장미 축제 (Rose Festival!)

Hey! Happy 1 month anniversary, Korea! :D
The big adventure for this week was going to the Rose Festival at this huge park here in Ulsan.  I didn't change any of the color settings on my little point-and-shoot camera so it's a pretty good depiction of what we actually saw.  P.S.  If anyone has any hints on formatting pictures on blogger, please please please let me know because I can't ever get pictures to go where I want them!

For now, I'll just put an album on Google Drive and give you the link.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B8DB07R6ZIQ7fnA4NndZNWdNbkdKREdpVDZMR2tBT3RtdklKcE4xbF9Wb0FvMFVZaVZ5R3c&usp=sharing

also, let me know if the link doesn't work! Thanks!

The pictures should be ordered by number so here are some explanations:
17-18: An entertainer dressed like Mario doing some fun tricks for the crowd.  Here's a quick video Trevor captured.

24: Write a wish on a heart and attach it to one of the flower tunnels

40-41: Different types of squash hanging from the walls and ceiling.  Pretty cool :D

47.  There was a tiny little zoo at the end of the park and they had an albino peacock.  Had to get a pic when it fluffed its feathers!

48.  We actually discovered this windmill on a different night at the other end of the park.  Thought I'd still include it in the post though

Food!

A lot of people I've met in Korea usually all have the same question for me: What is the biggest difference between here and the U.S?  There are many answers to this question but usually my response includes something about food.  I have yet to try a Korean dish that is just like a dish I've already tried before.  Here are some examples of the food we've had here (including some from our trip to Japan)

Bokgumbap

Red Pepper Paste

Rice  cooking and veggies frying!

This is a dish that some of our friends may be familiar with because Trevor made it several times while we were in Cedar City.  This dish is really simple, quite satisfying, and not terribly different flavor wise from what I'm used to.  It is made by frying up various vegetables (we usually use potatoes, carrots, onions, peppers, and minced garlic) along with your choice of meat (we've been using ham as it is the least expensive meat here) and if you'd like you can add an egg or two (which we usually do).  Meanwhile, you start with about 2 cups of uncooked rice (we us sticky rice for this recipe) and get it going while you are frying your veggies.  Once the rice and veggies are both done, you combine them and then add some red pepper paste.  This stuff smells kind of weird and has a really weird texture but when mixed in a dish, it creates a decent spicy flavor.  Once the red pepper paste is incorporated, you're ready to eat!  

Finished!

Curry over Rice and Kimchi Mondu (Dumplings)

Curry over Rice and Kimchi Mondu

This dish is also very simple.  Prepare some rice, boil a packet or two of pre-made curry sauce, and fry up some pre-packaged dumplings (the ones Trevor decided to use were Kimchi dumplings...).  Once the rice is cooked, and the curry is heated, just dump the curry over the rice and mix! The fried dumplings act as a side dish.  For me, the curry was ok, just different than what I'm used to and the dumplings kind of reminded me of opening a tupperware of mystery leftovers and being hit in the face with month-old rot.  Sorry Trev, not my favorite!  We will have to try a different filling for the next dumplings we get!

Donggassu (the good kind)

Donggassu 

There are many variations of preparing donggassu (fried pork cutlet) but this particular one was served with egg over rice, some kimchi, and served with special donggassu sauce for dipping (the closest resemblance I could think of was like bbq sauce.  This form of donggassu was really good.  I actually really enjoyed the sauce (a lot of sauces here have been quite strange for me), and how could you go wrong with some fried pork cutlet?  Well actually ended up having some in Japan and I couldn't finish all of mine.  We were pretty sure it was just smothered in soy sauce which really took away from the pork flavor as well as the usual crispy texture of the donggassu we had in Korea.  I didn't take a picture of the donggassu in Japan so sorry there is no compare and contrast visual. You'll just have to take my word on it ;)

