I Left My Heart In Seoul

My most favorite Oppa (and only oppa lets be real) is getting married! I could not be more happy for him and his fiancee. The wedding looks like it will be in October of this year in SEOUL. While I was thinking about making a return trip to Korea next year, I certainly don't mind going sooner than that. I'm seriously too excited over the prospect of being in Korea in 6 months that I can't think of anything else. (But to be honest, I've got a lot of things to do this year w/friend's baby + bridal showers that I don't know if I can go to Korea this year < /3)

Winter Wonderland Tag

Something a bit different on the blog today, a tag video! I recorded this a bunch of times on different days because I was never satisfied with the result, but after 3 days of this I gave up and what you see is the best of the bunch lol.

I tag, Ashley, Andrea (& Mike) and Olivia! All of their blogs are linked on the sidebar under "Favs." :)

News Flash: I Miss My Language Partner!

Since I'm back in CA and have time to spare these days, I've been wanting to get back into studying and learning Korean. I don't really want to pay to take classes in an extension program ($$$$) and I don't really want to go to an academy-type of language institute, so I thought I might partake in an language exchange meetup.

Lets just say that after trying it out twice, I came home and immediately messaged my old language partner (이상형) from Korea. I met some very nice people who were extremely welcoming and fun, but I'm just not sure a group language exchange is what I need right now. And not to say that my LP is replaceable by any means, but I'm only just now fully appreciating our study situation and really how well it turned out. I definitely appreciated my LP before, and thought it was pretty lucky that we got along so well as people, but now I'm appreciating just how well we got along as language partners. I just didn't think it would be this difficult to find a compatible language partner.

An example of this compatibility issue can be seen in something as small as the choice to speak formally or informally to one another. Last night, after asking the ever important age question, a Korean male found out that I am actually older than him. He was surprised because he thought for sure that he was "oppa" to me. Suddenly, he rejected my older status and decided that he would be the older of us so I should call him "oppa." After I put up a fight because lets be serious that doesn't even make sense and to be honest I HATE using the world "oppa," he then made the suggestion that we should be same-age friends to speak informally.  

I don't know if this is an issue now that I'm the native speaker of the host country (instead of vice versa when I was studying in Korea), and that the culture/group has promoted speaking informally, or that the Korean students studying here want become closer to Americans, or what, but generally, I'm not someone who uses informal language with people without reason--especially not with someone I just met.

Compare that situation to my old LP. LP and I are actually same-age friends, but we spoke to each other formally for a good while before we switched to informal language. And that's because we got closer to each other as friends and felt more comfortable, so it made sense.

I think I just like to reserve informal language for people who are really close to me--I like for it to have meaning, and since I don't use it freely, when I do use informal language with someone, it really conveys the feeling of closeness, on my end at least. Likewise, the only people I like to call "oppa" are guys who 1) are actually older than me, and 2) I have that close relationship with. It's not just a superfluous "oppa-dongsaeng" relationship.

Call me picky, but that's just how I roll. #kanyeshrug But apparently its not just me. LP is having a hard time getting a new language partner on his end as well. In the end, we agreed that we'll never find better language partners than each other.

He also said "you must miss me," and then I responded, "ㅇㅇ 보고싶어" because its true and I'm glad we still keep in contact and that I can interrupt him while he's at work to complain about my life and that I speak to him in 반말 because I don't usually speak to others informally and that I accept him speaking in 반말 to me because generally I don't like when others speak to me informally.

So it looks like its back to more k-dramas in the meantime, and then enrolling in a class sometime after the start of the spring semester. I'm toying with the idea of introducing him to an acquaintance in Korea who expressed not only wanting a Korean language exchange partner, but explicitly said she wanted him as a partner. LP was pretty famous on my seoul blog and I never got more comments or likes on any posts as much as I did when I blogged about him. Except that I selfishly don't want him to replace me haha. I'll get over it though, because I do want good things for him. I just need to make sure this girl isn't crazy and will treat him right (I sound like his mother).

Thanksgiving 2013

It's been a few years since I've been able to celebrate Thanksgiving in a traditional way. When you live abroad, you just can't cook the way you do here in the states, and while that usually isn't a problem (and more often than not a benefit), when it gets to be the holidays you start craving the comforts of home. In Korea, generally speaking, Turkey is not generally found and that kinda puts a damper on your Thanksgiving plans if you're planning on celebrating it. The way my friends and I got around this issue was by having access to the U.S. military base in Seoul, which offers a basic Thanksgiving set from the lodge. It's so appreciated, but last Thanksgiving my friend Andrea and I definitely had to scramble to the convenient store downstairs to try and find something to make gravy out of (I think we used some canned soup and a hamburger meat + sauce meal that came in a packet, lol).

