words and food

Life lately has been a whirlwind of Korean language classes, cultural and teaching workshops, and planned activities. I spend the first four hours of the day in Korean immersion classes. I have technically learned something like 200 vocab words and should be able to ask about your hobbies, nationality, and job…in reality, however, the only phrases I’ve integrated into my daily conversation are hello (annyeong haseyo) and thank you (kamsamnida), I can’t remember half of my vocab cards and I reverse my vowels. My learning curve is steeeeep. I am having some fun sounding out words, though. Some words in Korea are borrowed from English, but written out phonetically in Hangeul. I got really excited when I sounded out a Hangeul sign that sounded out to “ah-see-kop-ee vs. ah-see-cuh-reem” outside of a restaurant and figured out what it meant.

The afternoons and evenings are full of lectures and activity classes. So far I’ve had hanji (Korean paper crafts), cooking (the picture is with my cooking group) and today was my first day of tae kwon do. Crafts, cooking, and sports—it just hit me that I signed up for three activity classes in things I am pretty bad at. I'll write more about the classes here later, but here's another picture from cooking class. We made pindatettok, a Korean pancake with a batter and scallion base, topped here with mussels, octopus and shrimp. It was delicious and made up for at least a couple day's worth of Tuesday breakfasts....

In between classes, we eat three meals a day in the cafeteria. There is rice and kimchi (Korean pickled cabbage) at every meal, including breakfast. All of the food is Korea or Asian, with one exception: Tuesday’s Western Breakfast. Last week Western Breakfast meant black bean milk (just what it sounds like), cherry tomatoes, white bread for toast, a mashed potato thing, soup, and small, rectangular fried shrimp with ketchup. Mmmmm. I think I"ll stick with rice.