Let's sing!

Ever since I first thought about visiting South Korea, there is one thing that I've wanted to do above all others.

I can happily say that I have finally done it. Karaoke, or its Korean name 노래방 (no-rae-bang), which seems to roll off of the tongue easier. 

I'm not sure why it took so long. Karaoke rooms are about as prolific as coffeeshops here, and if you glance up at the sea of glowing signs for the typical multi-story business buildings, you're bound to find a few.

Below is a street just out side of our old apartment. I took this shot a while back, because it had rained and I thought it was pretty. But looking back, I saw that the karaoke place my friend and I went to is pictured here. Look at the building on the right. The bottom store, which is super bright and says "Square" is a mobile phone carrier. Above that is the karaoke room, the name is actually "Queen's Avenue song practice place". Above that is a dentist. You can see there are many things in these buildings. In the building on the left, that's a Hyundai car dealership on the ground floor, and a Chicago pizza pub just above it.

When we first walked in, for me the feeling was reminiscent of a spa. Everything was bright, clean and there is a counter and receptionist where you pay. You take your shoes off in the reception area, step up onto the raised floor and are led to your private singing room.

Two people for one hour of karaoke cost 20,000 won, around 17 dollars. But later I found out, it is customary to receive free minutes. We ended up singing for 2.5 hours without having to pay anything more.

So here was our room just as we began to settle down. The microphones are in the corner between the window and TV on a charging stand.

Here are the essential tools. 

Remote - Each song is assigned a number which you punch in using this remote. It also allows you to search the database for specific songs and artists. There are several other handy features like pitch and speed adjustment. Like when we sang a particularly low song by a male artist, we would hit the # button a few times and it would raise the song's pitch into our higher, girly range. There is some distortion to the quality, but this is karaoke after all.

Song Books - Songs are listed in alphabetical order by song title. The largest section is of course for Korean songs, then there is a sizable English section and finally recent updates listed by month. The January 2016 page, at the very back of the book, had the latest Korean Pop songs and a handful of international hits by people like Adele, Sam Smith and Justin Bieber.

Tamborines - You know what to do.

Microphones - Oops. Forgot to include those. They're important too.

 Like I said, the songs are listed in alphabetical order. Which quickly convinced me that I need to learn the order of the Korean alphabet, something I have been putting off, having deemed it unimportant. Now I have finally found a compelling reason to learn alphabetical order.

The English section has a huge variety of hits - everything from classics like the Eagles and Queen to contemporaries like Rita Ora. I was quite impressed to see the names of so many artists from every decade and almost every genre. Have a look.

And once you start singing, the lights dim, the music thumps and a colorful lights start flashing and swirling in time with the song.

We had such a fun time. In the pauses between songs, you can hear the crooning and yelling of people in nearby rooms which is a funny yet sobering realization. They can hear us too? Since we went in the afternoon, we heard teenagers, but later at night the crowd would age a bit. 

We sang a variety of English and Korean songs. Often we would pick out familiar songs in the language more foreign to us, only to discover that the other one did not know it. My friend picked out some songs by Stevie Wonder and the Beegees and had to sing solo. While I chose some Korean pop songs and ended up hitting the high notes and rapping by myself. Thankfully the remote also has a skip button.

No one interrupts you when you are in the room. It is your safe place to sing as loudly and awfully and awesomely as you wish. The small digital box beneath the TV displays the amount of minutes left. Occasionally the amount increased, as free minutes were added, but it finally ticked down to zero, the dance lights faded and the room brightened.

I didn't take any action photos of us singing. We were were too busy having fun, and I barely remembered to take these few pictures. Should I risk the embarrassment and get a few shots of us next time? Maybe drag Isaac along?

I wish they had karaoke rooms like this back home. I know there are comparable places in big cities, but it seems hard to find a comparable place for such a cheap price, and with the same safe, clean feeling.

Before I go, let's talk about snow. We had a few more snow days, enough that I have now gotten into the habit of running to the window each morning to check for flakes. There was no serious accumulation, but one snow was special because the snowflakes were large enough to easily be seen with the naked eye. I spent over an hour on our balcony trying to take pictures, hunched over my cell phone after making the disappointing discovery that the batteries of all of our dedicated cameras were dead.

One word for snowflake in Korean is 눈꽃, which is literally snow flower. I think it is such a pretty name, conveying the magical, impossible beauty and intricacy of these little frosted flakes. Or maybe I'm just a typical Southerner, never losing my excitement for the white stuff.

Moving

We did it!

