Korean news...

I've added a korean news ticker to the sidebar so you can see what is happening in our nweck of the woods.

Bedtime reading...

So in ten hours I will be starting my new job.

Lemon Meringue...

Since our stuff finally arrived this week I now have some stuff to enable me to make use of our oven. As we had friends coming round for dinner, it seemed like the perfect excuse to make something and I decided to try and make a lemon meringue. This was to be my first time making it completely from scratch as in the UK I would normally buy a packet sauce for the lemon filling.

Things to note:
1. I got a recipe off the internet as my recipe book has been misplaced by the mother-in-law (along with my sandwich toaster)

2. This is my first time using our new oven so I'm not sure how I'll need to compensate on temperature to calibrate to recipe temperatures.

3. It doesn't appear to be fan assisted so I don't know how even things will cook.

4. The recipe calls for the juice of two lemons. On the squeezy lemon juice thing I got in Korea, it doesn't give any indication of the strength/or how many lemons there are in it.

Basically this is Lemon Meringue 1.0.

Pastry:
With the weather as it is at the moment when it comes to making the pastry, there is a window of about 10 seconds between the butter being too hard to mix with flower and melting completely and being useless for pastry. Nevertheless a dough was formed, rolled out and put in a pie case. I didn't have anything to weight it down with (my mum has this jar of lentils that are 30 years old and used to weigh down pastry and rpevent it from rising) but then the recipe didn't call for it. 20 minutes in the oven and it looked like this:
While the pastry was cooking I was working on the lemon filling. I almost burnt it while I was over at the computer checking on the recipe but it was ok. It's basically water, lemon juice, cornflour, egg yolks and butter. Visually it wasn't quite what I'm used to, but it tasted ok. I do need to work on figuring out the correct amount of lemon to put in...let me know if you want to volunteer as a taste-tester. A quick whisk of some egg whites and sugar and the meringue was ready to go on top.
45 minutes in the oven on a low heat and you have a pie that is ready to eat. Actually I think the low heat was too low cos the meringue was a bit soft...but there you go, I'll know for next time.
Now for the most important part, the taste. As an experienced eater of lemon meringues I could find plenty of things that were slightly off but it seemed to go down well with the others.

Poor old Rooney...

Sunme and I were talking about Wayne Rooney while waiting for the Man U game to start when Alex asked who he was. I said he was one of the players and Alex asked which one. I told him that it was the one that looks like Shrek. A couple of minutes later when the players were all lined up to be introduced to the VIPs Alex pointed to Rooney and said "He looks like Shrek, he must be Rooney."

Sk8ter Boi - first attempt....

I'm sure you can probably rotate it somehow, but I'm blowed if I can figure out how.

Stampede and football....

I wanted to try and get hold of a dictionary of accounting before I start work so that I can start learning all the words I'm going to need to know. I looked online and surprisingly such a book exists and was available from the book shop in Coex and thus we went to buy one on Sunday afternoon.

We were walking along looking at this and that when up ahead we heard screaming. We continued walking, turned around a corner and were almost run over by a stampede of about 200 teenage girls. We were walking four abreast and would have been annihilated but were just able to pick the children up. It was kind of like the scene in the Lion King when Mufasa dies...anyhow, we assume there was an appearance by a 'talent' as in the distance we could see some guy dressed like an extra from an early Duran Duran video...

After our close escape, we went to the bookstore and got the dictionary and then went to the (scale) model shop to look at models. On the way there we saw some pictures flashing on the floor. On closer inspection, it was some kind of interactive display that reacts to you moving your feet. It had various scenarios and my children wanted to stay there all afternoon. Here they are playing football.

After a couple of turns we swung round to Megabox to see what they were showing and ran into some players from Reading FC (they're here playing a pre-season tournament) at an autograph signing. We saw Seol Ki-Hyeon, Alan Bennett, Ivar Ingimarsson, Dave Kitson, John Oster and Brynjar Gunnarsson. They looked fairly bemused by the whole thing and I'd love to ask them how they are enjoying their time in Korea. Actually more than 10% of the Premiership are in Korea this week cos Bolton are playing in the same tournament and Man U are playing their own friendly on Friday.

