Gingerbread House

Awesome! Thanks so much, Christine!


It looked too pretty to eat, so the house remained decorative for a while, until I had to babysit my nieces at home. At first, they were only eating the candy decoration and the sugar base. I told them they had to eat the cookie part and they complied, no problem. The gingerbread had an odd sort of sweetness - I'm guessing it's due to the molasses?

My older niece drew a picture (the two little fingers at the bottom are hers):


Yum, indeed.

11/11 is....

As all Canadians know, November 11th is Remembrance Day: a day to remember and give gratitude to the soldiers who fought in times of war (particularly the World Wars). But lest we forget, all sorts of things are celebrated on every day of the year, some more frivolous than others. South Koreans commemorate the sacrifices of its own soldiers in much warmer weather (June) and in November, decided to eat snacks. November 11th, ie. 11/11, is "Pepero Day" in Korea. Pepero is often called "Korean Pocky" but it's got thinner chocolate coating and skinnier than Pocky ('pepe' is an adverb meaning 'really skinny'). You're supposed to give Pepero to your sweetheart on this day (basically one more excuse to annoy single people). I believe it started in the 90's, and the company took this lovely marketing opportunity and ran with it.

Anyway, I sometimes feel odd about November 11th being both Remembrance Day and Pepero Day. Korean people will chat light-heartedly about Nov. 11th, but it just makes me think of poppies and moments of silence, you know? And as Remembrance Day approaches, I start craving Pepero.

So last year, I decided to commemorate(?) both days. I ate my Pepero, and then made poppies out of the package (I did not mean any disrespect by it). I made three different shapes:



Even as we eat tasty, crunchy, chocolate-covered snacks - we remember.

I made one of these too (more than one, actually, but anyway)

Geez, this is kind of addictive. A bit like oekaki but much less skill required to have fun.



For some reason, the legs don't show... (I did draw them.)

Subway Riding

I have to say, it's pretty easy to get around using public transportation in Seoul. They seriously have to do something about the TTC if they want to make Toronto a "World Class City" like they're always talking about. The subway lines look pretty complicated:


I have to commute a bit over an hour to get to work. If you want to know which lines you should take to get to your destination, you can use the online path-finding whatchamacallit. Below is how I get to work (start from yellow line; the fare for this distance is 1400 won, which is a little less than $2 CDN):


Since most Korean streets aren't named, the exits are numbered to make things easier. When you're meeting somebody at a subway station, for example, you can say, "Meet me at exit number 5." You can give directions this way too. Some stations are quite large, and have many exits.


The most number of exits I've seen so far at a station is 15:


There's not much to say about the platforms, but I found these cross-legged people amusing for some reason, and took a picture (this is at Apgujung Station, which is the station I get off to go to work).

A bajillion in Korea: Unattractive Churches

One thing I noticed in Korea is that there are churches everywhere. And by churches, I don't really mean grand old structures with gothic arches and stained-glass windows and the steeples. Smaller Korean churches often only have the steeples, and these of the most makeshift kind.


(You can click on the pictures to look at the bigger version.) These are all churches found near where I'm currently residing. They take up the top floor(s?) of a plaza building. See how in the third one, after the church service, you have the option of going to the "Beer King" on the second floor. Above it is a Karaoke bar and another (non-bar) Karaoke place. And these churches all have names written on their little symbolic steeple. From left to right, they say "Return" (as in "Return to the fold, ye sinners"?), "Church of Happiness", and "The Open Church".

The church may also be this square gray building, with few identifying marks other than the huge cross on them. Non-Christian Korean people often have a bad impression of churches; maybe if the church buildings look nicer they'd feel more kindly towards them? Finally, look yonder, a distant light beckoning, the ligh of... a burning cross? I'm not too fond of crosses that light up, and maybe the ones that do light up shouldn't be red.

I'm kind of craving a beautiful old church right now...

Spring is bright yellow

Well, now I have been in Korea a full 3 weeks. I hadn't expected the weather to be as cool as it has been, but my sister says they've had a strange winter (as did Canadians) and the temperature has been unseasonably low so far. One good thing is the yellow sand from the Gobi desert hasn't been so bad (I'd worried a little). Still, the spring flowers have all bloomed, which caused me much delight. I hadn't realized how little flowering happens in spring in Canada. In Korea, I see flowering trees everywhere I go! At first, I was so surprised to see trees covered with only flowers - no green buds or leaves, just flowers all over:
But now, I feel a bit disappointed to see the trees are starting to bud, since it must mean the spring flowering season is passing.

In Canada, the colour of "Spring" (i.e. the two weeks between winter and summer) is the green of new leaves; nevertheless, it was bright yellow that always made me think of spring. This is because when I was growing up in Korea, the surest and most distinct sign of the retreat of winter was the appearance of the yellow flowers cascading down in this photo: I always thought it strange that you don't see these in Canada. I don't even know what they're called in English (in Korean they're called "genari" - that's a hard "g" at the beginning). They're not the prettiest flowers, but I always liked them; they look so happy and...yellow. They make me think of stars. And who doesn't like something that marks the coming of spring?

MiniCheesecake

Wouldn't that have been an awesome ministry to be included into the world of "1984"? I'm sure Big Brother loves cheesecake. Who doesn't? Anyway, this was my first attempt at making a cheesecake of any kind, and I had no idea what I was doing. I just got this recipe off of allrecipes.com, and went at it. I didn't want to buy any extra pans or anything, and these looked easy to eat also.


They're supposed to be tiny-cupcake sized, but I didn't have the right pan or tiny-cupcake cups. And that'd be too small anyway; you'd have to eat like 3 at once, then feel all guilty about eating so many. But made three times bigger, you'd be able to savour the cheesecake-y goodness with little guilt or fuss.

I also tried to make the crust come all the way around, so that you wouldn't really need the cup to hold it:


It looks interesting but the cheese taste didn't really come out as much in this one. I also kind of failed with the crust; it tasted blah and the texture was kinda nasty. When it was fresh out of the oven, it was pretty greasy looking too. Better luck next time.

So I bought a plant

And it looked like this. I had no idea what it was, but it was cheap and it looked hardy. I saw that it was a perennial so after it blooms, I thought I could just let it be for a while (which is what I did with the CNIB crocus).

It eventually grew into something that looked like this:

Tulips! I hadn't expected that at all.
When the flowers began to wilt, I clipped them,following the same instructions as the crocus, thinking they're both grown from bulbs, so they're pretty much the same, right? (<-faulty logic). I also wanted to take photos of just the flowers.

They didn't look very interesting until they began to dry and gain interesting shapes and textures. I took photos against a background of plain white printer paper.


It's fun to take pictures from different angles!

The plant itself grew a bit more, then began to wilt. I think you're supposed to leave it be as it stores nutrients in the bulb, and when it has wilted and can no longer photosynthesize, you clip it down. It needs a period of cold followed by "spring" to start growing again, I think. I hope I can get it to grow again.