Saturday's 5 Things

What am I grateful for right now?
1) Heating

2) Fresh shitake mushrooms

3) Savings

4) My warm pink sweater

5) The colour blue

The money I got from publishing?

I spent it on clothes!! There was a huge sale at modcloth.com, so I got 3 dresses, a skirt, a belt, and a pair of shoes. Here're the dresses and skirt:

It's actually navy, not black like this picture makes it look.

This is what I'm wearing to Amy's Christmas party

And the back

Also, I was given three new sweaters (no, mum, I don't wear them with leggings in public, just inside the house :D):

That is all :)

Finally Published Friday

Just a quick one - I'm sure I'll get back to blogging properly when I have a desk (Amy moves next weekend!). But, I just had to share - the magazine I got published in arrived :D

Here's my article - a whole 4 pages!

Just a quick one Monday

So, another weekend, done and dusted. Where does the time go? Here's a brief summary of what I did this weekend. I should have taken some photos - I promise to do better next weekend, I'm going on a temple trip to dig up sweet potatoes. Yeah, weird I know :)

Friday-Saturday: Saw Jay. Watched the movie 'Seeking a friend for the end of the world', cried pretty hard all over him. Hopefully didn't freak him out. He seemed ok. Note to self: don't watch movies about the end of the world, even if they do say they're comedies.

Saturday night: watched an excellent episode of 'Bones' while eating kumara oven fries.

Sunday: Went to Myeongdong with Amy. Ended up travelling all over Seoul and getting totally exhausted. Had some pretty nice Korean BBQ.

Monday: Had my follow up visit with the gyno. Amy came so we could go to the spa afterwards. We were talking quietly on the bus and the lady in front of us turned around and told us we basically weren't allowed to talk on the bus. She was really rude, and used quite an insulting Korean speech style (they have different levels of speech here), so I told her 'no' we won't stop talking. She got angry and kept saying 'shut up' in Korean, and I told her 'no' about 5 times. Eventually she turned around in a huff and we continued out conversation. THEN her phone rings and she answers it and proceeds to talk really loudly! We happily bitched about her for the rest of the journey. 

Then, at the doctors clinic, I had to go wait in the hallway for my doctor and this young American couple had just found out they were unexpectedly pregnant. They were happy about it, and called the girl's sister (on speaker phone, in the hallway - WTF?). Lol, the sister was WAY less than impressed with this news and really upset the newly pregnant girl. It was horribly embarrassing to listen to. Man, if I ever tell anyone I'm pregnant, they better react with nothing but total joy (unless I start the sentence with 'I've got some bad news...').

Anyway, then lunch, then spa, then home. Now am very clean and sleepy. Also suffering from unexplained relationship anxiety. Don't like it.

Today's 5 things:

1) My doctor's visit was only $12.

2) Fluffy socks.

3) earplugs

4) Autumn sunshine

5) I got 10 stickers on my Gong-cha card, which means I got a free drink :)

Quick post on Thursday

Amy arrives tonight! I'm going to get her from the airport. But first, I have to give a two hour exam this morning, pick up something for her to sleep on from Bekah's house, and clean! Mid-term exams were yesterday, and we had a staff party afterwards, which was fun. I made a pumpkin cheesecake, and it was a huge success. Everyone loved it, at the whole thing in about 15 minutes, and asked for the recipe. So, feeling good about that :) It was a very nice cake.

This past weekend was a good one too. On Saturday I had a big picnic date with Jay, which was lovely. We had sushi in the park, followed by some traditional Korean tea and rice cakes in this cute little basement tea-house.

Tea, rice cakes, and Jay's hand.

On Sunday I stayed in my pyjamas all day and played the Sims 3. Seriously, all day. It was great!

This coming weekend? Possible date with Jay Friday night, hanging out with Amy, and just relaxing :) 

And here's a photo wall in my apartment:

Itaewon Food hunt on the Weekend

So, I went on a food hunt game thing this past weekend. I got put in a random team of 6 people and we had three hours to try foods from as many different nationalities as we could in the Itaewon area of Seoul (the 'foreign' area). I ended up with 4 others girls my age and my friend Harry, which was ok, but I totally find guys or older women easier to talk to. So, while I didn't make any new life-long friends, I did have a great day. And we won! There was no prize, but we managed to try 14 different nationalities of food, plus bonus points for different beer, making a total of 27 points. The next closes team only had 17! One team only got 4. So, here's some pictures of the day:

My team.