Anyhow, after all that excitement we went home to watch 'the boys' play against Bahrain and watching that game I rather wish I had been trampled to death earlier in the day.

Fishing for Coi...

I decided to take the kids fishing...


Actually, to a non-techno geek like me it is pretty amazing to see the fish swimming away as you get near them. If you want to try for yourself, then head to COEX...they're embedded in the floor all the way through the centre.

Hollywood star in the making?

I put Emiy to bed tonight as usual and when I went in later to check if she was hot I found that she had put on her sunglasses before going to sleep. I guess she's going to try and become a talent and is just practicing the skill of wearing sunglasses in the dark...

Celebrations...

Yesterday, I was offered and accepted a job and so we went out to celebrate. Nothing flash as I won't get paid until the end of August. The job promises long hours but potentially a fair bit of travel so I'm looking forward to it.
It doesn't look that bad does it? It is pork marinated in a sweetish sauce and barbequed at the table. The sidedishes are various kinds of pickled vegetable.

Both the kids really enjoyed it and Alex even had his wrapped in lettuce...we hear from school that Alex has stopped being fussy with most foods, its just Emily to sort out now.

A replacement for Caramel?

Actually we've got our eye on a couple of stray kittens that live in the car park downstairs. Just need to catch one...

Sk8ter Boi...

Alex is doing inline skating at kindergarten and yesterday he got all his gear. Let's hope he doesn't get given a black eye by his teacher as happened when someone took him ice-skating.

Rainy Season

We went out for dinner yesterday and got caught in a downpour...

Siesta...

Lucky thing.

Our House..

...not in the middle of our street but on the 8th floor of an apartment block.

Here you can see a photo from just inside the front door looking at the lounge and balcony.
It has three bedrooms, a large double, a small double and a single (or is it one of those that you can fit a double bed in and therefore they call it a double but which you can't put anything else in. This is the photo of the large double which has been given to the kids.....
Finally there is a kitchen area and a utility room.
This is a typical layout for Korean apartments built in the 1980s. All in all it is 35 pyeong (1 pyeong equates to 3.3sq. m.) but that includes some communcal areas like our share of corridor and the lift. It seems big enough now, but we shall see what it is like when we get our furniture.

The Carvers to guest star on the Simpsons?

So, in honour of the release of the Simpson's movie, you can create a Simpsonesque likeness of yourself. I present here the Carvers as they would look in Springfield. Oh and if you want to have a go yourself, you'll need to go here.

Going for a walk, somewhere new...

A friend is putting together a collection of posts on the theme of "Going for a walk, somewhere new", which seems particularly appropriate to our circumstances. Since we've just moved to an area of Seoul where I've never had cause to go before, pretty much everywhere we go is somewhere new. Anyhow, we decided to take a walk this weekend to see what is in our neighbourhood.

