Kara

I don't know much about this group, but they have two of the biggest songs out right now. They're catchy... as is most K-pop... ^^

Just because they are white, doesn't mean they speak English...

I went to see a movie last night. We were even on the CGV website to find a good movie to watch (it's kind of the wrong time of year to find a "good" movie). Anyway, we found one that looked like a fighting/martial arts movie that looked pretty cool. We even watched the preview, but it was dubbed over in Korean, but, we figured, hey, they're white, aka, it's a movie we can watch and understand. We couldn't figure out the title... It didn't seem Korean, but we couldn't translate it either... but, whatever.

We got our tickets, we sat down, and we were watching watching, and all of a sudden the actors start talking... but... it wasn't English.... it was French. We both looked at each other with the same thought. Good god, we just paid 7,000 won to watch a French movie subtitled in Korean. Well, it was an action movie, so we watched. The fight scenes were cool, but we still have no idea what the movie was about.... I tried my best to read the subtitles, since my Korean is far better than my French. Unfortunately, my Korean reading skills are painfully slow, hard as I try to improve on this skill. I was only able to translate one entire sentence in the whole movie. -_-

Anyway, if you get a chance to see this movie with ENGLISH subtitles, it's a pretty decent movie.... I think....

A Kitchen Adventure....

Well, I've been talking about cooking Korean food at home since... I don't know... maybe August... but I finally just got around to doing it for the first time tonight (and no, I'm no including cheese ramyon in that). I was rather inspired by reading Crazy Korean Cooking . I first decided to make 파전 (p'ajeon: scallion pancake), but then I decided to make some 참치찌개 to go with it while I was actually in my kitchen.

I used the recipe from Crazy Korean Cooking as a base, but then added my own ingredients to try to eat what I'm used to eating at my favorite little kimbab restaurant (which serves a lot more than just kimbab).


First I went and and bought some tuna... They have special tuna just for making jjigae.... luckily I noticed the English writing... I was just kind of staring at the 20 different kinds of tuna and had no idea what to buy...
I fried up the tuna for a few minutes along with some green chili peppers. This is going to be spicy!!
Here's my Kimchi and peppers. I only added in two peppers... all that kimchi should be enough spice... I did throw in that whole bag of kimchi though.


Here's my tofu and my ddok (rice cake in the bag there). Threw those in too, but I think next time I won't throw them in so soon. Didn't seem to matter too much... Oh, and tofu is REALLY cheap. That whole box there was 400 won (30 cents?) The rice cakes were about 2,000 won ($1.50USD?)


Threw all that (not all the rice cakes though) into the pot with the tuna and chilies. Added two and a half cups of water and let it boil.


While that was cooking, I made some p'ajeon. P'ageon is Korean scallion pancake. Is that a scallion in the photo? It looks huge.. is it a leek or something? Anyway... whatever it is, I cooked it up and made a pancake with it. It tasted right. I added one cup of flour, one cup of water, two eggs and a pinch of salt. Mix it together like you would any pancake batter. I added the onion to the batter, but I wonder if it's better to add it to the batter once it's in the pan. Oh, I also threw in another green chili, very finely chopped. Got to give it some spice!

It took a few tries to get it to look like what you see here. The hardest part was getting it to cook all the way through. Though, I'm infamous for letting that happen to breakfast pancakes too. Not that I've cooked those in 10 years either though...

I let the jjigae simmer for a little while while I fixed everything else up.

Anyway, here's the final product! Dip the p'ajeon in the soy sauce for more enjoyment and deliciousness. You'll maybe note the absence of rice... I wanted rice.. I really wanted rice... but I only have one pot for soup and rice... and since my jjigae was in the soup pot, I had no pot to make my rice in.... got to find a better solution to that problem.....

Here's my own recipe for everything I made... note* this is my first time making it, so you can choose to trust my recipe if you want, but it hasn't been tested for generations or anything....

