To give you an idea of why we’re not as write-y write as we always claimed we would be: I came home from work and set about making a lesson for my 5th grade class. That took from about 5 until 7, when I took a break for dinner, I took from 8-9:30 to finish up the lesson. Now I have an After School class to a do a lesson for and when I’m done with that I can get to work on my 7 lesson plans due next week. I love my After School class, but the additional work load has been severe to say the least. The good news is that if we choose to stick around for a second year here we can re-use all of this stuff and pretty much put it on Cruise Control. Phew.

Also, those content pages above will get popped soon. We’re buy deciding which ESL stuff to upload. Between the two of us I think we could publish a full curriculum for our grades.

So, Thanksgiving, as you might have inferred, is not a holiday that celebrate in Korea. They have a Thanksgiving-esque celebration in early October and a sort of vague interest in the concept of American Thanksgiving, but they’re not really paying attention. Which, whatever, of course. But this was our first Holiday away from home.

Thanksgiving is always kind of political- Whose family do you eat with? What house do you eat at? Who’s going to bring that terrible dish again? It’s a little bit barbed, but even at it’s most prickly we spent it among family. And we spent it in the warm and eager period of holiday bliss. Forget your test, forget your crappy car, forget your lousy boss, you’ve got two solid days of ‘Whatever’ time.

But it was weird because we never got that. What I kind of really hated was that Thanksgiving snuck up on me. We spent Halloween by the beach in Busan, but Halloween always kind of comes and goes and, let’s face it, beach weekend is better than ‘Get drunk and throw together a costume at the last minute’ weekend. But Thanksgiving is a Major God of the Holidays, sharing it’s lofty perch with Christmas and lording over the Minor Gods of President’s Day and Columbus Day. And so to just kind of wander into it was. Weird. Like walking in a fog.

Anyway, I’m not a sentimental man, really. I don’t miss much from back home, I’m not pining for America in any intense way. I like the constant challenge of being somewhere ‘else’. But Thanksgiving gave me this lackadasical sadness in my gut, it curled up in there like a grinning Chesire Cat. I couldn’t shake it.

So we decided to just have Thanksgiving. Now, if you’re doing this you have a few options. CostCo has frozen turkeys for about 60 bucks, but this presumes you have an oven. And if you do have an oven, is it larger than a toaster? I didn’t think so. So that one is right out. Option 2 is that a handful of international restaurants have Thanksgiving buffets available for a range of offensive prices. We considered this but the earliest reservation they had was NINE AT NIGHT. We were bummed about this. But, things as things does, someone told us that you could order a turkey from the military base. And to prevent TERRORIST ASSUALT, they’d just deliver it to the base gate. $94.95 for a meal fit for 12. We called in, made the reservation and started inviting people.

The problem was that none of us had ever been to the Military Base. And for an enormous military complex, it is stunningly difficult to find on a map. And Korean Taxi drivers don’t understand the words ‘army’, ‘military’ or ‘garrison’. Pantomiming a man shooting will not aid your cause. Regardless, our neighbor Jaime and I set out to pick up this turkey from the military base we didn’t know how to find. It took us 2 and a half hours and about 4 close calls.

I’m going to skip ahead here and say: THIRD, we went to the wrong military base. Did you know there were 2? There are. Do not go to the one with the guys in body armor WEARING enormous light up ‘X’s that mean ‘Go away’. But if you do, a six foot Korean who sounds like Ray Ramano’s TV brother will suddenly speak perfect English and sneak you past the guards and only then, on Korean military soil, tell you that you’re in the wrong base. Was that a test?

Anyway, he’ll also say, “Leave the base and go up the hill”, which sounds pretty easy. Except that the hill is half a mile away. Long story short: We got our turkey. We literally had EXACTLY enough money, down to pocket change. We took a cab home. We had 11 people, 8 Americans and 3 Koreans, and we ate everything. It felt like real Thanksgiving and the cat in my guts shut up and went home. And everyone drank too much because you can. It was, at the very center of it, nice.

What’s not so nice: A hangover, a school day that starts extra-early and a ‘Teachers Trip’ that is SEVEN HOURS LONG. It starts at 3. It ends at 10. I might die in the middle.

Sorry about that DRANK above, right as I started to type that post title that killer Sleigh Bells jam Crown on the Ground came on. Have you heard it? It’s the sickest jam this side of the MOON. It sounds like a grim hip-hop club right at the moment a bling-ed out Voltron with 12 story sub woofers in it’s legs obliterates it with ION LASERS. It’s equal parts big booty Method Man beats, dreamy space jam Cocteau Twins pretty female vox and fuzzy noise pop. Which is like a dream listen. Bacon dipped in fudge and wrapped in a waffle or something.

Anyway, this is not about that. This is about Pocari Sweat. Pocari Sweat is one of those things that always turns up on a list of the TWENTY CRAZIEST THINGS I SAW IN ASIA lists, mostly because it has “Sweat” in the name. Big letdown: Hey, it’s pretty good! It tastes like Gatorade back when you had to make Gatorade from a powder and it came in flavors that existed like Orange and Lemon-Lime and not RIP TIDE RUSH or ARCTIC ICEFLOW. One of those is a real flavor, the other one I made up, but I’m sure someone at Gatorade is taking notes. Also, ugh- Riptide Rush? Who wants to drink something called ‘Riptide’? That’s like. Ben & Jerry’s Silty Sand Fudge.

