Sabbatical Day 52 (6.29.16) - Gangnam Part 1

Today we decided to explore Gangnam. It was a 45 min subway ride to the area and I found out that the area is huge! The interesting thing about being here for me is that I just follow James wherever we go. I have no idea what direction we are going in, or what the street names are. I usually do a little more research but decided to leave that all in his hands.

And I digress...back to Gangnam. The area was made famous by the PSY song, but the music video was at Gangnam station. We decided to make that our last stop for the day. We started at Samseong station (yes, Samsung) and checked out the Coex mall. James read the description and told me it was Seoul's largest mall. Once we got there and walked around a bit, we both thought it was nothing special. Then we found out it was Seoul's largest underground mall....big whoop. We got out of there quick style and went to look for the Korean Buddhist temple called Bongeunsa Temple which was supposedly across the street.

Well, we walked in the wrong direction and found ourselves at a casino. This casino only allowed foreigners in which is pretty genius. (Something else to note about the Samseong station is that it also has Seoul's World Trade Center and a giant convention center. There were a lot of foreigners around.) We ended up staying there for at least an hour with James playing several hands of Blackjack. I don't know what it is with that boy and Blackjack but he loves it.

Once we headed in the right direction to the temple, it was very easy to find. It was like being transported to the rural countryside which was very cool. The temple offers an overnight temple stay for meditation and to see how the monks live. It was weird for me to see a Korean Buddhist temple because most Koreans I know are Christian and I associate the Buddhist temple with funerals and Vietnamese school from when I was a kid.

We left the temple and decided to walk to the fancy shop area of Gangnam (aka the Rodeo drive). It was luckily only a mile and we knew we were there once we saw designer shops that were 3 stories high at least. Each of the buildings had a cool design and structure. I think my favorite was the Omega store.

This road with the designer shops was also called Kpop Star Road. It had statues of a bunny (?) that were dressed like different Kpop stars. At the end of the road was a giant statue dressed like PSY. At the end of the road was the Galleria which had very high end shops and a fancy schmancy food court.

We ended up walking around more and went to the back side streets because James had found some shops to visit. What was weird was that there were apartment complexes right next to the super nice Galleria that looked very very ghetto.

Later that day James made a very interesting observation to me. I think he's a genius.

The way that Seoul is laid out is very different from San Francisco. In San Francisco, each neighborhood is known to be nice or not etc and all the houses generally look similar in each neighborhood. In Seoul, you can visually see the wealth disparity. People in the city usually live in high rises or in 3-4 story buildings called villas. The high rises are seen as nicer and show a price tag with that association. The villas are seen as not as nice and are much cheaper. The streets are also very narrow in Seoul. We were walking down some narrow streets and had to move to the side for cars to pass through. James made that observation that even that is showing the wealth disparity - you're on foot and I'm in a car so you need to get out of my way.

Crazy....

To say the least I didn't have the best impression of Gangnam. We didn't make it to the station but plan to go back to check it out. We are also going to check out two smaller neighborhoods in the Gangnam area that have turned more hipster. Excited for that!

Sabbatical Day 51 (6.28.16) - Errands

Today was our first full day in Seoul and we had a lot of errands to run. We woke up at 5 am and couldn't go back to sleep and are pretty jetlagged too!

1) Get our resident cards

2) Get a Tmoney card to use on the subway

3) Open a bank account

4) Get a Sim card

What an experience. You'd think it would be easy to do any of those things but it was anything but. Unfortunately most the items required one of the others as a prereq. For example, in order to get a bank account, we need a phone number or our resident card. 

We ended up running around the city going to several different phone stores for the sim card and several banks to find out what their requirements are. We couldn't get the resident cards because they require an appointment. Funny enough, their site wasn't working and they don't do same day appointments anyway. We were able to get a Tmoney card but bought it at the first place we stopped by (our local 7-11). The worker there only had cute cards with Line and Kakao mascots. We found out later that those cards are more expensive than the plain cards. 

While we ran around doing errands, we were able to explore our area further and I took the subway for the first time!

My observations for today are that 1) the style is to wear long sleeve shirts with short shorts 2) girls here wear light brown almost red eye shadow all around their eyes and very pink lipstick. That would look NCAA on me so I'm not trying that trend anytime soon.

Sabbatical Day 50 (6.27.16) - Seoul, Day 1

We finally arrived in Seoul! I barely slept on the flight because I was having issues with the entertainment system and really wanted to watch movies. Our flight got in around 3 pm local time (which was way past my bedtime in SF). Of course we wanted to eat and explore the city a bit so we did a bit of unpacking then headed out to the street.

The area that we are staying in is where all the universities are. I am amazed by how many food and coffee shops there are-it seems like every other shop is either of those! We ended up eating a few doors down from our apartment and ordered kimbap and bibimbap. The meal was VERY cheap ($6 for the both of us). I'm so excited to eat more delicious food!

