Thursday night, I met my friends Joe and Tara who are also teachers and live right across the street from me for dinner. We ate at a fried chicken restaurant where we enjoyed a couple pieces of fried chicken, french fries and a beer. It was a nice dinner to end a quiet day spent at home. After dinner, they showed me where the yarn shop is in Gwangju. I want to crochet Baby Plueger a blanket, but I didn't know where to buy yarn. In the TINY shop, a woman was passionately teaching three other women how to knit as we browsed the selection of yarn. It seemed fairly picked over and I couldn't find any of the colors I had in mind. Then, Joe found a box of yarn that was in front of the shop that was on sale. I found some good stuff in there for the baby's blanket and for one for myself. They aren't quite the colors Jess suggested (or at all, really...) but I think the blanket will turn out pretty sweet.
Friday, I received the Christmas package my mom sent. It only took a week to get here! In it, she included two types of chex mix for me to share with the teachers at my school. When I started to pass it out to the teachers, along with mini candy canes, they went bonkers. They couldn't believe that she would take the time to make such a wonderful homemade treat for them. They kept saying that she must be an angel or Santa Claus and other cute, appreciative comments of the like. And, they LOVED the chex mix! They each only got about a dixie cup's worth of the stuff, but they were in love. I was glad to be able to share something with them that reminds me of Christmas time (thanks, again, Mom!). I don't think it has fully dawned on me that I won't be spending Christmas in any of the traditional ways. Time for new traditions, I guess.
Friday night, I was snuggled up in my pajamas, crocheting and watching a movie when Hyunjoo called to invite me to her apartment for dinner. The last of our foreign exchange students was leaving that night, so she had us over for dinner. We had several traditional Korean side dishes and she also ordered in two main dishes for us to enjoy. I shared some peanut clusters with the group, which they also loved. After dinner, we watched Letters to Juliet. Hyunjoo and Ji Hye's reactions to the movie were so delightful...almost more entertaining than the movie :) What a perfect way to spend a Friday night!
Saturday was spent wrapping up my Christmas shopping with Diane. We started the day in Namdaemun Market which is a traditional market that sells almost anything you can imagine from fresh fish to wholesale jewelry. We walked down a darkish alley in search of food and knew we were in business when we were in the way of several women carrying trays of rice, kimchi and ramen on trays balanced on their head. We settled into a small busy restaurant after a very smooth man in a bow tie tried to entice us into his fish soup restaurant with the promise of a warm place to sit. His promises of heat couldn't make up for the unappetizing look of his fish soup and we chose a different place to eat. We sat down and ordered our respective kinds of soup (tofu for me and kimchi for Diane), which was accompanied by about six side dishes. Everything was delicious except for the light brown mystery fish (?) whose texture weirded me out even more than the seeming absence of flavor. Odd. The soups we ordered (and the poached egg souffle side dish) were served steaming hot, and with the direction of the wind blowing through the front and back doors of the small tent where we ate caused all of the steam to blow in the direction of my face, giving me a free egg facial in the process of enjoying lunch. It was annoying at first, but after we couldn't change the direction of the steam, I decided it was funny.
Later, after our shopping excursion took us to Insadong and we enjoyed some tea at a cute tea house called Tea Time, we headed to Myeongdong for dinner. We weren't hungry and it was still early, so we decided it would be a good time to see a movie. There were two options: the latest installment of The Chronicles of Narnia (a movie I was not interested in in the least) and The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. I've never been a huge fan of either of those two (aside from What's Eating Gilbert Grape, of course!), but Diane and I were willing to give it a chance. We purchased our tickets (you choose the seats when you buy the tickets!) and walked around for awhile to kill time. Two hours later, we entered the theater and prepared to enjoy the movie. Aside from a few clever jokes which seemed to be lost in translation as Diane and I were literally the only people laughing in the theater, the best part of the movie was the 20 or so minutes when I fell asleep. The overall plot was weak, the action wasn't there and the lukewarm romance plot was completely unbelievable. (I'm sorry if you've seen in and enjoyed it... Diane and I found this movie laughably terrible!) Nonetheless, we were happy to have figured out how to navigate a Korean movie theater as the big show comes this weekend with the Korean debut of the latest Harry Potter movie. I haven't read any of the books since the first 50 or so pages of the the fifth book and I haven't seen hardly any of the movies, so I hope I'm not completely lost! Oh well. I have to know what all of the fuss is about!
This week's classes are back to normal for the most part, but since all of their exams are over, the students are in no mindset to learn new things. So, we're showing movies for the rest of the time before Winter Break. By Friday of next week, I will have watched Home Alone 15 times! It's a good thing much of that movie will never get old for me. Also, Hyunjoo, Ruth Teacher, Dionne, two students and I will sing for chapel this week. Since it will be too cold to have chapel in the auditorium (Mr. Shin told me that some teachers refer to the Samsung Memorial Auditorium (our school's auditorium) as the Samsung Refrigerator because it is so cold in there during the winter!), we will record our performance Thursday after school and it will be broadcast along with the rest of the service throughout the school on Friday morning.
Tomorrow is supposed to be really cold. I'm trying to figure out which pair of leggings will be the warmest to wear under my jeans :)
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