Jajangmyun

Supposedly this is a Chinese dish that a Korean brought over but this dish is not normally eaten in China.  All I know for sure is that it is very common here and is fairly cheap.  I've had it 3 times now I think and it's pretty much the same every time.  As far as Trevor or I know, it's simply noodles with a black sauce which is like a sweetened soy sauce that is generally cooked with some onions and maybe a little bit of meat.  The noodles are fairly thick they are a different feeling than other noodles I've had and the black sauce is kind of gooey feeling so sometimes it feels weird to eat.  I always feel like I'm getting black goo all over my face when I slurp up the noodles but I guess not since nothing really comes off on the napkin when I wipe my face.  Jajangmyun is strange to me for all these reasons.  I don't mind eating it but it's not necessarily something I would pick right away off a menu.  It is also usually served with these yellow radishes that are prepared in some way that seems kind of like pickling.  Trevor and I both hate them.

Shish-ka-bobs (don't know what they are called)

Side dishes

some of the chicken ones

These shish-ka-bobs come from our trip to Japan.  They are exactly what they look like.  Grilled pieces of meat with onion between each piece.  We tried the chicken ones and the beef ones and they were both pretty delicious.  They were juicy and grilled really well with great flavor.  They were served with some sort of side dish that looked like maybe some kind of mushroom but had a fishy smell/taste.  There was also some potato salad and some cabbage with dressing.  The potato salad was good but not special in any way.  The strange tan substances were not too tasty, and well, cabbage is cabbage...  The meat was great but ended up costing quite a bit more than expected due to our inability to understand Japanese.  The shish-ka-bobs were pretty small and we still left slightly hungry even though we had just payed for the amount of two hearty meals.  Trevor was pretty sad because he loves food and he loved the shish-ka-bobs but they were so pricey!

Darkbokgumtang 

This is best described as a type of chicken soup.  It contained big pieces of chicken (often with the bone included that had to be picked out), several different types of mushrooms, and a few assorted veggies.  The flavor is pretty good but can get annoying after having for leftovers 5 times (we received a large portion of this from the sister missionaries).  The soup is also served with flat glass noodles just for added substance and texture.

 Shabu Shabu

I'll try to explain this one without scrambling your brains.  A couple of kind sisters in the ward here invited me to lunch with them and the sister missionaries.  We went to this restaurant that looks normal until you enter one of the special rooms with all the shabu shabu "stuff" all set up.  The seats were on the ground and I had the pleasure of my first cross legged meal with my shoes off.  The best way to describe shabu shabu is kind of like a Korean version of a taco.  The waitress brings in this orange liquid which is poured into one of the cooking bowls in the middle of the table.  There is another bowl that is heating up water.  There are vegetables and leaves and meat and a whole assortment of things that I still don't quite know what they are spread all over the table.  Once the orange liquid gets hot enough, you start putting things into the bowl for them to start boiling.  There are thin rolls of what I assumed was beef that you put in the boiling orange liquid that come out as cooked pieces of deliciousness.  Now comes the cool part.  You get these little round translucent circles that I thought were napkins (oops!) which are actually rice sheets.  You dip them in the heated water and they become kind of soft and pliable.  You then take out whatever ingredients from the boiling orange pot and put it in your little rice shell thing.  You wrap it all up in this slightly sticky rice cocoon and then have 3 options of sauce to dip it in.  It was fun playing with all the different flavors and options and sometimes I had a really good "taco" and sometimes I had a really weird "taco".  Meanwhile there are other side dishes around the table that everyone shares that you just grab a piece here and there with your chopsticks whenever you feel like it.  This is a very social meal as you are reaching across the table, and putting together your shabu shabu along with the others at the table.  I wish I would have taken more pictures but I got really involved with trying to communicate to the relief society sisters who had invited me to lunch.  They were so chatty and really nice and wanted to know EVERYTHING about me!  Hopefully you can see from the picture what I mean by everything described above.

