Shabbu Shabbu, Okpo and faulty sidewalks.

I forgot to put my photograph drive back into my camera, so I had to take pictures on the actual camera this weekend, but I happily found this picture of Joseph and I in the old teacher office on one of our first weeks of school. We have come such a long way ( and both of us have much longer hair now) But it was fun to reminisce and think how much has changed and how much we done and how much we have learned.

Us in early October, Picture by Sen.

Now onto this weekend. We decided to be Adventurous with our appetite. We stopped at a street stall and order a Japanese fad food item called "Unbelievable Taki Yako"...which is a piece of octopus tentacle cooked in a breading dough outside layer topped with Mayonnaise, BBQ sauce, Fish shavings, Seaweed pieces and vinegar... It sounds awful, but it is actually quiet tasty, but you have to wait for them to cool off a bit or it is more like octopus tentacle covered by LAVA.
We actually passed this octopus in a bucket near the Okpo fish market, he was still alive and blowing water bubbles, so I got a picture. WE ATE THIS!!!! VOLUNTARILY!

We did a bit of Shopping in Okpo before we went to dinner, and while looking for fun gifts to send to people we came across this coolest combination, Keychain, toenail clipper and bottle opener... I have to add this to the list of Mustard with Paper towels.

While doing our shopping an interesting thing happened, Joseph is so powerful he broke the sidewalk... Literally he was walking and the sidewalk gave out underneath him... just one brick though, which was really odd... here is a side view with his food exactly as it was placed when said collapse occured.

The offending brick. Crazy.

On our shopping adventure we stumbled arcoss a photo studio.

I still maintain that Koreans are weird when it comes to photographs. Here is a picture of a baby looking out the window at the rain, crying, completely naked and taking a leak all at the same time... I would have a hard time having this above my mantle place with company coming over..

This was right off the main street as a promotion of what kind of work they do... yeah....

And I love how the underwear stores do the same thing... Gee I guess Valentines day must be coming up.... I doubt many American boys would be caught dead in this get up!

We also found another bookstore (SCORE) with some aswesome english books, this one caught our Eye. The Obama story, he is so famous here, there were several biographies of him as well.

I like how the back cover makes it look like he had to escape Kenya via hot air baloon to live in American so he could be President.

We also found this comic book retelling American History in comic form, unfortunately these comics are not as funny as Calvin and Hobbes. According to the comic, the Native American Indians were peaceful hippies corrupted by Europrean Greed.

Here is a selection of the wooden tables to use for the Solar new year holiday, they also had a chart that told what kind of food you had to eat for a successful new year and the placement it needs on the table. Very traditional, and beautiful.

We actually had Indian food in Okpo but Sunday night we went out for our other favorite food, Shabbu Shabbu! I figured I would show pictures of this meal instead since indian food all kinda looks like mush!

They start you off with a big pot of beef flavored broth, and fill it with several different kinds of mushrooms and cabbage. They give you different sauces to dip the boiled mushrooms in. They also give you a big plate of thinly sliced beef, and you put it in the pot to cook it ( another place you cook for yourself) The you place the cooked meat on these already prepared rice balls on a type of lettuce. (they also garnish it with black seeds and crab meat.)

Plate -o- meat

Half of the mushrooms, the other hald are in the pot.

Here is the pot, the table acutally has a burner in the middle of it so you can adjust the heat as needed. Joseph is picking out some meat right now.

They also put additional things in the broth including shrimp, a weird bread/noodle thing and dumplings. All of it is boiled in a delicious broth.

After you eat your fill of all the different mushrooms, and the meat, they then take the leftover broth and cook rice in it adding seaweed, dried carrots and mushrooms, soy sauce and an uncooked egg to create a rice porridge so nothing is wasted. You can also get noodles, but they tend to put spicy kimchi with the noodles, so the rice is a bit more bland and more to Joseph' s and my liking.

It is so delicous, and we have gone several times, but this is the first time I have ever remembered to bring my camera.

Hope everyone is doing well and staying warm with all the Snow... we hope it will start warming up here soon!