Austrian Apple Pancakes

Fried plantains at the African restaurant

Korean Mandu

American onion rings

English beer

Greek spinach pie

Russian salad

Relaxing with the whole group at the end :)

I'm a Nerd Saturday

I've spent most of today doing some much needed chores. I cleaned the whole house... all two rooms of it! I sadly packed away some summer clothes that won't be worn again this year :'( and did some sorting, etc. I went for a nice walk in the sun and then decided to test my gluten-free tummy. I got a chicken wrap (totally fine) and some garlic bread (made me feel so sick and I still feel yuck now, and hour and a half later). So, I'll be remaining mostly gluten-free for now. Not to mention - holy crap does carby stuff shoot the calories through the roof! A 'normal' meal for me of meat and vegetables, comes to anywhere between 400-600 calories. Today's lunch of a couple of bready things? Over 800.

Some excellent news: Amy has her visa number and should have her visa within a week! She'll be here in 2-3 weeks at the most. I'm so excited to see her!!

And, today's craft project: pimping my new lifting shoes. Most of you won't understand this/the logo, 'cos I don't talk about it much, but trust me - it's awesome :)

Regular pair of shoes. $50.

Go my supplies and template.

Nerd Fitness for the win!

Yeah, I'm cool - they don't match!

Best gym shoes ever. End of story.

Pin hole Friday

Life is weird. Well, the way we see life is weird. I've been working so, so hard at 'keeping busy' so I don't think about Jay all the time that I've exhausted myself. I was going out all the time, into Seoul 1, 2, even 3 times a week, hiking, crafting, always busy so I didn't have to think about how busy he was and how not-busy and pathetic I was in comparison. How is someone who has a 20-23 hour work week supposed to deal with someone who works an 70-80 hour work week? (I'm estimating on that one). It's not even the difference that gets me. It's not that I don't get to see him. It's not that contact for the past two weeks has been minimal. It's that I care so darn much. I don't want to care or hurt. So, I kept really busy.

When I was busy I was happy. My horizon felt so big. But, because I've been sick and exhausted I've had to stay home and do 'nothing' for a few days. It feels like my life has shrunken down to a pin hole. And I'm in the hole. And the pin is poking me.

Ok, it's not that bad :) I signed up to go on a food meetup on Sunday afternoon, and made a fun, fun gyno appointment for Monday, so I feel as though things have opened up a little.

Blegh. I'm having pancakes for dinner. That should fix things!

Pharyngitis Wednesday

So, another sub-par night's sleep and a sore/swollen feeling throat. I feel exhausted and foggy :( My desire and guilt at not going to the gym on Monday outweighed my sick feeling, so I went and got a pretty good workout in, considering. I'm not sure it was the smartest thing I've ever done, but I think it was ok. I didn't push myself, just did enough so I didn't feel like a lazy bum. Then, I made a snap decision to see the doctor before work. One great thing about Korea is that you can just walk into any of the many clinics you want to, and see a doctor with minimal wait time. And then, pay only about $4 for your visit and $3 for the medicine. Sadly, I picked wrong today and got a doctor with such a small amount of English I think I terrified him. He literally glanced down my throat, listened to my chest, and pronounced that I had pharyngitis within 60 seconds on me walking into his office.

Pharyngitis, google tells me, is just a fancy word for swollen, sore throat - probably caused by a virus. But, good old doctor no-English prescribes me antibiotics anyway. So, good thing it all cost me less than 10 bucks and only about 10 minutes because he didn't tell me anything I don't know and I wont be taking his medicine. I'll stick it out until the weekend and then visit a different doctor if I'm not seeing any improvement.

In other news, I made 'Philly cheese steak' capsicums for dinner. Yes, processed cheese is all I can afford in Korea :)

More fun stuff Monday

So, it's been another jam packed week! I am starting to think I might need to slow down a little, as I'm feeling kind of run down and am possibly getting a cold. One of my co-workers has tonsillitis, and I am REALLY hoping it's not that!! But, that didn't stop me from having an awesome week and weekend. Sadly, no Jay this week. It's only the second or third time I haven't seen him each week since we started dating (nearly four months ago now). He had a huge event on - his company was opening a new subsidiary business to do with some business thing I don't understand (he said small start-up incubation, whatever that means). Anyway, because I am a lovely girlfriend, I made him his favourite cookies and left them in his mailbox on my way past his house on Sunday. I was going hiking, and it was only 10 mins out of my way, so I thought it'd be a nice thing to do. He hasn't been home to find them yet :)

So, last week - teaching was good, pretty normal. Wednesday was the Universities foundation day, which meant no classes, but we had to go in for a short ceremony, then I had lunch with some of my workmates, and then ended up being in a big meeting for the reading textbook I'm helping organise/write. We met with the dean and the publisher to see if it was going to go ahead. So far, so good, and we're going to start getting it written. I'm working closely with Thomas on a special advanced part of the book, which is really cool. He's a very smart guy, and I can learn a lot from him, but he also seems to really respect my input and ideas, so that's great.