Japchae

I've also found many variations of this dish.  The one I made consisted of fried vegetables (carrots, onions (yellow and scallions), and red peppers.  These are combined with glass noodles and a soy sauce based sauce with sesame seed oil, sugar, and sesame seeds.  I chose to garnish the dish with a fried egg. Everything is simply mixed all together and eaten with chopsticks (by now I should be a pro but I'm not :( ).  Pretty simple and tastes fine but isn't the best meal I've ever made.

Tangsuyuk

This dish surprised me with it's great flavor and texture.  It's often served along with the Jajangmyun.  It is definitely a preference of mine over Jajangmyun.  It's pretty much just sweet and sour pork.  The pork was sort of crunchy on the outside and the sauce was kind of gooey and the two together made a pretty satisfying texture.  A lot of Korean dishes don't have a huge abundance of flavor but this dish was refreshingly satisfying in terms of flavor.  I'll have to learn how to make it!

Cake!

This past Saturday, Trevor and I spent the evening with our friends Janelle and Ryan who are living in Pohang about an hour north of us.   We found a cute little cake factory that has all sorts of decorations so you can decorate your own cake to your hearts desire.  They make the cake for you and frost it with a base frosting.  You pick out a second frosting flavor and a frosting tip and then go pick your decorations.  We picked a chocolate frosting (of course ;) ) which we expected to be a darker brown than it ended up being.  I'll let the pictures speak for themselves here.  It was really fun creating our cake even though Janelle and Ryan strongly outdid us in the creativity/artistic department!  The cake was really airy and not extremely flavorful.  It was really simple although it did have a few fruit pieces to add some sweetness.  The base frosting was a simple cream-based frosting and also didn't have much flavor.  The decorations were just colored hardened sugar made into different shapes.  Not the best cake I've had but it was nice to have something sweet to eat as sweetness seems scarce here :(

Janelle, Ryan and baby Ryan!

"Saranghae" I love you

Visa Run and Pioneer Children

Japan! View by our hotel

In Korea, in order to obtain a work visa, you must submit a lifetime supply of paperwork to your employer who in turn gives you a visa number which you must take to a Korean consulate.  And of course, there are no Korean consulates in Korea which means you must exit the country for them to process your visa.  For us, that meant a quick trip to Fukuoka, Japan.

Bridge on the lake

It's not very difficult to get to Fukuoka.  Our trip consisted of an hour bus ride from Ulsan to Busan followed by a flight from Ulsan to Fukuoka which is a little under an hour.  The hard part about a Japan trip is that almost NOBODY speaks English (and Trevor and I don't speak Japanese).  This caused for a lot of pointing, gesturing, and when available, the use of Google translate.  As an example, here is a sample of dialogue between me, Trevor, and Pizza Guy (further referred to as PG):

I didn't like squatty potties

Trev: (pointing to the "buy one pizza get one pizza free" ad) "We want this.  Buy one get one."
PG: "Oh. Ok." *fumbles through a stack of brochures, handing us one in English*
Trev: "Oh, thank you.  Much better."
We look through the ad and find "American Classic" aka pepperoni.
Trev: (pointing to American Classic) "we want two" *hold up two fingers*
PG: "Ok.  Ok." *points to ad on the counter* "buy two pizza.  better deal."
Trev: "wait, we have to get two pizzas to get one free"
Me: "no buy one get one free.  He's telling us to get two pizzas so we can get one free"
Trev: "I think he means buy two pizzas to get one free"

Tiny room!

Me: "I think he misunderstood us that we wanted two in the first place"
Trev: (to PG)"we buy two pizzas to get one free or we buy one pizza to get one free?"
PG: *confusion abounds upon his face* "uuuuuuuhhh....."
Me: "We buy two pizzas.  Get one free.  Want two pizzas please"
PG: "uh ok. Name?"
Trev: "Trevor"
PG: "Trayboar???"
Trev: "Yes.  Close enough..."
Me: "you can call us Stupid Americans though"
PG: "telephone?"
Trev: "no telephone" *shakes head no
PG seems befuddled at this response and requires assistance of a co-worker... "Ok" *shows us price*
Trevor pays and we sit down to wait.  Bought two pizzas for the price of one.