So, silly name aside Pocari Sweat is pretty good and I drank it a lot during the summer and also when I get drunk and do not want a hangover. It has electrolytes. And resupplies your ions. In case you have a grimy club to BLOW UP.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Last week Chris of Chris in South Korea fame alerted us to a really fun little event- The Seoul Lantern festival. Lantern festivals aren’t hugely unusual, but they usually happen in the Spring or Summer. A fall lantern festival is an event, indeed. It was also the first really, really cold day of our time here. We bundled up earlier in the day and spent some time in Insadong, a popular tourist market, with the intent to make our way towards the lantern festival. We got sidetracked by a weird toy museum and a nice dinner, but around 8:30 we made it to the festival.

The festival was taking place in a location called Cheonggyecheon, which was ground zero for Seoul’s downtown revitalization efforts. It’s a beautiful stream that cuts right through Seoul. Since the 1400’s it’s been a sort of landmark, but earlier in the 20th century it fell into disuse and eventually became such an eyesore that it was covered with concrete and buried in roads and highways. The revitalization helped restore the creek to it’s former beauty. Urban planning nerds can click through to the Wiki-link for details on how a major world city tore down two of it’s most highly trafficked roads, built a creek and won out.

So, anyway, it’s 8:30 and chilly and we get down to the creek and it’s just beautiful. In the middle of the creek they’ve positioned these lanterns over the running water and they look so warm and cozy. The crowds were huge and it was a little difficult to stop and get a good shot, especially given the lighting conditions, but I nabbed a few dozen keepers and you can use the gallery above to give them a peek. It was, unfortunately, the last night of the festival, but I know we’re both excited for the next one. It seems a little silly, but “Stand on a bridge surrounded by colored lanterns” is definitely on the ‘White People go to Asia’ checklist So, check.

This is not my picture. Oh, I had pictures, but in a piqued fit of self-preservation, my unconscious mind led me to delete them from my camera. What you see there is not a delicious cinnamon roll, but instead a ghastly minon of the pastry Satan called ‘Garlic Olive Roll’. Take that in for a moment. Garlic. Olive. Donut. Sugar. It sounds like the losing ambition of a particularly batty Top Chef contestant. Have you parsed it yet?

Our very first morning in Korea, something like 10 hours after getting here, we popped into Dunkin’ Donuts because we could read the sign and we knew what it was. One of the truer delights of going abroad is seeing familiar things go utterly weird and in that regard D&D delivered. Sure, there were old favorites like the plain glazed and the ‘Bavarian Cream’ (What, you don’t know where Boston is, Korea?), but there was also a whole new spectrum. There’s something called a ‘Chewisty’, which is 8 small, rice flour donuts bonded into a ring. It’s my new favorite donut.  The rice flour gives it a chew so that the total effect is Donut Bubble Gum. There’s also a segmented heart filled with both jelly and cream.

And the there are misfits. Originally there was just the First Sin, Garlic Olive Roll. But then something called ‘World Donut Festival’ rolled into town and it was like. Let me paint a scene: There’s a new temp at Dunkin’ Donuts Korea HQ. The big boss says, “Larry! Get these rejected donut ideas down to the incinerator!”. Meanwhile, a pretty young secretary is bringing up a folder full of Good Donut Ideas. Larry leaves the office and is SMITTEN with this pretty lady and bumps right into her. In the commotion that follows, the papers get all mixed up. The result is World Donut Festival.

Now, it’s not all bad. There’s an ‘Olive’ Chewisty that tastes exactly like the regular Chewisty. There’s also a yogurt filled Greek donut. The one that made the headlines on food blogs was a ‘Kimchi Donut’, but it’s actually a Kimchi Croquette and you can get them 3 for a dollar at any self-respecting Korean bakery so BACK OFF WHITE DEVILS. But there was also something called ‘Lentil Cacao’, a chocolate frosted donut speckled with raw lentils. And some kind of baked bean thing from the country of Hell.

But none of them could muster the kind of audacious horror of Garlic Olive Roll. It’s a permanent fixture at D&D, this is not a seasonal item. This donut stands with the Pink Frosted and Toasted Coconut Thing. It’s a real deal. 6 weeks after my first sighting, I finally picked it up. I figured, “Hey, it’s here everyday. And maybe it’s a mistranslation thing. After all, who would put garlic and sugar on a donut?”. Had I bothered to be more critical, I would have remembered that this is a county that studs it’s cakes with tomatoes.

So I bought this thing and I bit it and I never want to tell you what it’s like because it is HORRIBLE FOREVER AND EVER BE GONE YE DEMONS. I’m not averse to the concept, but the execution is putrid. It’s like someone made the regular glazed donut and rolled it though the trash pile at the Olive Garden. It tastes like every low-rent Chinese food meal I’ve ever had. Who did this and why?

Point being: It’s not even a novelty, like those banks shaped like boobs or the pot bellied Batman I spent 7000 won prying from a crane machine. It’s a bad idea in Korea, it’s a bad idea on the Moon and it’s a bad idea on every plane of the Multiverse.

Made some changes. Didn’t make all of them. You can now comment! The commenting interface is ugly beyond ugly! Top links still go nowhere, but that’s being rectified as we speak. Any problems, you know where to reach us!