Happy Thanksgiving!

We've been pretty busy lately, but we've still had time to think about how much we miss all things American, especially food. Even though I don't eat turkey, I still have fond memories of crustless pumpkin pie (thanks Grandma!) and my dad's famous chocolate bread pudding. In years past, I have also had vegetarian Thanksgivings with friends with some pretty amazing food. Since we are recluses here in Korea, we don't have friends in our town to celebrate. We also didn't have any time off, since this is Korea, so we didn't have much time to cook anything. All said, I was pretty pumped to crank out some Thanksgivingish food for nostalgia sake.

I spent quite a bit of time preparing for our dinner for two. Things would have gone more smoothly and efficiently if we had more than two burners and an 8x8 toaster oven. Counter space would be nice too. I greatly miss my mini food processor, hand mixer, and baking pans too. Oh well, we made do and came up with a pretty fabulous dinner!

On the menu at Michael and Lisa's was: Tofu and Mushroom Pot Pies, Cranberry Pecan Stuffing, Garlic and Parmesan Mashed Potatoes, and Mini Pumpkin Pies.

We paired it with the finest French wine that Homeplus has to offer for less than $30 and sat down to a quiet 10:00 dinner.

We downloaded some Thanksgiving favorites for our eyes to indulge in:

We completed our night Skyping to family during their family dinners. It made us miss everyone all the more, but we're excited to be coming home in the not-so-distant future.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!

What's Happening in Our Neck of the Woods

What's going on Gizmo? Do you see something out the window?

 Holy cow! There's a zoo out in the alleyway!

The kindergartens in Korea really overdo it sometimes. For their art show, they treated the kids to a little "zoo." It consisted of a badger, a spider monkey, some rabbits, some turtles, a porcupine, a himalayan cat, a dalmation puppy, a coati, an iguana, lots of assorted birds, and a pony. Of course Korea is all about the photo op, so the kids only posed on the pony rather than going on rides.

The art show included a Christmas tree, nice!

The kindergarten's mascot

Just a note - I wasn't sure if everyone knew this or not - we live across the street from the "kindergarten". Regular schooling for kids here starts in first grade so to give the kids a chance to socialize (some even offer language and art classes) you can enroll your kiddos into privatized education. The kids across the street (apart from playing with zoo animals) sing, play the recorder, and basically run around wild.

Farewell to Fall

This is the prettiest Korea looks. We're trying to soak it all in and enjoy it because for the next 2ish months we have left, there will be nothing to look at but barren trees and brown grass. Some trees near our house are bright red and it's always nice to walk by and look at them. The weather here has not been as nice as back in the states. Our nicest day this month has been a high of 55. The leaves are quickly falling off of the trees and it's only a matter of time before we must bundle up in hats and winter coats.

On the bright side, winter means snow. We are planning a ski trip in February during Lunar New Year, so we have that to look forward to! Until then, we will just have to remember the beautiful fall leaves and ignore the ugly landscape around us.

Toilet Training Update

Gizmo has been faithfully using the green seat to do her business for a few months now. We were hoping that she  would be moving on sooner, but we went at her pace. Last weekend we went out and bought a padded toilet seat. The idea was that it would be textured, giving Gizmo a less slippery surface to land on and the illusion of something to bury. I don't know if she bought it.

We installed it on Sunday. She definitely wasn't thrilled with it, but she seemed to have no problems hopping up onto it. The first night, she went #1 with no problems. She was not excited about #2 however. She whined and cried all night and finally in the morning she started digging on the bed. I hurriedly carried her to the bathroom. When I checked the bathroom a couple minutes later, I found that she had pooped on the floor. Ugh.

That night while Michael was on the computer, he didn't notice until it was too late that Gizmo was pooping on the bed. Yuck.

We decided to give her one last chance. She was having zero problems going #1, so we thought she might just need a little more encouragement for the other part. That night I was vigilant about her bathroom activities. She kept me up most of the night worrying that she was going to poop on something else. Finally, I stuck her in the bathroom and closed the door, forcing her in there until she went. And she did!

Gizmo in action.

The next night was much less stressful. She didn't whine and she did her business before we went to bed so I caught it on camera. I've noticed that she places 3 out of 4 feet on the toilet seat. She needs to have all four on the seat before we can remove the tray underneath. We will keep at the way things are now until she is really comfortable, then we will try to remove the tray. This will probably be 4-6 weeks from now.

So, steady progress. Gizmo is not completely litter free but she is getting there. We're hoping that before we leave Korea she will be good to go!

Happy Halloween!

It's a little late, but in Korea we are sometimes ahead and sometimes behind the US on certain things like celebrating a holiday that normally occurs on October 31st.

We spent the month of October encouraging our students to draw pictures of pumpkins, zombies and ghosts during any spare time, but the hagwon we teach at is a "serious academy" whose idea of "game day" is to make all of the kids write and memorize a speech and perform it in front of their peers every four weeks. The parents we cater to don't like it when their kids have fun in Englishee class. So we didn't prepare anything for Halloween in our classes and in turn didn't really prepare ourselves for our second favorite holiday of the year.

The weekend of Halloween was spent watching zombie and vampire movies like 28 Days Later and 30 Days of Night. We also put some Alien and Aliens into the PS3 for some nostalgia of the 80s. If we were social people, we might have hit up Seoul for a party, but this was good enough for us.

My mom sent us an Emergency Halloween Care Package from the USA, but it somehow ended up in South Africa instead of Korea so it was late in getting here. It arrived Tuesday afternoon. There was a ton of candy and some pencils and little scary plastic toys so we figured we could make some goodie bags for the kids. I stayed up late evenly distributing the candy and toys into 47 clear plastic fruit waste bags and tied them with yarn that Michael never used when he was crocheting.

We handed them out between classes on Wednesday and Thursday and they went over pretty well. Some excitedly told us thank you as they grabbed their bags and our director told us we spoiled the kids with a "lot of candy!" Most of the kids we just told them we had a surprise for them, but the older kids I told them that it was from my mom. "Eddie" said, "Your mom is very generous!"  A few kids came to class with their newly sharpened pencils and one precocious little girl told us about how her mom played a prank on her with the plastic centipede in her goodie bag. So thanks mom, you made our kids' day!

New Session

We're slowly chipping away our months here in Korea. We just started a new session on Wednesday - the second-to-last one! Things are constantly changing at the Hagwon - new students, new schedules, dropped students, and new classes to teach.

This session Michael and I have the lightest schedules since we started here back in February. We now teach just 25 classes a week each, which is pretty awesome. We're teaching more classes and doing less tutoring - which is nice - and we have time off to work on lesson plans and mess about on our computers.

Exciting news - we will be home in about 4 months! Time is going quickly for me - I've been keeping busy enough, but Michael (who let's face it, has been homesick since day one) is not coping as well. He started a countdown some months ago and we're down to about 100 days to our year anniversary. We'll keep you posted on when we find out we're coming back.