Aside from the language barrier, I had an enjoyable time for the most part while in Japan.  The first full day we were there, we pretty much just walked and walked and walked and walked...aaaaannnddd waaaaallllkkked (like the pioneer children ;) ).  We walked along the edge of a little lake close to our hotel and then we walked almost the whole way to the Fukuoka Zoo.

Right by the zoo, we discover there is an LDS temple so we walked over there to take a look around.  A Japanese man came out and started talking to us in English (cue the Hallelujah choir) asking if we knew about the temple.  We told him we were Mormon and his excitement level dropped a few notches.  He asked us where we were from and so we said St. George.  He said "I love St. George!!! I went to Dixie State College!"  Turns out he even ended up riding his bike to Hurricane once to visit one of his host families.  He also noticed Trevor's Brice Canyon t-shirt and said he also loved Bryce Canyon.  We talked for a while with this Brother and he took our picture in front of the temple.  I don't think this was any sort of coincidence.  I was very thankful to have such a fun experience.

After taking some pictures of the temple, we walked over to the zoo and spent a fun day looking at animals.  I think we should have been paid to be there though because some of the Japanese people there seemed more intrigued to see us there than any of the animals.  Needless to say I was the main attraction at the zoo that day! ;) Several young kids came up to us and in a loud harsh voice would say "HELLO."  Trevor of course wanting to educate them in the ways of the English language says "HELLO." right back followed by a "HOW ARE YOU.?" Silly boy setting a bad example for all the little Japanese children!

After walking around the zoo all day, we finally decided to walk to a subway station which would take us back to our hotel.  Although our hotel was about the size of half our living room in Korea and the bed is barely bigger than a twin bed, all that walking wore me out and made sleeping in cramped quarters much easier.

Fukuoka City Museum

I'll give you a guess as to what we did the next day.  Yup, more walking!  We walked to Fukuoka tower which is also near the beach and a museum and a library all of which we took some time to visit.  It might have been the exhausted legs or the cloudy day but I was somewhat disenchanted with all of these attractions.  They were cool and interesting to see but not overly enjoyable.  After a day of walking around Fukuoka, we spent the evening watching a movie in the hotel room.

The following day we were finally able to pick up Trevor's visa.  Pick-up time didn't start until 1:30 and check out at our hotel was at 10:00 so we hauled our little piece of luggage and some leftover pizza to that lake I mentioned earlier.  It is really picturesque all around the lake and we took the liberty of taking several pictures.  We also ended up feeding pizza crust to the wildlife there including a heron (my favorite), ducks, turtles, and koi fish.

After picking up Trevor's visa we decided to just go right to the airport and wait there for our 7pm flight back.  It was nice to sit for a few hours after all the walking we did the past couple of days.  We made it back safe and sound and Trevor and I both slept all the way through the night for the first time since coming to Korea and didn't wake up until 8:30!  Thanks Japan for the fun times!

Buddhist temple found randomly

The month long week

Since this post is mostly about shopping, I'll add a few random pictures to help keep you entertained ;)

Common flowers here

Remember that post where I talked so much about the waiting game and everything happening at a snail's pace?  Well this week was more like a cheetah.  Oh ya, a cheetah that can sprint a loooooooooooooooooooooong distance.  What I mean by this is that we did so many things this week it went by extremely quickly while at the same time the amount of things we did probably could have been done in twice the time (ok so maybe not a whole month's worth but hyperbole makes for a better title, right?).  It sure feels like we've been here for over a week. 