The previous week, Isaac and I packed up quite a bit of stuff that we did not want the movers to handle, like small electronics, valuables and underwear. During this process, I learned to my delight that Isaac and I have the same packing style - painfully meticulous. There was this moment of recognition: I was taping a bag of half-empty pasta closed and he was folding and refolding a briefcase strap he rarely uses. Our television and plants and clothes had yet to be considered, for both of us were sidetracked by less important details.

On Moving Day's Eve, we carried two loads to our new apartment. It's a brisk 10 minute walk when you're weighed down by luggage but still eager to escape the 20 degree night.

Friday morning the movers showed up around 8:15 in the morning and went to work. They used baskets and moving blankets to wrap up and secure all of our stuff while we just kind of stood around watching and worrying.

Once packed, they shifted everything to the landing outside of our apartment. The next step, moving all of our stuff from the twelfth floor to ground level, I was a little excited about. The moving truck has a special arm with a platform on the end that stretches up to our floor and then raises and lowers its cargo. It's a sound I've grown familiar to, hearing different residents move into the buildings nearby, the long metallic sliding as it the empty platform falls down to reload.

I think this moving system is pretty neat and efficient. Probably because it is just never something I considered before moving to a big city - how to best move in and out of high apartments.

The weather was sunny and below freezing, so the whole time I was super concerned about this huge orchid we have that originally belonged to Isaac's grandmother. I kept trying to guard it and keep the movers from bumping it and leaving it outside.

After a final walk through and farewell, we reluctantly met the realtor to finalize our move out, then trudged up the road to our new place, a little less excited about the unpacking process.

This part felt the most tedious, I just wanted to kick the movers out and do it all myself. We were getting pretty hungry by this point too since it was now lunchtime, maybe that's why I felt grouchy. Finally the movers left and we were able to start rearranging things and settling in. Since the apartment is basically the same layout as before, just putting things back in their place made it look and feel so much more homey.

We grabbed a quick lunch at one of the bunshik restaurants close by. Bunshik literally means minute food so it's basically like Korean fast food or street food. I shared before about this kind of food which we ate at a market. Something about the weather being cold has us both craving bunshik more and more. Especially the fishcake on skewers in the first picture below. It's always served in a steaming hot salty broth which is just perfect for warming up during the winter. All of this food cost 10,000 won, or $8.25.

Of course, the views outside of our windows have changed. Our living room has the floor to ceilings windows once again, and we now see the almost endless towers of other apartment buildings. We try to make sure to close the blinds at night now in order to avoid giving any of our new neighbors a show.

Below is a shot out the windows on the other side, where our office, kitchen and washing machine are. This is the side that Isaac loves to hate because he can see his office, I have no clue which building it is. I think it's quite nice, even has some mountains in the background there.

Afternoon snow showers this Wednesday and Thursday helped make our new place seem more dreamy, not to mention inviting after tromping through the wet snow. Here's a panorama shot as the snow was falling.

And this is our apartment building (on the right) from the street corner. Then a view of the same street corner looking down from our balcony.

Our company/mountain view once more.

So I suppose everything is settled in once more. We happened to walk by our old apartment building this weekend just as the new residents were moving in. The tall arm of the moving truck was stretched up to the 12th floor again. It made us a little sad. That place was our first home together as a married couple, and where I met my first friends here, our old neighbors.

But our new place is growing on us. The heated floors work better, I'm not sure why, but the difference is quite noticeable. We are able to feel the heat beneath our feet and it does not make the air as dry as our previous place. The sun also rises up outside of our living room windows, so it is a treat to be able to see that each day. A new year and a new home. I hope your new year is off to a solid start too!

Ashley

Lately it's become clear that Isaac and I have a favorite restaurant.

We like this place so much, we decided to go there on Christmas Day. At 10:45 in the morning.

It's on the second floor, and here's a shot I took as we ran excitedly up the steps. We went just 15 minutes after it opened, worried that it would be too crowded. I can confidently say that we were both ecstatic about eating here.

Maybe it seems a little strange, but sure enough, as we began chomping down on our "Christmas brunch", families started piling into the place.

This restaurant is Ashley, located in the building outside of our living room window that colorfully lights up each night. It markets itself as "American Grill and Salad". The first time I visited this restaurant was last year in December 2014, when I came to South Korea over the holidays to visit Isaac. He suggested we go there for dinner.

My first impressions then were:

1. Why is it called Ashley? Shouldn't it be Ashley's?

2. It's 18,000 won per person? ($15) No way are we paying that much for an American style buffet. 

I've been to Golden Corral and it is not worth that much.

