come on over to the new site! just in case you want the url too: konglishkids.blogspot.com
new posts will be written over there from now on. an explanation is over there too. =)
all is well. i’d love to have you continue to follow our adventures!
it’s friday afternoon here, and there’s absolutely nothing to report. you know, in case you were wondering. there hasn’t been a phone call, an email or a text. nothing. no word letting me know “yes! you can start monday!” or “sorry, the funds just aren’t there right now.” or even “could you just give us two more weeks?” all is silent right now. which probably isn’t good news in the end.
i guess i could do the calling and writing and bugging. but i kinda don’t want to. at this point, the trip home for the summer is gone and over which means i’ll be here for the time being anyway. so whenever they call, i will heed. let it be.
i have some other plans bubbling in my brain. don’t worry. i am never down for long.
and it just keeps getting funner! if you are trying to get something done at the korean bank today or go to the doctor’s office or maybe visit a local tiny hole in the wall, well you should just stay home. AGAIN. because it’s yet another holiday! apparently the whole month is a holiday.
today is Buddah’s birthday! and i guess it’s as important as Jesus’ back home cuz everyone has a day off again, except your major chains. it’s raining cats and dogs outside though, which is a bummer because that means i can’t get out and about to observe what is supposed to be done on a Buddah’s birthday. do they not eat meat today? do they do a lot of meditation? do they have special rituals, or cakes or presents? my parents think it probably has something to do with going to a buddhist temple, having a special service there and eating a special meal. but i think they are guessing. i do see special pretty lanterns hung everywhere on the street though. back home in hawaii they were only hung at the korean buddhist temples.
but until next year, the rest of it shall have to remain a mystery to me.
this is the week i’m supposed to find out either way. whether my experience in korea will include a sweet dream job complete with an ability to be home in time to meet the school bus and spend the afternoons with the kidsters, or whether i get to continue to keep busy during the morning with miss gracie before things get extra busy when her brother gets home. one path means financial padding (and more shopping for pretty pretty things!) and the other means simplicity. like i said before, i’m ok with both. i just want to know.
actually, if it weren’t for the summer months and a promise to jun to spend it in hawaii, i wouldn’t be so eager to know. but the pleading doesn’t stop and i can’t make it stop because i just don’t know. at this point, the ticket prices are so crazy, the answer is still probably “no.” but if really, i have nothing to do this summer but deal with the intense heat with them both at home, i may just have to find a way to make it happen. but i can’t get around to that until i KNOW.
today is mother’s day back home, but it was yesterday for us here. my mother in law was visiting, which was nice. we’d never had a mother’s day with her. she’s in korea for a bunch of stuff, mostly dealing with some property she has down in seoul, so it was really nice of her to come all the way down here for the weekend instead of us going to her. it was different than any other mother’s day.
i wonder how it was for the other family’s on base. i guess they had access to a decent brunch place and stuff, but being off post meant that nothing opened up (especially on a sunday) until noon or so. so captain j was kind of lost. his specialty was taking me out for a big breakfast brunch buffet, after he takes the kids out to play as soon as they got up (jun still gets up between 5:30 and 6 am) so that i can get an extra couple of hours and returns with flowers from a corner flower shop that’s of course been open since dawn. here, taking the kids out that early wouldn’t be tolerated by our korean neighbors because of the noise that early, and there wouldn’t be any flower shops open. he’d only gotten in the night before from a TDY so i don’t blame him for not thinking ahead.
poor guy. he tried his best to keep them quiet. when i got up and joined the family, the kids were already playing video games. a usual huge no no. he’d let them to keep them quiet. and then, with empty hands, he kind of made this grand gesture and said “happy mother’s day! kids, say happy mother’s day.” the kids didn’t even look up from their unusual treat. and then i made everyone breakfast because who else was going to make it? (and no, captain j would not. he SHOULD not. and i don’t like cereal.)
but it was ok, because, i made these
and it was all good.
here, the day wasn’t just to celebrate mother’s though. it’s called uh-buh-yi nal (literal translation: ma-fa day. real meaning translation: mother & father’s day or parent’s day.) the whole weekend, practically was dedicated to parents. so you went from children’s day on the 5th to a weekend of celebrating parents. basically the whole city half shut down to enjoy celebrating each other. how marvelous!
i had no idea this was coming and kind of watched it unfold with glee. first, the amazing way that children were celebrated nearly brought me to tears, so much so that i wrote about it over at kimchi mamas. then, because my mother in law was here, we were out and about where we saw lots of flower buying and huge groups of families moving in and out of restaurants. news reports did stories on immigrants who were far from their families and encouraged kind citizens to remember those who didn’t have families around them. It was kind of like thanksgiving, but people ate out. i liked it!
my parents left our place to give my mother in law some space after spending a noon meal with her and they say they got swept up in it too. as soon as they disembarked from the train on the seoul end, my cousins swooped in and off they went on a big family dinner extravaganza that lasted late into the night. having been away for 40 plus years, they’d never experienced the full extent of uh-buh-yi-nal. i think they liked it too.
koreans are smart, they get it done in one shebang. this was our shebang.
when we moved here, there were a few things i wanted to make sure i had in my possession when it was time to leave. this past week, i successfully acquired one set of said items.
enough ceramic korean dinnerware settings for a party of six.
love.
i’ve already moved the c.orelle/ikea/yardsale-find stuff i’d been using since college and am thoroughly enjoying these new dishes and bowls. food seriously tastes better when it comes served in prettier vessels. even ramyun.