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday Joseph and I decided to hit up a few crucial stores in Geoje, and then go to dinner in Okpo. Not a wild and crazy fun adventure, but we needed some things from the foreign mart that you cannot buy in Home Plus, and since it was relatively nice out, we wanted to get away from the apartment! Our first stop was a small stop and shop on the other side of town (near the bus station). We had left early in the morning, so we needed some sustenance to keep us going. We stopped in a Brown and White Bakery (there are two apparently) and picked up what we thought was a vanilla creme pastry thing. Next we stopped at the family mart and picked up drinks! Then we took our spoils to a nearby park we had never been to before and we sat ourselves on a pretty patch of rocks under a tree and watched a group of kids playing basketball.


This was about 15 seconds before Joseph discovered the pastry we bought that said "vanilla" was definitely "banana"... it was still fabulous though. He really didn't want to share.


And My fantastic discovery. Mochacinno Milk tastes exactly like the Starbucks Frappachinos you can get in the glass bottles, but this is 1,000 won as opposed to 3,500.... Yeah!

"Ummm, this is banana flavored"


He also bought this little gem, because everything is so cutely packaged in Korea, and he needed a smidgen of chocolate to complete this pastry tasting.

We always love to try new drinks, this one was a "fiber and beauty" drink... Koreans are all about the vitamin/power/caffeine drinks, and most of them are terrible, but this one can only be described as "like flat orange Fanta mixed with Sunkist with a bitter aftertaste..." Well they can't all be winners.
After Joseph took the first bite this was me being way happy about accidentally buying the banana version!

And then I shoved it in my face! Yes!!!!

Uh oh Someone needs a napkin. He was really mad I took this picture, and is going to be even more mad I put it on the blog! Oops!

Here is the little Korean park we sat near. You can go sit in the Pagoda things, but they were both occupied by kids playing Pokemon cards. Very cute.

This was the tree we sat under, it looked like it had a bunch of pea pods hanging from it's branches.

We also did some shopping after our snack... The Awesome thing about Korea is they constantly give you free stuff when you buy something, we always try to buy drinks at the family mart and they remind us that it comes with a packet of cookies for free... Sometimes though the combos are very interesting... like this one.... for those students who like to write but end up with chapped lips...

One time I saw buy a bottle of mustard you get free paper towels (I know how easy it is to get crazy with mustard), and even napkins with free socks....(? no idea on that one) we have decided to keep a list of all the interesting combos and try to take pictures, and we will see which is the most odd or weird combo.

We ended up going to the bus station and heading to Okpo. We first went to dinner at Quiznos ( country chicken soup in a bread bowl was calling my name....) and then we stopped at the foreign mart to pick up some amazing Indian food and fiber bars ( because Joseph went through the ones Lindsey and Amanda sent already...which by the way the apple ones were awesome!)

With our tummies full as well as our backpack, we headed home... since it was only 8 when we got back to Gohyeon we stopped by the D cube and went to Starbucks to sit and chat for a while. We really like the Starbucks near our house, it has a very cool vibe to it and we can always talk, or sit and read, a nice way to get out of the house in the winter. I went down to the home plus for a minute to grab a few items I needed for dinner one night this week.

When I came back I found Joseph has ordered us a lovely dessert, a chocolate crunch cheese cake, which was very different from cheesecake you get in the us, but it was still really tasty. ( we usually don't eat this bad everyday, but we do splurge on weekends.)

Well with Saturday over, on Sunday we decided to go see the Movie Nine... which I kinda liked ( simply for the fact it was a musical, and had lots of theatre aspects, as well as a long list of famous stars in it) but Joseph didn't really like it... so instead of just going out to dinner, we wanted to save a bit of money ( and we could not decide where to go) so we came home and I ended up making my best attempt at chili. I had bought some salsa at the Home Plus the night before, so I added some of that to the chili so it would have a Mexican feel, and it turned out surprisingly well.

And I ended up making much more "Mexican chili" than I intended, so we will probably be having it for lunch tomorrow too!

All I did was throw together Some cooked ground beef and onions ( I should have added green pepper but I forgot to buy one), a can of sliced tomatoes, a can of Kidney beans, 1 cup of Pace medium salsa, some water and a bit of flour to thicken it, some salt and pepper and let it simmer for thirty minutes. Way easy to make and filling (yet still kinda healthy)

I still have a few pictures and a cute story about our trip to Masan, but I forgot to upload the pictures to the computer, but you can look for that post sometime this week.