Final Day in America

It is currently my last day in America. I leave tomorrow evening back for Korea. The time spent here has been unbelievable. It has been so nice to see my family and most of my friends. It's been amazing understanding everyone around me (Spanish and English conversations). There's so much about America that I've missed that I didn't even realize I was missing. A huge part of me wishes to stay, or at least come back right after my contract ends.

But then I start thinking of the logistics: where in America am I going to live? Can I find a good job? Would I have to move back in with my parents? What about my boyfriend?

The truth of the matter is that I miss America, but due to many factors I've realized right now Korea is the best place to really be for me right now. Sure, North Korea has been acting up and having its tantrums, but I'm happy in Korea overall.

I have always loved to travel and be in different countries, and I've rarely ever felt homesickness, but never before have I lived in another country for an entire year. I've gotten my first taste of what life in the Foreign Service is going to be like. I went 10 months without seeing my family, and that was difficult. I will probably go more once I become a diplomat. This was not as easy as I thought it would be.

This is definitely something to consider.

-AALA

Persian life so far in Korea

I apologize for being so absent. I still owe a Philippines trip post to this blog, so hopefully I'll get around to that before Christmas vacation.

As previously mentioned, I have given dating a Persian a second chance. This second endeavor has been monumentally more successful than the first. It's been over a month now since we have started dating, and I've been quite taken in with the culture and the people, and yes even the language.

Yesterday I helped my boyfriend and his brother and sister-in-law make torshi. Torshi is basically Iranian kimchi (kimchi is Korean pickled cabbages or radishes). Torshi comes from the Persian word "torsh" which means "sour." It is very much similar to kimchi in that apparently there are as many different types of torshi as kimchi, depending on the region and any events. There are places where you don't eat a meal without torshi (again, very similar to kimchi).

The torshi we made consisted of (if I can remember everything): apples, bell peppers, chili peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, celery, radishes, tomatoes, persimmon, cabbage, and probably one or 2 more things that I can't remember. These are packed into jars with spices and water added. They are going to be left to sit for about a month or 2 (or more). According to my boyfriend's brother it can actually be left to sit for about a couple of years! I'm very excited to try it once it's finished.

I'm slowly but surely learning Persian/Farsi. It's very funny because I have almost ceased to learn Korean... I just can't! I'm having a hard time retaining any new Korean words I learn because there's too many languages in my head, and they all have nothing to do with each other. I've learned so far:

salam: hello
salam jubi?: hello, how are you?
khodahafez: good-bye
lotfan: please
merci: thank you
khahesh mikonum: you're welcome
baleh: yes
na: no
azizam: a term of endearment
jigar: also a term of endearment, although in their language it also means liver, so that's kind of interesting
eshgham: term of endearment, means roughly "my love"
divone/kheili divone: crazy/very crazy (this gets said a lot between my boyfriend and me haha)
doset daram: I like you a lot/I love you (informal, depending on the context of the sentence)
asheghetam: I love you (formal, meaning more like "I'm in love with you")
chai: tea
ob: water
pesar: boy
dochtar: girl
zan: woman
koma: coma (I learned this because I was explaining to them what a "food coma" was hahaha)
tiripet mano koshte: you're outfit is killing me (this tends to get a few laughs)

I've learned a little bit more, but unfortunately these other words and phrases are a bit inappropriate.

Next post will be about the Philippines. I promise!

-AALA

Thriller

My kindergartners sang Michael Jackson's "Thriller" for the Halloween Song Contest yesterday. TOOOOOOO CUTE!!!!

Taiwan Days 4 and 5

Now on to my final days of summer vacation in Taiwan!

On Thursday Greg and I headed to Hualien by train. I wanted to go to the beach, and he suggest Hualien. My coworkers in Korea told me Kending was a good beach place (it was on the western coast of Taiwan), but Greg was adamant about not going to Kending, so he suggested Hualien (on the eastern coast). The problem was that there weren't as many beaches in Hualien as Greg and I were hoping for, so the first day was spent exploring the town, eating delicious Chinese food, buying souvenirs, and walking through the night market there.

The coastal landscape we pass on the train

Hualien on our way to our hostel. You can see the beautiful mountains that surround it

View from our hostel room

We had this entire room to ourselves for the night. Awesome.

Our hostel in the lobby has this big map, and guests write their names and where they are from and stick it here

Can you find my name?

I was exhausted so Greg and I killed some time by napping. We then tried to find the beaches, but we then realized it wasn't how we thought it was going to be. Oh well. But below are some shots I took of Hualien and the area that we explored.