So we ordered a to-go pizza and did not eat at Ashley. Isaac was very sweet, doing just as I wanted. Maybe I overreacted because I was only visiting for a couple of weeks, and wanted to try restaurants different than home. Whatever the excuses and reasons, I was so wrong. Since that first visit last year, I've learned that the weekday lunch price is way cheaper and that even the dinner price is well worth it.

The first mistake I made was taking the restaurant at face value - being branded as an American style buffet was a negative in my book. I go back to my childhood of being a picky eater and seeing few things I like; I visualize big stacks of cafeteria trays and plastic cups.

This place has a much nicer feeling to it.

Say "cheese" pizza guys!

The decorations feature charming little bits of Americana like sports banners and classic car posters. There are also unexpected decorations, like mannequins wearing the same dress as some actress in a random television show.

We try to sit next to the window, so we can enjoy the inverse of our usual view. It is fun to gaze across the street at our apartment building there and count down from the top to the 12th floor and find our set of windows.

And of course the food is a big draw too. I only took a few pictures, but I think it's enough to give you an idea. All of the food areas are spotless and well-maintained, with a few workers constantly roving the floor talking into mouth pieces about what needs to be replenished and cleaned.

There are plenty of familiar foods - pizza, pasta, tacos - but everything is tinged for the Asian palette. Which I feel a little uncomfortable trying to describe, in case I do so badly, but I'll try. I tend to notice more complex flavors, fresh produce and less sugary or salty than what I'd get back home. Sometimes "complex flavors" just means adding in a contrasting taste to familiar foods, like ordering a cheese pizza to find sweet corn kernels scattered beneath the cheese (true story).

Below is a mixed rice bar, with all of the fix-ins to pile on top of rice to make the Korean staple bibimbap.

Below is a pretty awful picture of Isaac at the soup station, usually a crowded place. Unless, of course, you're eating Christmas brunch like us! This is a Vietnamese noodle soup (pho) bar where you fill up your bowl with noodles and bean sprouts and whatever else you want, then add the warm soup stock.

On the right is one of my favorites, the dessert fruits. Grapefruits with carmelized sugar and the tray closest the camera, popular with me and children, is a mixture of mangoes and dragon fruit in a sweet syrup.

The salad bar, which includes things most un-salad-like. I have not tried the "sweet pumpkin salad cake", maybe next time.

Isaac always ends up with one plate that looks like this.

Below there is Vietnamese noodle soup, a spicy mustard chicken and apple salad. Lots of Indian curry and rice, fried boneless chicken and gorgonzola pizza. I read somewhere that gorgonzola pizza is a specialty of Korea. Which made me think that, in fact, before coming here I had never tried it. Yet almost any restaurant here that serves pizza has a gorgonzola variety. Have you ever tried it before back home in America? Usually here the crust is super thin and light, with the mild tang of the cheese and some garlic as well.

Dessert is worth waiting for too. The beautiful black-seeded fruit is my favorite - passion fruit. It is one of the funnest and delicious things I have ever eaten. It feels almost like an exciting candy, incredibly sour and tangy at first, making your face pucker and mouth water, and then you get to crunch down on the seeds.

I know this was a lot of pictures of food, but maybe now you understand why this is one of our favorite restaurants. It has just enough familiar foods to make me comfortable, but enough variety that I get to try something new each time we go. This past time it was cinnamon nut granola made with ramen rice noodles instead of grains, and it was delicious!

Maybe it sounds a little sad to say that we took more pictures of food than of each other on our first Christmas as newlyweds. But we have this wonderful memory of our hearts pounding as Isaac and I ran across the wide city street, not wanting to miss the crosswalk light, busting through the glass doors and running up the staircase. We were just as excited as any other kids on Christmas morning, and that has to count for something.

Friday is our big moving day, so tonight is the last night we will get to watch the rainbow light show at Ashley outside of our living room window. This post seems like a fitting farewell to our most scrumptious neighbor.

Merry Christmas

I just wanted to hop in and say Merry Christmas!

Feeling a bit homey

For some reason I've been lacking the motivation to make another blog post. I think I want to blame it on this busy time of year.

We will be moving soon. Our housing is taken care of by Isaac's company, so at least for the most part we don't have to handle the paperwork and coordination. We have looked at 5 different apartments within a 10 minute radius of our current place, and finally seem to have found one that will work out.

