Taejonedae Cliff Hike

We had a few days off for Lunar New Year. Which is the Chinese New Year according to the lunar calendar. Most Asian countries seem to celebrate Lunar New Year more than December 31st/January 1st. Since we had a few days off at the end of January and the weather was absolutely perfect I decided to go on a hike with Hez and the Busan Day-trippers Group. Yea, I'm not sure if you caught that Wisconsinites, it was January and the weather was in the 60's. Sometimes there are many reasons that I'm happy for living abroad and missing this years winter is one of them. Sorry for rubbing it in. I started off the day wearing my parka and ended it by just wearing a tee shirt and soaking in some sun. This hike is really beautiful and worth the subway, transfer to bus line, walk a while commute to get there. Plus its also worth the thousands of stairs you walk up and down and up and down and up and down. 

Even the stairs are quite pretty as you can tell in the picture below. The whole hike was decorated by rocks in the pavement. 

This was some sort of castle like formation on the rocky coast. It's quite picturesque. 

The sea of shipping containers. 

This is Hez and I taking in the beautiful coastline. 

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! The largest Hula Hoop I've ever seen and Hez was totally rocking it! Look at her go!!! :P

More of the rocky coastline of Busan

Hez looks like she should be on one of those inspirational posters in this picture! One that says"First you jump off the cliff and you build your wings on the way down." Haaaaah look at me being good at google searching inspirational quotes. 

Me feeling pretty tough at the top of a million stairs. lol. Hez kicking some yoga butt! 

An Indiana Jones Bridge! These always horrify me just a little especially when people jump on them and make you wobble on them. 

On our walk, nearing the end we ran into this man that was making all these statues and sculpture like things by the beach out of the rocks. The guy was chillen by his creations. It had to have taken him a really long time to complete these things because he did it all with balance. Hez is inside the heart with the artist himself. 

Cat Cafe!

So as most of you know I wasn't able to bring Hercules with me to Korea. I've gone in and out of homesickness, missing my parents and family and friends but there is nothing like the sadness and loneliness I feel because I don't have my fur baby. Sometimes I feel bad saying that, like my love Herc is stronger than my love for anyone else but I cant talk to him or explain it to him. Plus, its not like I got to cuddle any of those people on the reg like I get to with my little handsome man. Yes, I know I'm still talking about a cat. Any ways I was going through pretty bad Herc-withdrawls so I decided to visit one of the things Korea's pretty well known for: Cat Cafes. Its a coffee shop/hang out place where you by an expensive coffee and get unlimited time to cuddle and love their cats and dogs. I really do think these should catch on in the states. Especially around college campus's. Imagine those crazy stressful exam days, if you could go to a café and play with some animals. I felt immensely better and happier when I left that place.

Here's the silly looking at that was pretty obsessed with my Packer hat, I'm pretty sure he was a HUGE Packers fan. :)

The next thing I want to draw your attention to is the color of this guys fur. Do you see the green/yellow legs and the bright blue tail? Its very common in Korea for the animals to have their hair dyed. I've seen half yellow, half pink dogs. Usually they don't dye the whole animal, most of the time its their ears and tails. Its pretty silly looking but, I also kinda love it.

They also had some dogs at this place!

AHAHAHAHA  best description of coffee ever.

Hey, Kelly Warren, do you see whose on that pillow? Go Buckeyes!

Doctor dress up day with Genuine class

Here's Genuine class for their doctor dress up day. I had the students' bring in their doctor toys and dress up things for our unit assessment. We had been learning new vocabulary about being sick and needing to see the doctor. What better way to see if they understand and have learned or vocabulary then acting it out! First we identified all the tools, then they got to take turns being the doctor or the patient. They would ask:

"What's the matter?"

"I have a fever/headache/stomachache/cold, ect"

"You should ______"

"Thank you doctor, I'll go home and ______"

Really these pictures are just super adorable.

Justin being, well, Justin

Amy and Ashley getting their doctor gear on. Amy's mom is a dentist and she sent with Amy all of the real tools a dentist would use with a sheet explaining what they were used for. It was so cool!

Dr. Audrey and Dr. Lina

Dr. Isaac and patient Sophie most of the kids didn't want to be the patient they just wanted to be the doctor... so you'll see a lot of patient Sophie, Justin or Brian

Dr. Christine

Dr. Lina

Dr. Audrey

Dr. Jay giving a shot in the head, Justin is obviously not a happy patient

Dr. Sophie

Dr. Ashley

Dr.Caden

Dr. Justin

Dr. Amy

Well this is part of what I do in class everyday. :) I love my job.

Cooking class with Jimin

We all know that I'm a little bit of a foodie... or at least I try to be. AJ and I have taken 2 cooking classes together in the states and it was such a great experience. When the opportunity came in Korea for me to get involved in a cooking class here, I  couldn't wait! Hez and I both went to the Galbi class. Galbi is meat that you eat when at Korean BBQ . She taught us how to make the marinade and what ingredients to look for at the grocery store. That's one of the major points of the cooking class is to help foreigners find and ingredients in the grocery store and to answer any questions that people have. Let me tell you, shopping in Korea can be one hell of a challenge. You can spend hours walking around in circles trying to figure out where the most simple thing is and never find it. Then you end up buying something and when you get home its not what you think it is! So pretty much half of the time its a guessing game. Thank goodness this sweet lady wants to teach us uneducated in Korean food foreigners a thing or too... plus she makes some killer kimchi.

Here's our class!

 

First they taught us how to bread and fry tofu.

 

Here is Jimin! She was such a sweet lady! I totally want to adopt her to be my Korean grandmother. Here she is showing us how to prepare the marinade for the meat. She already has the meat in the marinade for a day so she was now just showing us how to mix it up.

She also taught us how to make my favorite Korean side. At BBQ you get TONS of different sides to eat and my favorite is a salad that has onions and a red sauce on it. The sauce is a red pepper powder, oil and vinegar. Its so crazyyy delish!

In these next few pictures she is showing us how to make this red pepper soy bean paste that you eat in your lettuce wraps with the meat. I'm pretty sure its called samgatom ... or something like that. I'm really horrible at Korean. I did just send some of this paste to my mom and dad, if you want to try it ask them! :p You can put the paste on anything, I know a lot of people that absolutely love it on pretty much anything that they eat.

In this picture you can see the red pepper and the soy bean paste.

Then you add fresh garlic, scallions, salt and pepper and mix it up. I really enjoyed the fresh paste a lot more than when I eat the packaged stuff. It had so much flava, flav.

 

Here's the Galbi

 

Our sides, we had fresh sea weed in a soy sauce, Jimin's homemade kimchi, salad, fried tofu, lettuce (for making lettuce wraps) and the different sauces. JIMINS KIMCHI WAS SOOOO YUMMY! She was adamant that the reason her kimchi was so good was because she buys organic produce and high quality sardine paste for the kimchi... I had to agree because it was one of the first kimchi's that I kept going back for seconds.

 

Some of the group at dinner. Hez and I

We finished our meal with sweet rice cakes... they kinda remind me of a Korean rice crispy treat and green tea. :) What a great experience! I hope there are more cooking classes in the future and then ill be able to hare my Korean cooking skills when I get back home.