Chocolate Mushrooms

Since moving to South Korea I haven't been able to do one of my favourite things - bake! We don't have an oven only a microwave and a gas burner. It's really annoying.

So when I was out and found this kit to make your own mushroom chocolates I thought I would buy it as it's about as close as I am going to get to a baking fix for a while (unless I meet someone in Korea who will let me use their oven!).

The pictures tell the story of my chocolate mushrooms - the chocolate wasn't the best but they were fun to make.

A visit to Bosan

Last Sunday Rich and I went to Bosan, we had been told that it was a good place to buy western goods. However it really wasn't our scene - lots of military and everything was in US dollars instead of Korean Won which was a little weird. Plus there wasn't anything in Bosan that you can't buy in Uijeongbu.

But they do have a really nice fountain there - with squirrels!

English Cafe Cultural Gathering

This weekend Rich and I took part in the September English Cafe Cultural gathering - this was a day trip organised by our school board and was for both native english speakers and Korean teachers.

We had a few different destinations during the day but my favourite were the Buseoksa Temple and a grape farm in the area.

Pine Bud Drink...

On Korea television there is an incredibly cute ad which features a squirrel whistling "Somewhere over the rainbow"" - it's adorable. The ad is for Lotte Pine Bud drink and when I found a can of it in the weekend I thought I would try it to see what's it's like - the squirrel is so cute the drink must be great right?

All I can say is that Pine Bud drink is pretty weird! It smells a bit like Pine-o-clean and also tastes a bit like what I imagine Pine-o-clean tastes like...so not so good.

Little Gifty Things

One thing I've noticed since becoming an english teacher in Korea is that the Korean's love to give gifts - just little items like rice cakes or cookies.

I've recieved many little things from my students since I have begun teaching - usually just little food items like the heart cake below (which looks cutier than it tastes) it's a good way to taste small amounts of various sorts of Korean food.

Sunday Riverwalk in Uijeongbu

On Sunday Rich and I decided to stay in Uijeongbu and head out for a walk, Rich had heard from some of the teachers at his school that there was a river walk in Uijeongbu so we thought we'd check it out.

He's some photo's from our walk - it's actually much nicer than it looks in the photographs.

Cheesy Korean Pop Music - It's addictive

I'm not usually one for pop music - but it's everywhere in Korea and this track is actually pretty fun and also constantly in my head!

Korean Hello Kitty - Store Window in Insadong

Teahouses, crafts, festivals & vegetarian feasts....just another weekend

After a pretty huge week of teaching Rich and I hadn't really made any plans for Saturday except for heading to our first ever "Seoul Veggie Group" meeting at Loving Hut so we decided it might be a good idea to head to Insadong again to sample some of the many tea houses.

But when we arrived at Insadong we were easy distracted from our original mission as there was a huge arts style festival on in Insadong where we sampled some (really strong) rice liquor, saw some amazing cultural performances and also took part in some of the craft stalls that were around for the day - I decorated the back of a hand held mirror with glitter and other pretty things.












If you'd like to see how the final version of my mirror turned out here it is!
After all the craziness of the festival we finally made it to the tea house which was pretty amazing, the tea was really good - I had quince flavoured tea and Rich had plum tea and the environment was so calming. There was even some little birds flying around in the tea house (well in cages - they weren't just flying about randomly).








After our tea house experience we headed out the the vegetarian dinner and Loving Hut and met a lot of cool other ex pats which was great. We finished the night off with a walk in Seoul Grand Children's Park (oh and a massively long subway ride home!)