(which six of the bowls i bought are specifically designed for — never imagined how much i needed perfect noodle bowls, but i did and i do!)
yesterday afternoon i flipped open my mac during gracie’s nap to discover the BIG news. almost every facebook status update and news headline exclaimed that osama bin laden was finally dead dead dead. i sat with my jaw open for the longest time, taking it in. the day had finally come. all sorts of emotions ran through me. i felt relieved, excited, and even a little anxious that it wasn’t true. but mostly, as i read about what went down, i felt proud of our boys. they’d done it.
today i stepped on post for the first time since learning the news. we live off post so we only go on when we have cause to. today gracie had ballet then jun had t-ball practice after school. in the halls and on the fields, as parents in uniform and out, prepared snack bags, dressed their kids in appropriate uniforms and shepherded their children to appropriate areas for their activities, they also spend moments talking quietly about the good news.
“Did you hear?” “Can you believe it?” “Never thought I’d see the day.”
and then it’s on to whatever moment is required next. but there’s a an extra spring in people’s steps and a look of renewed hope and people go on their way. It’s like suddenly we’ve reached a milestone we never knew we wanted to reach in this struggle and now we hope that the view on the other side will show a slope down to an easier path.
but we’ve been in this game long enough to know what’s up. people seem to think something is over or something. but more than likely his death was more symbolic and it actually won’t change things much. even if it is over, it’ll be over slowly. and anyway, life will go on with our families finishing posts and assignments as planned. steady as she goes.
so when i finally learned through various facebook posts and a fellow kimchi sister’s thought provoking blog post of the partying going on at various places in the US, such as at the white house, it made me scratch my head. what was that all about?
i don’t know. i can’t speak for all military members or spouses. but my opinion is that i believe that most of us would probably not choose to boast about our successes so loudly. it’s one of the first lessons you learn when you enter military life — and continue to learn. don’t flaunt your rank, don’t talk about operation details even when they’re kinda cool and support each other in quiet unannounced ways. so loudly rejoicing death, even an enemy’s, doesn’t fit the profile of the people i’ve seen in the military community.
what i do know is that it’s been quiet around here. But that doesn’t mean that we are any less proud of our service men and women. i would usually never says this, as we are an Army family but—— Go Navy!
okay so let me get this straight. i really shouldn’t just be realizing this, but i am. but i think we have days where we can’t or don’t want to go outside and play more than 50% of the time here in korea during the year.
on rainy days, obviously we stay in. it wasn’t actually that obvious to us at first because rain can be kinda warm and nice for the most part in hawaii so it’s not necessarily a deal breaker when it comes to outdoor activities. walking in the rain was actually a really fun and popular outdoor activity with us. but here the rain is lots colder and wetter and um, dirtier — what with all the pollution and radiation and yellow sand. so we stay out of the rain. rain means staying in and busting out the board games, video games and tea sets. cool.
we experienced bitter cold too. i thought snow days would just mean staying in, but windy cold days meant staying in simply because it was miserable to go outside at all unless you were quickly running into the car or into another building. so pretty much all of december to february was staying in. never mind the several snow days we had, which i hear was phenomenal for these parts where it maybe snows one or two days out of the whole year. it actually snowed at least 10 times, and then there was the GREAT snow where it got to 2ft and people had no idea what to do. so. we stayed in a lot.
and then this summer there was the searing heat. you couldn’t escape it anywhere outside. stepping outside into the hot humidity was like stepping into a hot sauna. the moist hot air enveloped you and you could feel it pile on layer by layer the longer you stayed outside. which meant that during really bad hot days we’d stay in where we could turn on fans and air conditioning and eat ice pops while watching things about the north pole on tv to try and cool off. lots of korean kids and families did come pouring out into the parks and playgrounds on summer nights though– i did notice. we’ll see if we do the same this year. last year we were fairly new and the large crowds felt overwhelming, but maybe now we can add to the fun.
and finally, during the spring, when i thought we’d have a string of uninterrupted days when we’d be out and about, we get to find out about yellow sand days. apparently, big dust clouds of yellow sand blow up over from china and cause the air to get so thick with the stuff that it’s dangerous for us to get outside and do activities when levels are up. i guess spring means that i will have to watch yellow sand levels and keep the kids in if it goes above a certain level. thus, more days in.
geez. seriously, who knew? who knew i’d have to figure out what to do with the kids all day at home, in the apartment for so many days out of the year? who knew i was such an out and about girl with the kids? not complaining. just observing.
also, no word yet on the job front. just in case you were wondering.