Chamchi Jjigae (tuna stew)

• 1-2 cans of tuna (preferably jjigae tuna, if available)
• Small bag of kimchi aprox 500 g
• Small container of tofu
• ddok (Korean rice cake, preferably the flat round kind for soup) if available and desired
• Chili peppers 1-4 depending on how spicy you like it. If you are saving for leftovers, this will make your jjigae much spicier in the following days.
• Any vegetables you like (mushrooms, potatoes, onions, zucchini are all good options)
• 2 1/2 cups of water
• Vegetable oil for frying
  

Fry tuna for 5 minutes in the bottom of the pan with oil.
Add kimchi and fry for another 5 minutes or so.
Add water, chilies, vegetables and let boil.
Add tofu and ddok and let simmer for at least 10 minutes.

Consistency should be quite thick. This is really more of a stew than a soup. This is my favorite Korean food, so even if you can't make it yourself, you should try to eat it at your local Korean restaurant. :-)

P'ajeon (Scallion Pancake)

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup water
• 2 eggs
• Chopped scallion
• 1-2 finely chopped chili peppers (optional)
• Vegetable oil for frying
  

Mix flour, water and eggs in a bowl and make sure that there are no clumps.
Add chopped scallion to the batter.
Pour batter into frying pan with oil.
Make sure the pancake is thin. Otherwise, it will not cook inside. I found I had better luck with the big ones than with small ones. Use a big pan and make big pancakes... 2 laddelfulls of batter.
Flip your pancake once top is starting to cook, and before it starts to burn on the bottom. (use two spatulas if you have them)
Once both sides are cooked, you can eat and enjoy. Be sure to dip in soy sauce for the best effect.

The letter 'V'

One of my biggest pet peeves of a Korean accent is the letter V (although the letter Z is a close runner up). For some reason 85% of my students pronounce the letter V like 'vui'. It has always bothered me, but the other day one of my preschoolers finally pushed me over the edge on this one when she (one of my best students in that class) turned to me and said "Teacher, not Vee, Vui".

Unfortunately, the mispronunciation of the letter V is also propagated in the media. For example, here is the song 'L.O.V.E' by the Brown Eyed Girls. They only get the letter V correct about half the time they say it...



And if you're curious about the pronunciation of the letter Z, they pronounce it as a J. Normally this wouldn't be such a problem, but when you're teaching kids, zoos come up quite often. Now, when you replace a J with a Z in the word zoo, it becomes Joo (aka Jew). With my most advanced class/oldest class I tried to explain what Jew meant so that they would realize how big of a difference there was between the word zoo and the word Jew. Unfortunately, it was completely lost on them. I might as well have been trying to explain Norse gods, because to them it 's just as obscure. Not to many Jews fled to Korea in the diaspora, evidently. They've never heard of Judaism.

A walk about town...

I really did nothing to celebrate Easter, but that just seems like how I've been living my life in the past few years. I did, though, take a nice long walk in the opposite direction that I usually head. We got on the Chongyechong further down near Seongsugyo Bridge (I might have that bridge name wrong... but it's something like that) and walked for a bit down that ways. We were hoping that we'd see some cherry blossoms down there and beat the crowds in Yeoido. No such luck though... it was still kind of grey and brown looking down there...

There were twice as many bikes as people, and it was actually a little scary, dodging bikes when the bike path wasn't separate from the walking path.


Finally we came to the point where the Cheongyechong empties out into the Hangang. We crossed the stream on a pedestrian bridge and followed the Han east in the direction of Ttukseom.


We walked for a while down there. We were actually hoping we'd see some cherry blossoms, but no such luck... it was still a little dead over there. After walking for about an hour, we found a park and sat down to take a rest. Here's some photos from the park:

Rock Climbing Wall... never seen one of these in Seoul before...

After sitting around here for a while deciding what to do next, we decided to get on the subway to cross the river (for lack of a way to cross by foot) and head to our friend's house in Jamsil. She lives a 3 minute walk from the lake in Seocheon.. aka where Lotte World is. We knew we'd be able to find some cherry blossoms over there... though it was getting to be dusk. We didn't know where the subway was, but we just walked a little more and found ourselves at line 7, Ttukseom Resort... though, we were really hoping for line 2. Before we got on, we caught a good glimpse of Olympic Stadium from across the river.