Thanksgiving 2012: Trying to open a bottle of wine + trying to make gravy. Seoul, South Korea.

So you can imagine that this year I was going to go all out with Thanksgiving (it's high ranking up there on my list of favorite holidays). Usually, I do a lot of the cooking, but this year I took it upon myself to cook everything.

• Turkey + Gravy
• Baked Ham
• Roasted Potatoes
• Corn
• Green Bean Casserole
• Sweet Potatoes
• Apple Stuffing
• Pumpkin Cheesecake

But then my mom decided last minute to make pasta and short ribs. It was a LOT of food, luckily it was more a long day of prep work and crossing things off one at a time than frantic cooking.

Woke up to a pink dawn :)

First casualty of the day. My knife skills are not what they used to be!

The beginnings of apple stuffing.

The beginnings of garlic rosemary roasted potatoes.

The end result of the baked ham.

Marshmellowssss

I tried to take pictures as I went along buy mostly I forgot kkkk and by the time I remembered everything was half eaten and looked like a group of wild savages had just destroyed everything and nobody wants to see pictures of that. I was just happy I was able to get everything done in a timely matter, and that, for the most part, everything tasted good. Or at least it did to me:) And more importantly, it was wonderful to spend the day with family and friends. Especially family. I hadn't seen some of my cousins since my sister's wedding last November, and even then, I was only in town for 3 days so I couldn't even spend quality time with them. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but they're all so grown up now and like, actual people. Bizarre.

And what better way to kick of the gift giving season than by Black Friday shopping? If I'm going to live the cliche, I might as well do it properly :)

To you and yours, wishing you a very happy Thanksgiving <3

We Meet Again: Hey Sister Seoul Sister

A wonderful consequence of living abroad is the simple fact that you meet people from all over, from so many walks of life. And if you're lucky, you meet those people with whom you just click and become fast and forever friends. I've been fortunate enough to be still be able to call the friends I met in Korea my dear friends even as I've moved back home, but all the distance doesn't allow for all of us to interact in the same way as we did before, obviously.

All that means that when we can reunite, we are bound for the best of times. One of my Seoul sisters, Erica, was recently in town and we picked up right where we left off and got to spend our days doing what we love best, being outdoors and under the sun!

Erica and I playing at Central Park, August 2013

Friendships like ours are just another reason why I am such a proponent of living abroad. Erica is also an advocate of an international lifestyle, and through our experiences, both shared together and retold, our collective understanding of life and humanity and the awesomeness of the world is enriched and compounded and made beautiful. When we were walking around nyc, I asked Erica if she felt weird being in the US (she's Brazilian-Italian and has lived in so many countries), and she responded so simply, saying that the more countries she visits and the more cultures she experiences meaningfully, the more she's able to see what makes us the same rather than different.

                                 

Erica and I on my last night in Seoul, March 2013 

Not to say that we should become one homogenous world, but its that desire to known our neighbors as our neighbors and not as something exotic that we aspire to. Each place has its own history and has something unique to offer to the world, and should be celebrated of course, but I think you can appreciate how a place is different from what you know without seeing it as other.

                                         

With some of our other Seoul sisters, Andrea and Julie, on what has become one of my favorite days in Korea, February 2013

I have so many friends who share my love of travel as our perspectives tend to run along similar lines, but in particular, it was so great to have one of my dearest friends from Seoul around for a few days. Because no matter how many stories you tell to others in order to explain what you've seen or how you lived, they remain mere stories and somethings can't be explained in words. With Erica, there was no need to explain anything because she lived through it with me, and reminded me of the who I was at a specific time of my life. As we swapped stories and memories, she was able to make Seoul come alive for me again in a way that nothing else has. For a few days, it was like I was able to visit Korea again.

the TIME CAPSULE: a good kid/ FB adventure

Around 10 years ago, a small group of my friends got together and did something which I consider to be the greatest thing we've ever done as a collective group (besides choosing to be friends with each other): bury a time capsule.

The four of us were coming upon our last year of high school and, as anyone can attest, it is a time of solidarity with your peers, of excitement for the future, of wanting to hold on to the past. Although I don't know whose idea it was to make the time capsule or the details of how it all came together (I have a strong feeling that we were inspired by an episode of Saved by the Bell, you know which one I'm talking about), one night my friends Sonya, Sadaf, and I gathered at our friend Stacy's house carrying armfuls of stuff we wanted to include in our time capsule.