We watched 'The Lovely Bones' for my film class on Friday. It's such a great film. But two of the Russian girls in the class were crying so hard they needed tissues. As the teacher, I just conveniently left the room during the really sad bits.

And then it was the weekend. On Saturday I babysat Ollie for a few hours. Yes, I was left alone with a 9 month old baby. I fed him, changed his nappy (first one ever), and all that goodness. I really like him - he's an awesome kid. Then Bekah came home and we had lunch and hung out for a bit. Then I went into Suwon to buy some new gym shoes, but returned with new jeans and a lovely sweater instead:

The jeans come from the men's section, but fit me perfectly! Score :) And for only $40.

On Sunday I went barefoot trekking and chestnut picking with a meetup group. The group was lovely and I had a nice time.

6 am catching the bus from home - cold and raining.

Really painful rock foot 'massage' road.

The muddy healing path

barefoot trekking

It's supposed to be healing mud.

Mandoo at the market with hot Nepalese guy, Subash.

Mandoo lady

Lunch

Pretty good for $6 each!

On to the chestnut picking/colllecting

I have no idea what I'm going to do with this bag of nuts I now have!

Then today, Monday, I've been feeling pretty yuck and resting most of the time. But, I did find the energy to make these:

The End.

Long Weekend Monday

It's the final day of my 6 day holiday, and I've had a great time! I did the Chuseok trip on Wednesday, which I wrote about below, and then on Thursday I spent the day at home skyping and crafting. I skyped with Amy in the morning and Jen in the afternoon, which was great. It was excellent to catch up with them both.

Then, I made these:

They're canvases cut with a craft knife. I got the idea off Pinterest.

On Friday I headed into Seoul to see the Alphonse Mucha art exhibition at the Seoul Art Centre. He's one of the founders of the Art Nouveau movement, which is one of my favourites.

I couldn't take photos inside the exhibition, but here's some from outside. I bought some cheap prints that I'm going to frame and hang up as well :) It was really cool to see the original works - he's an artist I really admire, and a style I'd love to emulate sometime.

Then, in the afternoon, Jay and I met up to go to another exhibition at the Seoul Art Museum (different place from the Mucha one I was at). We went to see a huge selection of Gauguin's paintings (who'd I'd never heard of, but he's pretty famous). His stuff isn't my cup of tea, but I was with Jay, so it was fun :)

On Sunday I went hiking with a group to Gwanaksan. It was supposed to be an easy hike, but turned into a nightmare. It was pretty steep from the get-go, and just got worse. Eventually we were literally crawling across rock faces and hanging onto ledges by chains and ropes. It was very scary - like one miss-step and I'll fall off this cliff and die kind of scary. I was really unimpressed with the organisers, who are experienced hikers, who obviously had not considered the route when saying the course was 'easy and suitable for beginners'. It was totally inappropriate.

So, it was really difficult, and scary. And then, one of the girls in our group fell about 15-20 feet down a rock face and badly injured her knee. The emergency helicopter was called and she had to be air-lifted out to hospital. That put a real damper on things. Then, because that took so long, we only had a couple of hours to get get off the freaking mountain before it got dark and we couldn't see any more so we had to haul ass and get the hell down as fast as we could. Not so fun. Luckily, there was short-cut trail that only took two hours to get down and didn't involve death-defying crawls of rocky doom.

Yeah... not cool.

The rescue copter

Dinner after we got off mount doom.

I was extremely pleased to get off the mountain, and it'll be a while before I go hiking with that group again. I've got two more hikes coming up, but they're with a different, WAY more relaxed group, so that should be fine.

Today I've just been relaxing, done some work, went to the gym, and am now doing some cooking. I'm attempting to make eggplant chips with the ageing eggplant in the fridge :) Tonight I have a date with some popcorn and the movie 'The Great Gatsby', which Jay kindly lent to me. Good end to a great holiday.