It's Christmukkah in Korea!

Right now I am sitting watching the sun go down over the mountains. It's Christmas Eve and I'm in Ganseong-eup, a small coastal city in eastern South Korea.

I arrived in South Korea on December 15. The past two weeks have been a blur. I spent the first week in Unseo (a suburb of Seoul) with my cousin Meghan and her boyfriend Dongwon. I ate some traditional Korean dishes, packed myself into overfilled subway cars, practiced some rudimentary Korean, and got a Japanese encephalitis vaccine. On the weekend, Erik arrived (yay!). We spent Saturday with his imo (aunt), imobu (uncle), and cousin. They took us to a delicious Japanese restaurant in Gangnam (yep, like in "Gangnam Style") and then out for coffee on Saebit Dungdungseom, a series of three floating islands on the Han River where part of "Avengers: Age of Ultron" was filmed! You can learn more about these islands and their design here.

Erik, me, and the hippie van in front of Dr. Helen Cho's lab on
Island Viva!

That night, we stayed up late watching "Trainwreck" (with Korean subtitles) and playing the Korean version of Settlers of Catan (it looks wayyyy different!) with Meghan and Dongwon while drinking soju, black beer, wine, and stuffing our faces with chicken, pizza, fries, and nachos (I clearly stuck to the nacho chips and fries). American fast food is really popular here, especially fried chicken and pizza. Every third restaurant is selling fried chicken. Fortunately for me, every fourth store is selling kope (coffee)!

Me playing Korean "Catan". I did not have the cards I needed apparently.
You'll notice the road, settlement, and city pieces are shaped plastic (not
wood blocks) and the resource tiles look different!

On Sunday Erik and I said goodbye to Seoul and started our (long!) journey to Ganseong-eup. The subway to the bus terminal was two hours, and then the bus ride to Ganseong-eup was three hours. During the trip we stopped and got some Korean fast food called "gimbap", which is basically a sushi roll minus the raw fish (they use egg, ham, pork, veggies, etc.). When we arrived home we received our first shipment of goods. It was the small one, with some basic household items like cookware and towels, and some non-essentials Erik packed during a panic moment. We unpacked these and then tried to catch some shut eye on the rock hard mattress we have (we'll be buying a mattress topper ASAP!).

"Gimbap"

Monday was a cleaning day. Unlike in North America where you have to clean up before you move out, in South Korea it's the new tenant that cleans up after the old tenant. Sometimes it can be nasty (just YouTube search dirty korean apartments). Fortunately ours was in decent shape. The worst part was the grey film on everything (I think at some point there must have been a smoker living here) and the sporadic spatterings of stickers on furniture, windows, etc. Koreans LOVE stickers and laminates. They put sticker covers on their windows, furniture, countertops - you name it. In all sorts of ridiculous patterns (we even saw a "Frozen"-themed window covering sticker at the market!). They also put instruction stickers on things. In our bathroom we had two instruction stickers for how to properly brush your teeth. One on the cabinet and one in the shower. I can now say I have developed my sticker-scraping muscles in my hands and forearm - they look awesome. That night Erik took me out for some grilled shrimp at a small restaurant on a back street. It was just okay. The banchan (side dishes) weren't great, there was no rice (WTF?! aren't I in Korea?), and the seafood and meat Erik ordered wasn't the tastiest. Plus it cost like $30! Needless to say I got to pick the next restaurant we ate at and it was wayyy better (and cheaper!). #winning

This is what a good selection of "banchan" looks like.
At the shrimp place we only got three - pickled radish,
garlic stems, and terrible, freshly-made kimchi (just FYI -
kimchi is supposed to be fermented for a long while to be good).

Our second shipment arrived Tuesday, and man was that a nightmare. 65% of the things Erik had in his American home (which was 50% larger than our current apartment) were shipped over, plus a few of my things. Erik described the task of trying to fit everything inside our apartment as "jenga-ing" things into place (super accurate description). We also found out we can't get rid of any of the furniture that came with the apartment, so we have to get creative and repurpose things (e.g. using a TV stand as part of a new bed frame in the guest room). After two days of intense unpacking and sorting and organizing, the space is starting to feel liveable. For those of you familiar with Erik's "room of shame", he now has a "balcony of shame" where all his unorganized military and sporting gear will live for the next year (I just block it out with curtains...).

Last night Erik and I were invited upstairs for tea by Wungshik, whom Erik aptly describes as Ganseong's resident socialite. Wungshik speaks English very well and, since he lives in the same building the US soldiers are housed in, he has taken it upon himself to familiarize the soldiers with the region and its people (including the grumpy ajoo-ma [old woman] on the second floor, whom we have yet to meet!). Wungshik is married to a very nice woman who also knows some English, but is soft-spoken. Today he took us out for gimbap for lunch and on Saturday (Boxing Day in Canada) he is going to take us to Sokcho, the biggest city nearby (about a 20 minute drive south of us). Wungshik's parents are going to have us over on Saturday night for steamed crab (yum!).

Tonight Erik and I will be setting up our Christmas tree (he brought one over - woohoo!), playing board games, and indulging in the pomegranate soju I picked up at the market today. Note: I do not like regular soju (it tastes too much like vodka to me) but I love the fruit-flavoured soju. So if you're ever in Korea, don't despair if you don't like the traditional stuff - there are other options!

Fruit flavoured soju! Blue is blueberry, red is pomegranate,
and yellow is lemon. I've also seen peach and orange flavours!

I'll post a picture of our Christmas tree and Christmas presents and Christmassy us sometime soon, along with a video tour of our apartment! I'm also working on posts about all the feelings I've been processing in regards to leaving Ottawa and about my adventures on the west coast prior to coming to Korea - so stay tuned, folks!