We got to Jamsil and we had to walk around the lake to get to our friend's house. Here we finally found our cherry blossoms. You can see the Lotte World castle in the background here too. No Disney ripoffs here...
Here's another Lotte World sight. The giant raccoon. Doesn't he just make you need to check out Lotte World??
After some coffee (actually, I had a smoothie, I don't like caffeine) the sun went down and we headed through my friend's neighborhood. There is a local Buddhist temple here. The whole place was all decked out in lanterns lit up. Never seen this before around here. But there are lanterns strung up all over the place? What's this all about? They went up a week or two ago around Wangsimni too (but those ones don't glow like these). Is there some holiday that I don't know about? I know Buddha's birthday is coming up in May, but this is April...

Anyway, they were still cool to look at!

Finally a decision...

I've finally decided to buy the Canon Powershot SX200. It's small and compact, but it has a 12X zoom, and more importantly, it has full manual controls, plus aperture and shutter priority. I know it's not a perfect camera. People's main concerns seem to be the flash that pops up automatically (though I found in the shop if you cover it with your finger you can keep it from popping up.. as long as you don't move your finger) and that it has no viewfinder. But... I've probably used the viewfinder on my camera about 2 times in the 7 years I've had it... so... really I'm not concerned about that. The cover for the USB port seemed quite flimsy, but I guess that if it did fall off, it wouln't be the end of the world. The one on my camera is fairly flimsy too, but it's never given me a problem over the years....The controls, though, seem ultra easy to use when I tested it in the store, and that's my biggest concern with cameras. I don't want to be searching through menus for 5 minutes to take one shot.

I went to the Canon shop in Shincheon on Saturday. They were sold out, but I put my name down for the shipment coming in on Monday. It's going to be 468,000 won, wich is $351.00 USD today with the exchange rate. So.. basically I get the same price. I may get a memory card with it, though, which in the US, I guess you can't get for free anymore. My friend bought an IXUS while we were there, and they gave her a 4GB (!!!) for free!(!!!). I'm hoping they'll do the same for me. I'll def buy an extra battery to go with the camera, since I don't want to risk running out of juice on a trip. Those cost about 47,000. I wonder if I can get that cheaper online or at Yongsan? I'm also wondering if I can get a small tripod... but thats something else I'd be better off getting in Yongsan... but... would I really use a tripod though???

Here's the CNET inital preview of the camera:

그림자 살인: Private Eye | Watching subtitled movies in Seoul... round 2

Thursday evening I got the chance to see 그림자 살인 (Private Eye) at Gangnam Cinus G. The movie was quite entertaining, actually. It's a thriller set during the Japanese occupation, though the year is never specified. I won't reveal anything about the plot, but it's definitely worth seeing. I was very happy again with the English subtitles. Here is the Korean trailer.



Private Eye Korean Movie Trailer - Click here for the most popular videos




I must say, though, that I was rather disappointed in the accessibility of this movie. I went with a Korean friend, so he called the cinema and found movie times for us. When we got to the theater, there was no sign that said which movie or which theater was showing the English subtitles. There was no English title for the movie. And I thought to myself this: if I spoke no Korean, and read no hangul (which makes up for the vast majority of foreigners here) how would I know that this movie was had English subtitles.

If you want to make Korean movies more accessible, why not write on the sign board that there are English subtitles available.. in English?? Is that really so hard? I've seen English titles for Korean movies that don't have subtitles... so why not write it for the ones that DO have subtitles.

I appreciate the efforts that the government has put into subbing these movies. Really, I do. They made nice little pamphlets that I found in the theater with directions to both the theater in Gangnam and the theater in Myongdong. But, if you can't put movie times in English on the website, provide even a paragraph summary of the movie, or if NOTHING else, make sure that browsers can appropriately display the hangul on your site, so that those of us who CAN read it can figure out the movie times and disseminate the information among friends. There are too many problems with the Korean website, and the English Service website provides nothing but the title of the current movie and directions to the theater... including plenty of directions for how to park... even though we know that only about .1% of foreigners have a car...

Oh, and that brochure that I found at the cinema for the English language service... had no reference to the English Service website, only a reference to the Korean site. And, speaking no Korean it'd be nearly impossible to find the English Service from their home page. Good job Korea. Yet again you work so hard and spend so much money to do something right, but you screw up the easy part....

The English service has been around for less than a month... so I'm going to hope that they pull themselves together. I wish there were some feedback link on their site, but no, yet again, another failure.

Anyway, don't let my negativity about the system keep you from seeing the movie. It's definitely worth it.