Explorations and Cookies

Our alarm clock is funny. It's one of those that when the alarm goes off, it tells you the time and temperature. The first few times we used it, it seemed to be fairly accurate with the temperature, but for the past few mornings it has been saying that the temperature is "negative 66 degrees Fahrenheit". Ha! that's cold! But then when we hit the snooze button and it goes off ten minutes later, it will say "78 degrees Fahrenheit".

The plans for this weekend looked quite a bit more romantic than the actual weekend played out. Before work on Friday, we planned to have a fairly quiet night so that we could get up early on Saturday and go explore Chilgok. For some reason, we have been setting our alarm for 8:30 every morning, but we're too exhausted to get up that early (which isn't early at all). So Friday night was very quiet. We ate cheese and crackers while we played cards. Then we watched a few episodes of Seinfeld and were asleep by midnight. But when our alarm went off at 8:31, we could not drag ourselves out of bed. Our eyes wouldn't even open. We slept until 9:30, got up, ate breakfast, sat down on the couch to read and study Korean, and took a nice hour or so long nap. We're thinking that maybe we're not sleeping very well at night, and that's why we can't get up in the mornings. Needless to say, we didn't get out of the house until 2:45 to go exploring, and when we walked outside it was freezing! And windy! We walked around for a while...a couple hours at least...and took a few videos and pictures. Exploring in a foreign country is different than exploring San Francisco or Austin. We walked around and didn't know what an opened the bag to find not candied nuts, but small, donut-hole like treats but without any glaze. They were quite delicious, and we enjoyed these mystery treats as we "exploredything was that we were walking past. We did buy a small bag of candy from a sidewalk vendor. When we walked past the first time, the smell and the look of the sign indicated candied nuts. So after one trip past the small portable candy shack, I decided to turn around and make a purchase. I handed the lady my 1000 won and she asked which one I wanted (I think). This was a surprise because I didn't even know there were two varieties of the product she was selling. So, I looked at the bags she had ready and just pointed to one. She smiled and handed me that one, and we were on our merry way. I" Chilgok.

Saturday night we cooked a hodge-podge meal, consisting of fried potatoes, shredded beef with tomatoes and mushrooms, and scrambled eggs. Weird, I know. We were super hungry and didn't really want leftovers, so we just had to cook something. Potatoes, beef, and eggs were the result. It was not too bad, except Korean ketchup tastes a little funnier than American ketchup (assuming American ketchup is even funny). But this small obstacle didn't stop us from devouring a full plate and thoroughly enjoying it. After dinner, we started talking about all the desserts we loved and how we couldn't have them now because we don't have a full-size oven, only a large convection toaster oven. Even if we had a full-size oven, finding the proper ingredients at the grocery store would prove to be a larger problem. After several proclamations about how much we loved and missed chocolate chip cookies, we decided to make a trip to Home Plus to see if we could sniff out all the required ingredients. So, we arrived at Home Plus and walked to the aisle that we thought would contain the flour. As we were walking down this aisle I happened to look up and see a bag of (my favorite) Hershey's Dark Chocolate Chips. Success! Then we began searching for everything else we needed: flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, salt, and vanilla. Praise to be Home Plus for designating a 10 foot section of Aisle 3 strictly to making chocolate chip cookies. We found everything we needed right there! The vanilla was in powder form and labelled "vanilla flavor," but that was OK. We rounded up these ingredients plus a few others and headed home, eager to experiment with toaster oven cookies.

On the walk home we realized that we didn't have a mixing bowl, so we decided to cut the recipe in half and use the teflon bowl that goes in the rice cooker. It worked like a champ! We also don't have any small measuring utensils, so we had to guess at all the Ts/ts measurements which can make or break chocolate chip cookies. We made it home and immediately began mixing up the dough. After combining and mixing all the ingredients, the dough looked pleasingly normal. Now the next challenge was deciphering all the Korean symbols on the toaster oven to determine which was the right setting for baking cookies... Well, we didn't have any luck with that and just ended up just picking a setting with a picture. We popped the cookies in and let them bake! Or maybe it was broil, or roast, or toast. I'm not certain. Whatever it was, the cookies turned out decent, and we had a nice dessert before bed. We saved most of the dough to cook the next day.

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It is Sunday now, and I didn't get out of bed until 11am. WHY?! Oh yeah, I stayed up until after 3am eating cereal and trying to decipher the back of our orange juice carton. That may be why. Today we must clean out our shower drain. It has been having difficulties draining all the water from our showers, and sometimes it even gives a little back accompanied by bubbles and gurgling sounds. We've been told the only way to do this is to dig in and remove all the small furry animals causing the clog. Rubber gloves? Something we forgot to pick up at Home Plus last night.

-Us