But Kelsey, what could you have possibly done that took up so much of your first week?  The primary answer: shopping.  Seems like a young lady's greatest dream, eh? FALSE.  What I mean by this is that Trevor and I being the frugal deal-seeking type had to seek out all the best deals.  Within 7 days we went on a big shopping trip 5 of those days. 

A typical side street in the city

Our first stop was at Korea's Wal-Mart (although somewhat classier than most Wal-Marts I've seen) called HomePlus.  After moseying around for a while, we began to realize we had no idea how to go grocery shopping in Korea.  Buying the types of food we are used to gets really expensive because a lot of the food is imported.  Buying Korean food is also tricky because I have never cooked Korean cuisine so we didn't know what ingredients to buy.  Although we brought much home, it still seemed like we had nothing and we continued to live off of ramen for the time being.

Cute little park 15 min away

You'll all recognize destination 2.  Every foreigner's homesickness remedy: Costco. I admit my high hopes for Costco were quickly deflated.  I've always known they sell everything in bulk and I guess it was more bulky than I thought which made everything seem extremely expensive. Several items purchased that day will potentially last us the whole year we are here.  While at Costco there were several items we decided not to purchase because we thought we saw better prices at HomePlus.  Once again we had a good load of groceries but still didn't have what we needed to start making full blown meals.

More of the park

Costco and HomePlus both seemed to carry produce that seemed overly pricey and so we were holding out on buying fruits and vegetables until we could find some place like a farmer's market.  Trevor knew they existed but didn't quite know where to go to find one.  After some research we finally found one across town.  I was so relieved once we got there to see quite reasonable prices especially on the vegetables.  Fresh carrots, potatoes, peppers, garlic cloves, and onions filled our giant pink polka-dot mesh bag.  It became quite heavy and Trevor volunteered to carry it despite the girly design ;) (He's so good to me!).

One day on his way home from work, Trevor found a small neighborhood grocer so we decided to check that out.  It's within walking distance which means we don't have to take the bus or a taxi which saves on $.  Several prices were comparable to HomePlus but most items were slightly more expensive so the bus ride may or may not be worth it.  It is good to know I can get groceries within walking distance if need be.  We did get a few items here but decided we should hit up HomePlus one more time for the week.

Our last stop to HomePlus finally readied us to really get cooking.  More on the food we've encountered as well as other activities our first week coming soon so check back in within the next week for more fun!

Our Apartment!

This post will mostly be pictures about our apartment.  They are mostly panoramic pictures to get general picture without having to use multiple pictures for each room.  P.s. sorry about the formatting, I can't seem to make it work the way I want.

Stairwell leading to our apartment

Shoe area as you come in the front door (includes a closet
to put all the shoes because everyone takes off their shoes)

Little cleaning closet including a washer/dryer combo

Dining room table and the door to spare bedroom 1

Living room including big screen tv, ac unit, little patio/drying rack area
couch, chair, and coffee table

Hallway leading to bathroom, spare bedroom 2, and master bedroom

Bathroom including a bidet 

Spare bedroom (1 & 2 look alike aside from the computer desk in 2)

Master bedroom includes queen bed, bedside table, dresser, tv, and vanity

Floor to ceiling closet space all along the back wall of our bedroom

The people who work at the compound are always extremely nice and helpful.  They will do just about anything for us and have workers there all the time in case anyone needs anything.  For example, we called the compound office asking about a wifi problem and someone was at our door in about 2 minutes.  There is also a clubhouse with a lounge, a library, a fitness center, and in season, an outdoor pool.  The facilities here are very nice as is the vegetation.  There is also a small school for the foreign children if parents don't want their kids going to a Korean school.  

The compound as well as the school Trevor works for is all run by Hyundai.  Little did I know that Hyundai makes so much more than cars.  They have a giant shipyard here, a Hyundai hotel, a shopping center, everything! It has been such a great opportunity already to get a broader view of the world and how life is so much bigger than my little world was in Cedar City.