Looking for a new place was kind of funny. All of the apartments we looked at were in high rise 20 story buildings like ours, and even had the exact same layout of ours, with only minor changes like a mirrored floor plan or no closet. I felt like I wasn't quite sure what I should be checking out in these places. They all looked so similar to our own, just filled with other peoples' junk. Luckily Isaac and our company's real estate person were there to assess important things while I got distracted by photographs, friendly children and pets.

Our new place is only a 10 minute walk from where we are now, but boy does it seem far after settling into our current apartment. Isaac and I catch ourselves being sentimental, admiring how nice it is that our home overlooks a busy street corner, with so many businesses just outside our front door.

This is our street corner. In the top right corner is our apartment building, and although this picture is blurry, perhaps you can tell or imagine that there are plenty of resources nearby for whatever we quickly need or want to grab. Next to our apartment building you can see the headlights of several waiting cars. If you walk ten minutes up that street, you will reach our new place. So it's not such a long ways of course, but we have gotten a bit spoiled I guess. Our new place will be on the 19th floor so it has quite the nice view, and we share the elevator with less than half as many units as we do now, so that's wonderful too.

While I'm talking about areas that have begun to feel like home, I'll mention this place too. Yeongtong is a comfortable 20 minute walk from our house now, and this distance may decrease slightly once we move. It's where you go if you want to "go to town", having a movie theater and two large brand department/walmart/mall type stores. I don't know what you call these kind of stores, but they remind me of all three of those, having a little bit of everything.

Here's a shot of the main road through Yongteong. On the right is Home Plus and on the left (behind the building with trees on top, has a slanted odd roof) is Lotte Mart. These stores usually have one floor that is a large grocery store, another floor with a food court and other floors that feel like department stores with small sections and overly eager staff. Customer service tends to be outrageously good and attentive in South Korea, to the point where it is sometimes annoying.

The Lotte Mart on the left is where the movie theater is that I mentioned before, and its glowing red sign is visible from the 19th floor of our future place. On my recent trips inside these big stores, I took just a few photos of things that are a bit different.

Sloped escalators are the standard way to traverse between floors. When you push a big shopping cart onto it, the wheels automatically lock up, preventing them from rolling forwards or backwards.

These stores are so big, and there is such a large variety of many things. But the bread aisle is just sad. It's a little less than half the length on one side, and even of that, only a third is what I would consider "normal bread". If you look in the picture, what is closest on the left and bottom looks most familiar. Mostly, breads are sold in smaller loaves and packets, and they are more Asian style breads made with rice flour. These tend to be very fluffy, light and sweet, but not what I hope to find on a bread aisle. I've given up the search for finding whole wheat bread, I just don't think it's going to happen.

Now the instant noodle section is no joke! There are one and a half aisles (three sides, hope that makes sense) full of more speedy meals than you can ever imagine. The store was quite crowded this day, so I tried my best to only take shots where people weren't standing. But take my word for it, there are a lot of noodles.

I took a shot of the candy aisle just because it was so bright and cheerful. It is multicultural as well, having a wide selection of candies from all over the world, especially Japan, Europe and America. I guess people can compromise on other foods, but they need their comfort candy from home.

It wouldn't be Korea without aisles full of potted meats and special displays of Spam. It still seems odd to me that Spam is so popular here. Around Korean Thanksgiving back in September, I even saw special gift sets of Spam, decorated cans carefully laid in red velvety cases. We speculated before that it is because of the Korean War. The land and people were in a poor state back then after so much war and harsh occupation; food, especially meat, was scarce. American troops and their Spam must have been a welcomed sight. Please let me know if you know more about this. I'm very curious! It is such a quaint western influence, I can't help but think we have better things to offer the world than Spam.

The meat and fish sections of these stores are no joke either. Next time I go with Isaac I'll try to work up the courage to snap a few pictures to share. One more detail, since we were shopping.

I still struggle with quickly pulling out the right change at the register, the extra tens place still throws me off I guess. 1,000 won is a little less than 100 cents. So if my total is 8760 won from buying a few fruits and veggies, I've got to find 760 won in coins. Not a big deal, just a bit awkward after being used to credit cards and cents. I do like the simplicity of the coins. They say the amount on the face, like "five hundred won", and just say "Bank of South Korea" on the back.

I'm sorry if this post was kind of rambling. December has a way of scrambling the brains. I think our upcoming move and the holiday season has us feeling a little off kilter. I'm holding out for a white Christmas though, just over a week away from the big day and it's not an impossibility. I guess we'll see.

Memory Trick

WARNING: This is basically just a book report. If you stop reading, I'll understand.

