - who is amazing - noted that the Brazilian kid was going to be absent and commented on how the class was actually going to maybe be quiet today since he wasn't going to be there and how we might actually get stuff done, I was kind of shocked and defended the student a bit by pointing out that this other kid was even louder so our class was not going to change. The fact that it's been done several times when this kid is absent makes me wonder if the kid just made a really bad first impression, or if it was actually because he wasn't full Japanese or even Japanese looking. I know he's actually pretty smart and probably understand most of what I say. I'm pretty sure he's pretending that he doesn't always. But whatever. He doesn't draw penises (boys are pretty much the same everywhere I guess) on the fogged up window and actually tells the other kids to shut up when others are presenting, so I don't care. It's just kind of unfortunate that he carries this kind of image with the teachers though, cause I'm pretty sure if he were in an American high school, he either be on the honors track, or he'd be one of those really smart slacker boys.

Either way, I'm going to miss everyone I've met this past year when I leave Japan.

It's so weird to think about only having about six months left. D:

"Fusion" Food

Dear Japan,

We might have created a crazy version of sushi that does not exist anywhere inside of Japan (ie, caterpillar roll, dynamite roll, to name a few) but what you've done with basically every other kinds of Western food pales in comparison. Even our panda express is probably more Chinese than some of the things you've done to western foods.

This came about because I happened to turn on my TV and by chance, they had a program on about - of all things - burgers in Japan. Like, proper hamburgers. Kinda. I mean, they're not the hambagu patty things my students are so fond of. This program showcased several interesting burgers from prefectures all around Japan.

The one I happened to come in on was an udon burger. Not just any burger, but a "sanuki-udon" burger.

I guess I should mention that from now on, the word "burger" shall be used loosely to refer to "things between two bread-based buns."

In this hilarious part of the show called "OPEN THE BURGER~" (or, "open tha bagah") they "reveal" what's inside the burger in two ways. One, they split it down the middle by pulling it apart all slow and dramatically. Second, they open it up from the top and take it off layer by layer. It's pretty amazing to watch (and really funny too, because they do it so dramatically). It's also funny to watch all their reactions when eating it, because I swear it's a requirement to scream at the top of your lungs "UMAI" or "OISHIIIII" which is like saying "THIS IS REALLY FRIGGIN TASTY." I also have a hunch that this is part of the reason why it's not considered impolite to talk with your mouth full; otherwise how else are you supposed to announce to the world that it's so freaking good? So good that you'd break societal norms of finishing your food before you speak.
So the sanuki-udon burger has a poached egg, udon that's been deepfried and drenched in some ginger teriyaki sauce, and a chicken patty.

Like I said, loose definitions of the burger.

Next was the korroke burger, which was yakisoba, wrapped in a large gyoza wrapper, breaded, and then deep fried so it's like a coroquette. Then it's put on a bagel bun. Holy dang.

The next one actually was made with fish - katsuo, and had mayo and something else my mind has blocked out. Oh yeah, one of those leaves. Shiso, aka perilla, aka, beefsteak plant. Beefsteak plant? What an interesting name.

Dude....

This next one, rather than having a bread based bun, uses deep fried tofu as a bun for tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet). Wut.

I'm pretty sure Japan has managed to make burgers more unhealthy than the KFC double down. Either way, this is amazing. I wish I could go hunt these down, since some of them actually sounded kinda... tasty.