I couldn't tell you really all the things I personally included, but I remember we all cut off a section of our hair (WHY) and wrote predictions about where we thought we would be when we finally retrieved the time capsule in 10 years time. I have vague memories of saying that I would be in a producer's chair in 10 years and that our missing-but-ever-thought-of friend, Joanna, would be wearing bonnets and sundresses and have a small army of children.

We put everything in 1 small tin box and 1 cardboard box, then put the boxes in a garbage bag--totally secured from the elements, I know. Dressed in all black like the cliche we were, we piled into a car armed with two shovels, flashlights, and the time capsule.

We drove to our high school campus. Under the cover of night we buried the time capsule under 2 inches of dirt--the place we decided to bury it had concrete-like soil that was impossible to break through, and then the sprinklers went on and we gave up trying to trying to dig deeper when we were getting soaked and water was entering our shallow hole in the ground.

And that was that.

Flash forward 10 years and the four of us are back together again in San Diego for Stacy's wedding. Much like our former selves, we dressed in black but convened at my house this time to not only dig up our time capsule, but also to make a new one!

We tried to include tokens of the things we'd done and experience over the last 10 years. I threw in some small trinkets from my travels in Southeast Asia, some photos, and the moleskine I used when I first got to Korea--as in, THE moleskine. You travelers know the significance of that moleskine and can only imagine how hard it was for me to part with it.

And now for photos in dark lighting:

Getting the new time capsule ready

Sonya and Stacy going through Stacy's "FB box" full of the best stuff from our high school days.

This is an example of one of the shirts we would make in high school. This one is the "LOVER" shirt. 

On the front, it says "What a lover." On the back is a GIANT list of all the people we considered "lovers"-- attractive and desirable guys, and not our real lovers, because I think I'd keep having Orlando Bloom as my lover a secret and not publicize it on an iron-on shirt thank you very much. 

Lab reports.

Sonya's drawing of JC from Nsync that she gave to Stacy. 

The one on the left is FREDDIE, the senior boy we loved as freshmen (although Graham was way hotter). For one morP he wore a pig costume, and he was in an airbands group called "Kids Incorporated." This was made by Sonya, but we don't know who the person is on the right. 

This time around we threw everything in plastic in plastic in plastic and loaded up the car to headed over to campus. 

 The new time capsule! Hopefully it withstands the elements and years better than the first one!

It was so bizarre and hilarious going back to our old high school as 27/28 year olds. So much has changed and we had no idea if the school had upgraded its security, if the fences and gates would be locked, or what we would find when we got there. There was an air of uneasy nervousness as we drove onto school grounds, and it was such a dramatic contrast to 10 years ago when we were fearless and the atmosphere was predominated by the feeling of reckless excitement. We kept thinking about what we would do or say if we were somehow caught, and it occurred to us that we had more to lose this time around, or, I should say, something to lose this time around (we had nothing as 17/18 year olds).

After much ado, we gathered our supplies, parked our car in the shadows, and slipped onto campus towards the spot that contained our time capsule. To be honest, I had high doubts about being able to find it again. We weren't sure if it had been found (it was only covered in 2 inches of dirt, mind you), and after like an hour of solid digging, our hands blistered from the wood of the shovels, constantly fearing getting caught, and AGAIN, the sprinklers going off on us, we started to doubt if maybe we had remembered incorrectly and were digging in a completely wrong spot.

The dirt was still concrete-like, and there were all these crazy roots growing everywhere, and more than once Sadaf got frustrated and started ripping out roots with her bare hands. We were at the point of giving up when Stacy suggested digging under this particular root that we had ignored earlier. I dug in and there was a flash of white.

It was like the a choir of angels started to sing.

Immediately we got down into the hole and using our hands, we discovered the white plastic bag we had used to put our boxes in! Finally prying the very worn time capsule from the jaws of the earth, we threw in our new time capsule, covered it up again with 2 inches of dirt, and very tiredly made our way back, happy in our discovery.

And a discovery it was.

Sonya said it best, I think, in likening our time capsule to the remains of the Titanic.

Everything was disgusting and reeked like 10 years of neglect and copper pennies. Water had destroyed and aged much of what we had included in the time capsule. Our letters to ourselves and our predictions were fused together and were unable to be separated and read. We picked through the time capsule like vultures a carcass, trying to find anything worth having. Oddly enough, we did find our hair (disgusting), and the things that survived the most were pictures of nsync that had heavy-duty lamination!

As disappointed as we were with how poorly our time capsule survived over the years, overall it was a great adventure and I'm so so happy that we had the brilliant idea to do this when we had nothing in our heads as youth about to set-off into the world. But more than that, I'm grateful we're all still friends and were able to successfully retrieve the time capsule!