Bucheon

Hmm.....these pictures looked better on the little screen on my camera. Guess I still need to work on the night settings. Anyways, this is Bucheon, a city a little outside of Seoul. We stopped on the way back from Incheon Chinatown, which is not a place I would suggest going out of your way to see. Anyways, pretty typical night view in a nightlife area. After all this time here, the lights and signs are still one of my favorite things in Korea.


This is where we ate. It had really good meat. Some of it was cooked in a little grill under the regular grill on revolving skewers. It was good.

Learning Korean

I spend a lot of my free time attempting to learn Korean. Learning another language is a difficult thing. At least, learning Korean is- I bet I could be fluent in Spanish in about two months if I felt like it, but Korean is much more difficult.

Anyways, this is my Korean academy, 가나다 한국어학원, or Ganada (ABC in Korean) Korean Language Academy. I have been studying there for about two months. Classes meet Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday for 3 hours each day in the morning. I took the placement test when I first went there, so I was able to skip the beginning classes, and started at "Elementary 2, Part One," which basically means that I started in month 3 of a 12 month program.

I wish I had started studying there earlier. I had learned a lot by myself before I started studying at the school, but without being forced to spend 3 hours a day studying, there is no way I could improve quickly like this on my own.

This picture below is not from a bookstore, but rather from my own bookshelf. And this isn't everything- I have had many other Korean books over the years. Whenever I got bored of studying, which was pretty often, I would go out and buy a new book. Throwing money at the problem....



Below is a random page from my new book, Intermediate 1 (No more elementary books for me, haha!). 요즘 밤에 아르바이트를 하거든요. It means something kinda like "because I have a part time job these days." There are far too many ways to say "because" or "so," and too many difficult to remember rules about when to use each one, says me.

Oh Yeah, I Went to Hong Kong

I almost forgot, on the way back from Vietnam, we stopped in Hong Kong for one night, New Year's eve. We had very little money due to poor financial planning and a lack of international bank cards. We had just enough money to take the bus into the city (and back to the airport) and buy a couple of cheap meals. It was cool, but to be in the land of Chinese food with no money to buy a ton of it was a bit unpleasant.

Hong Kong was kind of like going to Chinatown in San Francisco. After spending a week in Saigon, it seemed extremely quiet and calm. We didn't have enough money to do any of the good tourist stuff, so we pretty much just walked around. I wouldn't go there for a trip again- but I wouldn't mind stopping there for a couple of days to do the tourist stuff and load up on some more food on the way to someplace more exciting.

Here's Why I'm not Skinny

I have recently figured out how to order delivery. This is a good thing and a bad thing. It is good because I have the opportunity to try different foods. I always wish I knew people who lived near me who wanted to get different stuff, but I don't. So delivery is a good way to do that. And I can use it to practice my Korean, which is getting better and better these days- more on that in a second.

But it is bad because I order too often, and I usually get chicken, or less often, pizza. I rarely get Chinese, in part because Korean Chinese food is an awful, awful thing, and partially because I feel bad for the delivery guys. They have to ride with one hand on the gas (motorbike), and the other holding a huge metal box filled with plates of food. It is incredibly dangerous. Like any Korean blog, it is my duty to inform you that Chinese food comes delivered on real plates. They return later to pick them up from outside your door. And all for no tip! Korean food is available via delivery as well, but most of the dishes are for many people, so too expensive, and too big. I can eat a lot, but not that much!

Oh yeah, this is how I order food in Korean:

안녕 하세요. 지금 배달 해요?
(hello, do you deliver now? they say "sure")

네, 여기 가요... 연희2동, 723-12 연희빌, 302호, 현관 비밀번호 8145#.
(ok, come here...yonhui two dong, yonhui ville (my building), apartment 302, my door password is 8145#)

숫불순살바베큐 치킨 하고 생 맥주 1000cc 주세요.
(ok, give me the boneless barbecue sauce drenched chicken and 1000cc of beer (that they take from the draft and seal it in a plastic bottle) please)

And then they say they will come quick, and they do.


Below is 찜닭 (chim dak), actual Korean food.Its spicy chicken in soy sauce with peppers, sweet potato noodles, carrots, potatoes, and some other stuff. It is good. Its hard to tell how big it is, but look at the full sized plate behind it for some perspective.



Below is some Vons barbecue chicken, which is the chicken I used in the ordering script above.
It is good, though too much makes me feel very bad. The guys on the front of the bag are some no-name comedians, though other places like 네네 chicken have the real stars on their boxes. For the record, the box on top of this post, from 굽네 chicken has some stars on their ads, 소녀 시대 (Girls' Generation) , pictured below.





Oh yeah, here's the Vons chicken



Coming later- more pictures of stuff I eat, and who knows what else.

I am a lazy blog maker

So this is my trip to Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, or whatever you want to call it. Above is a frog and some field mice. The restaurant was quite nice, and cheap. The frog and mice were about two dollars US each. The frog was kind of unpleasant- looks like just a dead frog, doesn't it? The mice weren't bad. Tasted like.....well, meat that looked like mice. Wish I had taken better pictures.



These three pictures are the madness that happened after Vietnam beat Thailand in the Suzuki Cup. The streets everywhere were jammed with motorbikes- which isn't unusual, as it is always pretty crazy, but there were more flags. Really, it was crazy.




And this is me drinking snake blood. The blood was better than the snake itself, which, as they say, tasted like chicken- very difficult to eat chicken, with the outside of some rich lady's purse and a lot of bones wrapped around it.



I have a million more pics, but I'll put them somewhere else. All in all amazing trip, but next time I'm taking more money. Should have known that just because a bowl of soup costs about a dollar that I would find a way to spend more than that. We ended up in Hong Kong on New Years with about 120 HK Dollars between the two of us. Enough for two small meals on the street and a couple of games at the video game place.