I've posted photos before showing the view of Seoul Tower when you look to the right out of our front door. Well if you look to the left there is a small mountain (a hill in English terms). Well mountains are there to be climbed, so that's what we set out to do.
On the way to the mountain, I noticed that one of our neighbours seems to have very green fingers and is cultivating grapes. Woe betide if you try to take any though, the sign says "I have used pesticides, do not eat or pick!" We walked around the corner of the apartment block you can see in the first photo and got quite a surprise. From our apartment, we can see a car park that is empty during the week and quite full at weekends and I'd assumed it was for people planning to hike up the hill. When I actually came to it however, it turned out to be the car park for this huge church. That makes three churches within spitting distance of our flat.
Now we were ready to start our assault on the summit. Now, you may be worried because we're not equipped with the crampons, pitons and ice axes that the majority of Korean hikers carry, but it's ok, i've never seen anyone have cause to use that kind of equipment and I was fairly sure this hill would be the same. (Unless those equipments are useful to ward of the millions of mosquitoes that were flying around, in which case I take it all back). Actually the mosquitoes devoured Sunme but left the rest of us alone. Do you think this marks her out as a witch or something? Now when I first started learning Korean there was a chapter about Korean hobbies which stated that Koreans love hiking in the mountains and that when they get to the top they love to shout "Yahoo!" as a form of stress-relief. Well I sure hope they've updated that chapter because when we got to the top the first thing we saw was this sign: For those of you who don't read Korean it says: "Let's use mountains quietly. Shouting "Yahoo!" from the top of mountains can disturb wild animals and local residents" That didn't stop one guy from screaming his lungs out, although by the time we reached the top there was no sign of the person responsible for the bloodcurdling screams so maybe he was screaming because he was being mauled by Manchurian tigers and black bears that are no longer scared away be people shouting "Yahoo!" Anyway I digress.

You may remember that I posted the other week about climbing a hill and coming across Daeseong temple. Well there were no cultural surprises waiting for us at the top this week, just a clock. Don't ask me why. The view from the top wasn't particularly special either; it had an odd aspect and didn't really look out over anything. I think it's Sadang and on towards Kwacheon behind those hills. We headed down the hill, aiming for the football pitch you can see on the left of the view from the top. We had heard that there is a Hong Myung-Bo football academy (홍명보 축구 교실) in our area and we wanted to observe a class so that we could decide whether to sign Alex up for it or not. We got there and observed a class of 4-5 year olds learning various skills from a teacher. It all looked very professional until the minute they started a five-a-side practice game at which point it descended into a swarm of children chasing after the ball. Still the teacher seemed to know what she(!) was doing so I guess we'll sign him up.
It was getting towards dinner time and time to head home so we set off. The only thing of interest to note on the way back was the HQ of a taxi firm. This had a multi-story car park filled with taxis but we resisted temptation and 20 minutes later we were back in familiar territory and ready for dinner.

Any questions....?

Rather than me rabbitting on about whatever comes to mind, I'm going to open up the floor to you guys. If there is anything you want to know or want to see, let me know.

My new phone...and the Seoul subway

I recently got myself a mobile phone. It has all kinds of completely useless features that I'll probably never use but it also has a really cool feature. It has details of the subway. As you can see from the photo it has a subway map on it so you can plan your route but it also has details of all stations. The best bit is that it tells you exactly which part of the train you need to stand in for transferring from one line to the other. Think about how many times have you thought you needed to be at the front of the train to change lines only to realise that actually you need to be right at the back. The subway here is really good. It costs about 45p per ride and you can transfer to a bus for free when you come back above ground. It is also very extensive having ten lines with more under construction. You can see on Wikipedia how it compares to other systems in terms of length, number of passengers and number of stations. Mind you the figures quote for length and number of stations don't include all the items on the map as some stations are counted as being train stations and are therefore excluded even though they are serviced by subway trains and require no seperate ticket. If you include those stations then there are 389 stations in total. Line number one runs from north eastern Seoul to South Western Seoul and is 143km long and takes more than three hours to go from one end to another. Cost of that journey? 1 pound 50p.

Family portrait...

It takes the three of them to be heavier than me.

Seoul Tower at dusk...

The monsoon rains have finally arrived and more often than not the skies are dark and cloudy.

My plant...

Hopefully 5,000 miles of seperation from the plant killer (you know who you are) will mean that this plant will thrive.

Happy birthday to me...

For my birthday we went out with a couple of friends for a seafood buffet. It was goooood...lot's of different kinds of kimbab, sushi, salads and some desserts.

After a hard day at school...

Catching up....

My camera and computer had a falling out so I haven't updated for a while. However, all is amicable again so I will do some catching up. I have responded to comments, so check older posts below.