One thing I have done a lot of these past few months is read. Of course pictures of Korean adventures are more exciting, but I am also experiencing new things with each book I read. So since this blog is about keeping in touch and what I've been up to, I feel like it's okay to share this type of thing every now and then. I just can't stop talking about this book, and Isaac is probably about sick of the snippets and random facts I keep sharing.

So the book is Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein. It is unique because it is: so interesting that it's hard to put down, non-fiction AND teaches a practical skill.

Basic summary: Joshua Foer is a journalist who was given the assignment to cover a memory competition. He became entranced by these mental athletes, who could memorize strings of meaningless numbers, poetry and decks of cards in record time. Even more surprising to him was that those he interviewed seemed and even professed to be utterly average people. Beneath the wings of a memory champion, Joshua began a year of training to become a mental athlete himself and went on to win the American memory competition just one year after entering this strange culture. This book tells his story and recounts his research all about memory - our brains, history of methods, society's changing perspectives and human anomalies.

This book challenged my ideas about memory and what it means to memorize. I have heard many criticisms about schools requiring memorization. Over the past two years in my teacher's education program, I developed a wrinkled-nose-smelling-something-bad sort of face in reaction to the word "memorize". This book showed me that such negative views towards memorization are a result of our current culture's misuse and misunderstanding of this lost skill.

Contrary to what I have always heard and often thought myself, memorization does not have to be a mindless, robotic task. Effective memorization, as employed by many generations of great thinkers before internet and books were around, is done using wild creativity and imagination. The basic idea is that you create an outlandish mental image which will help you retain whatever information desired. For this is how our memory works naturally. The reason any American can tell you what they were doing on September 11 is because it was an abnormal and surprising day.

So using this method, memory is the ability to paint strange mental snapshots. The more senses you can imagine, the deeper, more memorable the image will be. That sounds much less intimidating than the memorization I tried in school, repeating lines of poems and definitions again and again.

Another aspect that helps our memories is location. Foer and the mental athletes refer to memory palaces, which are locations very familiar to you which you can comfortably walk through in your mind and insert the crazy snapshots you form. Popular memory palaces places like your childhood home or old high school.

This idea is the basis on which world-class mental athletes do much of their performing. To memorize numbers or playing cards, they create a system, assigning an atypical and specific image to each number or card - which can then be combined to create strings of images just like my walk up the driveway, allowing them to recreate the correct order of a string of numbers or cards.

Although memorizing the order of a deck of cards is a cool party trick, I wanted to try out this method on something a bit more useful. So I have begun to memorize Korean vocabulary words, imagining fun and unlikely images and inserting them in my childhood home. I thought I would share the first few just to give you an idea. And because I can't stand to have no pictures, I did some doodles on my cellphone just for fun.


가까스로 ga-kka-seu-ro | adv. barely, nearly
My list starts with me turning off the engine of my car in the driveway. There is a giant crow on the windshield violently pecking at it, yelling "ga! kka!" as cracks spread across the glass like a spiderweb. I know the verb form of this Korean word means to be close, so having a crow pecking close to my face just barely not breaking the windshield makes this image vivid and connects it to the specific word.

세다 se-da | v. to be strong, severe

I get out of the car, assume an impressive martial arts pose, yelling "se" in my best Asian accent. Then crying "da!" I leap through the air to kick the bird. This word was totally new to me, but imagining bashful Betty yelling and furiously jumping seems so ridiculous that I easily remember it.

고르다 go-reu-da | v. to choose, to make level

I walk towards my house, still in the gravel driveway when our dog Rocky appears beside me. On top of his high, broad back there is a silver tray holding two drinks, pink lemonade and regular lemonade. I hesitate, trying to choose which one I want and impressed at Rocky's balance.

I'll stop now, because as you can see, there is nothing miraculous about this process. But I think that is the beauty of it, that it is so simple and doable. Without much effort, maybe 15 minutes daily over the past week spent imagining silly scenes, I have memorized 60 Korean words and their meanings. If I can't sleep or when I am bored, I can walk through my memory palace and check on each word and its definition to see if anything is fuzzy.

It has been a fun and useful exercise to try this memorization method. I am beginning to recognize the words I learned in conversation, like Isaac's father telling me last weekend to choose where we would eat dinner. "Betty-a, gol-la!" That's the conjugated form of the third word on my list.

So if you've made it far, thanks for sticking with me! I hope you found this interesting, and maybe even feel inspired to pick up the book or try this method too to remember something, whether it's a new acquaintance's name or your to-do list.