A small Chinese restaurant we ate lunch at in the market. They had absolutely delicious dumplings

The Hualien night market

We went to bed finally, and then woke up early to take a bus to Taroko Park where there were these gorges.

The visitors' center

You can see a Buddhist temple here

Going up to the Buddhist temple

View from the Buddhist temple


Buddhist prayers being done

The monks have their own garden

After our trip to Taroko Park Greg and I caught the train back to Taipei. The next day I flew out back to Seoul, and thus ended my Taiwan trip.

However, my ties to Taiwan didn't end there. I bought an Amazon Kindle a few months ago, and a week after I had returned to Seoul I realized I had left it on the airplane when I was coming back from Taipei! Thankfully, it was at Incheon airport, and I picked it up over the weekend.

Phew! OK, the next post I guess will be about my Philippines trip. Haha, let's see how long it takes me to load those pictures up (considering I went to Taiwan back in July, and only now at the end of October I'm finishing up posting pictures this might take a while...)

-AALA

K-pop Part 3 (and some other songs)

I'm going to take a break from posting my vacation pictures to bring you the next edition of K-pop (and other songs)!

One song Yelena and I have really been loving lately is by a K-pop/hip hop group called DJ DOC. The song is called "I'm a Guy Like This." I can't get enough of this video because it's so funny and nonsensical. You'll see things like guys dressed up in "sexy" marching band uniforms, or these 2 guy dancers dancing with their long hair tied up... it is very strange. But I love the song. I've heard it so much I know how to sing the bridge and the chorus of the song (though I'm not exactly sure what I'm saying). I first heard this song in a Subway sandwiches store, and I asked the woman working there who speaks English who sang it because I liked it so much.

DJ DOC "I'm a Guy Like This"


The next song is by a hip hop group called Supreme Team. I just learned about this song a week ago when it played in the club Yelena and I frequent every weekend. I don't really have much to say about this song, but I just find Koreans who try to be all hip hop like they do in America funny. Honestly, they don't really pull off ghetto well here. But it's adorable. I also find it funny that the cute guy in Supreme Team has such a low voice. I was not expecting that.

Supreme Team "Super Magic"


There was a song that I couldn't find for 1 month, and that was Secret's "Magic." I kept hearing it everywhere, but for the life of me I couldn't find it based on the words I heard of the song when I plugged it into a Google search. Finally one day, when Yelena and I were in Myeong-dong (a major shopping area in Seoul), I heard it in a store that we passed, and I went in and asked the employee with charades who was singing the song. They told Me Secret, so I plugged that into youtube, and voila! Found it! I also realized why I had such a difficult time finding it. They say the word "magic" in the song, but they don't pronounce it the way it should be pronounced. It sounds like they say "mazzy" or some word that sounds strange, but definitely NOT "magic." Oh well. Here it is:

Secret "Magic"


This last K-pop song is by Lee Hyori (note that "Lee" is her family name, since in Asia family names tend to come first) called "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." This video is interesting because I see a lot of similarities between it and DJ DOC's video (like the shake it dance, or the dancing in front of Mercedes trucks... although that could just be how they roll in Korea). The album that has this song had some controversy because it was found out that a lot of songs were ripped from other people. Well, regardless, I like the song, so enjoy:

Lee Hyori "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"

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Now, on to the non K-pop songs. Yelena and I really like this Persian singer called Arash. He actually grew up and still lives in Sweden, but sings in Farsi (mostly). Arash is the singer of that soccer song "Iran Iran" I posted about months ago. Yelena and I are kind of in love with him. He sings a song called "Always" with a singer from Azerbaijan called AySel. It was a collaboration that was submitted for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest as the Azerbaijani entry. It got 3rd place, and remains Azerbaijan's highest ranked song in the contest to date, and it marks the first time Azerbaijan got to the top three. Here it is:

Arash and AySel "Always"


Another Arash song Yelena and I love is called "Temptation." However, there are 2 versions of this. There is the Farsi/English version where Arash sings in Farsi, but has fellow Swedish singer Rebecca Zadig sing the chorus in English. The second is Arash singing in Russian with Russian singers. Yelena (being Russian) favors the Russian version. Apparently the Russian one was a big hit on the Russian charts. So basically, Arash gets around if you know what I mean hahaha

You'll notice there's a huge difference between Rebecca and the Russian singers once you see them...

Arash and Rebecca Zadig "Temptation"

Arash and Blestyashchie "Vostochnyie Skazki"


-AALA

Christmas plans almost made

I have officially bought my tickets to the United States for Christmas!!!! I'll be flying into Los Angeles. This feels so weird. I am actually somewhat dreading going back to the US. I've grown so accustomed to my life in Korea that life in the US seems so alien to me now. I really quite thoroughly enjoy not blending in with the general population. And I have a much healthier lifestyle here than I do in the US (the food alone is a thousand times healthier than American cuisine).

