Driving and Shopping and Eating Oh My!

We have had a lot going on lately so I will do my best to recount all of our latest adventures.

Driving: We took a trip to Daegu on Saturday to Camp Walker. Chuck (the guy Dave is replacing) drove us, and though the driving style is rather different here than anywhere else I have ever lived, we are blessed to have pretty minimal traffic here on the southern most part of South Korea. Yesterday Dave and I went and took a written test, on base, to get our Korean driver's licenses. We both passed and now can venture out into the streets... yikes! We are going to try to buy a car soon and are thinking of getting a car like this one.


The car is very small (which is important for parking) and you get a 50% discount on all of the toll roads if you have a super compact fuel efficient vehicle. Which is always a good thing. We thing we can get one that is just a few years old for under $2,000.

Shopping: While in Daegu we bought lots of things we needed for the house (cleaning supplies, printer ink etc.) but I also got a new mobile phone! I have rejoined the world. As much as I wanted to be like everyone else back home... I couldn't get the iphone 4s because they couldn't activate the phone on a weekend, and I wasn't going to be able to come back up to Daegu for a while. As a result, I ended up with the next best thing, the LG Optimus EX. The phone is an Adroid smart phone and it is quite fancy. I am having a bit of trouble learning how to use it because the user's manual is all in Korean, and so are several of the applications on the phone. I am learning though...

Job update: I have applied for a job on base, after being chased down by the school principal. They are apparently in desperate need of a substitute teacher and so I will likely become the new base school sub. It pays about $100 a day and I might get to start an after school club choir! :) I will keep you posted on any updates. 

Cooking: Though cooking has been a bit more difficult than usual due to our lack of kitchen tools (our stuff may still be a month more before we see it) I have been trying to use some of the local produce/ingredients at dinner. I have been talking to some of you about these amazing mushrooms. I don't know what they are called, because the signs at the grocery store are always in Korean, but here are some pictures. You can get a sense of size in the image on the right.

 So... I decided to make a vegetarian vegetable noodle soup the other day. They don't sell vegetable stock on base and I wouldn't know what to look for out in town, so I decided to make my own. I got lots of local vegetables and chopped them up, and about 3 hours later I had a pretty darn good stock. At about that time, Dave came home and he tried the stock, agreeing that it was indeed a good stock especially since I was winging it without my cookbooks. I decided that it would make a better soup if I cooked the noodles in the stock. The noodles cook pretty quickly so I had Dave's meat and my tofu already cooked and set aside. Once the noodles were cooked, I lost my mind and was in such a hurry to make sure that I didn't overcook them, that I strained them into the sink... which means that I dumped my 3 hour stock/soup base down the drain.... Now, at this point, I don't have time or even the vegetables to make another stock, so I threw a few vegetables in some water, boiled it and threw some soy sauce in the liquid and called it soup. Once all of our vegetables, noodles and tofu/meat were added to our individual soup bowls, it actually turned out pretty well, but I was rather disappointed that stupidly strained my soup base down the drain. Oh well!

And now for something completely different:

 The Monty Python rabbit lives outside of our house. He is quite clean and well fed, so we think he must be eating the locals... or maybe just some carrots. 

 

 And, last night while we were walking to the noodle restaurant just off of base, we saw the very first cherry tree blossoms starting to bloom! Spring is coming!!!!!

 This is the Noodle restaurant. We at there again last night. Our total dinner for noodle soup and dim sum was less than $8. And it tasted fantastic!!!! :)

More updates to come, stay tuned!