Springtime at Halmoni's house

Sunday morning we took another trip to Halmoni's house in Yangsuri. As I've mentioned before, Yangsuri is about as polar opposite from Seoul as you can get, even though it's only about 50 mins by subway from downtown. Our day started out like this: We arrived around 11 to find no one home and we couldn't get in the house. So we decided to drive into the town center (which doesn't cope well with the recent influx of people and traffic and is always congested) where we passed Halmoni and the boyfriend's father walking out of a market that was set up in the center of town. We entered the market trying to find them and found all sorts of interesting things.


All the socks you could ever want or need... as long as you like overly cute things...


Adorable puppies for sale... but in a cage way too small...

Checking out the chickens... only 4,000 won each... can you believe??

튀김- basically anything you can imagine, battered and deep fried... you can see some shrimp, zucchini and squid here. We had the squid. I usually avoid squid, but if it's cooked right, it can be quite tasty. Deep-fried squid, for future reference, is quite tasty. I think it needed some sort of dipping sauce, but otherwise it was quite delicious.

Korean popcorn. This is the first time I've seen this. They put it into some sort of pressure cooker, and when it's done, it pops and makes a sound more or less like a canon shot. I don't suggest standing right behind one if you're not expecting this sound...


Finally, after walking around for a while and not finding them we headed back to the house. There we found what they went to the market for. Halmoni was in the backyard planing lettuce seedlings she bought at the market. The chicken coop, which had been empty for the past few months was full of chickens again.

I didn't expect to be doing gardening, and I wore a skirt and shoes, so fortunately, the boyfriend had some clothes there that I could wear so I could do some gardening. I'm not sure how I feel about his clothes fitting so well....

The boyfriend made fun of me for wearing my sunglasses while I was gardening... but if the ajummas wear visors to do this sort of thing, I need something to protect my eyes too...

Running around the yard was Meri, the cute little dog that lives outside under the shed, along with one of her puppies (I think the other was given away). The puppy is less than two months old, so she's going to be a bit bigger than her mother I expect....

Anyway, the last sight of the day was some men playing jokgu (족구), that strange sport you see around which seems like a strange combination of volleyball, soccer and maybe hackysack. I'm not entirely sure how to play, but it looks like it's similar to volleyball, but you need to use your feet instead of your hands. The ball bounces like a basketball and looks about the same size too. I'm curious if anyone has seen this game outside of Korea...



*Note, Halmoni is Korean for grandmother.