My ticket to Los Angeles, however, might not be where I end up staying. My family is currently trying to decide whether they will go to Los Angeles and Disneyland, go to Guadalajara, Mexico to visit family, or stay in Arizona for Christmas. It's cheaper overall for me to just buy a ticket to Los Angeles because there are so many flights between Korea and LA that it made sense. If my family stays in Arizona or goes to Mexico I can easily buy a separate ticket to whichever destination as Los Angeles has flights to and from there every day. And if my family decides to go to the Happiest Place on Earth, well, I'm already there!

Can't wait for Christmas!

-AALA

Taiwan Day 3

Hey everyone,

Yes, I know, I've been MIA again. I really never realized how eventful my life in Korea would be. Believe it or not some of my personal life drama has continued, but it seems to be winding down now, thankfully. I had a bit of work drama as well, but that also seems to be winding down. Anyway, back to my trip to Taiwan.

On Wednesday Greg couldn't go out with me anywhere in Taipei for work-related reasons, so I got directions to go to the National Palace Museum by myself. This museum is an art museum that houses almost 700,000 pieces of ancient Chinese artifacts in its permanent collection. The history of it is pretty interesting. There is a Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing, and during the Communist takeover it was feared that the artifacts in this Beijing museum were in danger of destruction, so the artifacts were moved to Taiwan. However, of the original Palace Museum collection, it is estimated that only about a quarter of the original collection in Beijing is now in Taiwan. The pieces that were moved, though, represent some of the best pieces in the collection from Beijing.

The Taipei museum isn't huge, so apparently the artifacts are rotated every 3 months, so to see the whole collection takes about 12 years. When I went to the museum they also had a guest exhibition of religious art from Tibet. I don't have any pictures of anything because pictures inside weren't allowed.

One of the famous artifacts in the museum is something called the Jadeite Cabbage. It is a giant piece of jade that is carved to look like a piece of cabbage with 2 grasshoppers sitting on it. Continuing on the food theme there is another piece called the Meat-shaped Stone. It is a piece of jasper that has been carved to look like a piece of pork cooked in soy sauce. It's actually pretty realistic looking. Pictures of both can be found here

The front portion of the museum

A banner for the Tibet exhibit

This is another portion of the museum that was to the side of the main part. It is where the Tibet exhibition was

After the museum I went back to the MRT (subway) stop, and grabbed a bite to eat. I had previously eaten here, so I wanted to eat this again. It was this sort of tortilla bread thing that had egg, and some spices and leaves of some sort in it. It was delicious. It also only cost about $1.

I went back to the hostel and slept for a bit. Greg was going to come by later with a friend of his, Darren, and we were all going to go out clubbing with some other of Greg's friends. Darren had a motorbike, and I absolutely LOVE motorbikes. I love being behind someone who is driving a motorbike. Just being on it, the wind blowing through you as you speed by... it all feels amazing to me. And in Taiwan the traffic is interesting in that at the intersections they have a block of space designated at the very front for all of the motorbikes to convene when the light is red. So, when you're at a red light all the bikes get to weave forward and get into that block. Once the light turns green all the bikes speed off first, followed by the cars.

Apparently Taiwanese people love K-pop music. Well, as I am also a lover of K-pop, Greg took me to a club that played K-pop music. I was happy. The club was called Funky.

This club

From left to right: Darren (Taiwanese), Michael (German), Greg (American), Toby (Taiwanese), me

Afterwards Darren took me back to the hostel. Now, I need to mention something before I tell you how Darren helped me on the way back to the hostel.

In Taiwan there are a ridiculous amount of cockroaches. During the day you don't see them, but at night in streets and alleyways that are quiet they are out and about. I am terrified of cockroaches. Every night I'd run into one or two or more. Every. Single. Night. Anyone who reads this who knows me knows that I was in hell at night. Within 2 nights I started my habit of walking slowly at night, keeping my eye out for roaches so that I could run away. Now, the roaches were never inside (thankfully), but outside.... uuuugh.

Anyway, we crossed a wide street on the way back to the motorbikes after we left the club, and a huge cockroach was on the street. I freaked out (as I always do with those little buggers), and stopped dead in my tracks, too afraid to continue walking. Darren PICKED me up and CARRIED me across the street. Drove me to the club on a motorbike, loves K-pop, and protected me from evil roaches on the street? I was officially in love with him hahahaha

And so ended Day 3 in Taiwan.

-AALA