After our meal we explored the neighborhood more. We found a lot of interesting places to eat, more coffee shops, and a shopping area. Since it was just getting dark, we also saw some street vendors out. My initial observations from walking around tonight are:

1) I didn't see too many women wearing tank tops. Most had t-shirts on or were covering their shoulders. Interestingly enough, I saw a lot of women wearing long sleeves with short skirts or shorts. 

2) People walk on the street glued to their phone. Even crossing busy intersections they are looking down! 

We have a laundry list of things to take care of tomorrow. Hopefully it's not too hot-today's weather was perfect!

Sabbatical Day 22 (5.30.16) - Family Time in Florida

I spent the last two days in Atlanta visiting my youngest aunt. My grams is staying with her because her house is getting renovated. I arrived in Atlanta after a short flight Saturday morning and my good friend Sean picked me up. As soon as I stepped out of the terminal I felt the heat and pretty much started sweating immediately!

The last time I visited Atlanta was when I was 9. I had three distinct memories from that trip: 1) I was traumatized by the tram in the airport because I followed someone on the tram thinking it was my aunt. Got caught between the doors, then ended up riding to the next terminal crying. 2) It was the first place I experienced racism. I was at a Barnes and Nobles and a lady said something to me about being Chinese. 3) Atlanta is where I became addicted to Days of Our Lives. I spent the whole week on my aunt's couch and tuning into Days everyday.

It's been a great few days. The food is good, the beer is good, even the weather (during the early am and dusk) is good!

This morning we drove a good 6 hours to my aunt's beach house near Panama City, FL. I must have had low expectations because the beach is awesome! And the beach house is like a little vacation getaway. The younger generation went to the local Publix and bought so many groceries. We cooked a delicious feast and bought a good amount of alcohol. Looking forward to the next few days!

Sabbatical Day 9 (5.17.16) - ESL

My mom has been an ESL teacher at San Jose City College since her twenties. She's been trying to get me to follow in her footsteps for so long now and I was never interested enough to do anything about it.  When I decided to take a sabbatical and open the door to other careers, it made sense to explore ESL because I am moving to a foreign country with no other way to make money. 

It seems like my mom is really excited about it. She wants to give me all of her books and materials (she is also retiring next month). Yesterday, I met her at work so that we could carpool together to the mall and go shopping. She introduced me to so many people and mentioned that I was getting my ESL certificate. I'm getting a certificate online....I'm not sure if that's too much to be proud of. 

At first when I told her that I was taking a sabbatical, she wasn't too happy. She thinks we won't have enough money and that we aren't planning for our future. I hope by her parading me around she is feeling better about us traveling and trying something new. Even at 32 years old, I realize that I'll always be her child and she'll always be concerned about me.

Sabbatical Day 8 - Cravings

Not going into the office definitely has its perks. I like being able to cook dinner every night. While I was working, I would end up cooking in bulk so that we'd have enough food for several meals. Because of that, I really have no idea how to cook for just one meal!

On Saturday night we had a group of friends over and I decided to make spring rolls with shrimp. I love spring rolls! I was still craving them and wanted to make more but ran out of shrimp. As we are trying to use up everything we have in our kitchen, I had to make do with what I already had. 

I remembered that I had some roasted rice powder that I took from my grandma's pantry so decided to use that to make bi chay. This is a vegetarian version of bi (pig's skin). Well, I looked up a recipe for bi chay and of course I don't have all of the ingredients so I improvised. 

The recipe called for jicama, taro, potato, rice vermicelli, and bean thread noodles. Instead of jicama, taro and potato, I had napa cabbage and bean sprouts. I ran out of rice vermicelli so I just made do with bean thread noodles. (This is like an episode of chopped!)

I also tried to grill tofu with a tamarind sauce. The tamarind was very sour and I wasn't a fan but am determined to make use of the sauce again!

As it turns out, I thought I was just cooking for one meal for one person but I still made too much food. I was pretty full after eating two, but stuffed the third into my belly anyways. Luckily James was willing to take the last one off my hands!

Sabbatical Day 7 - B2B Experiment

Two years ago James and I did Bay to Breakers (B2B)with some friends. We walked from his place on Divis and Oak through the panhandle and to the edge of Golden Gate Park. On our way back, it was around lunch time, we had been drinking for hours and STARVING. Suddenly, we saw two ladies with cart selling egg rolls! We were so hungry we bought at least 10 eggrolls for our group-we didn't care what they cost.

Since then James and I always talked about how much money we would make if we sold food at B2B. This year, we decided to experiment and try our hand at selling Spam Musubis. People love Spam Musubis, right?

We found out this was semi right.

Before I get to the part where we sell the musubis, let me tell you about our process. The ingredients of Spam musubi include spam, rice, teriyaki sauce and seaweed.

Spam: We bought 4 Costco packs of Spam. Each Costco pack has 8 cans. Each can can create about 9 slices....that's 280 musubis. Woah! Luckily my friend Gina bought us a "luncheon meat slicer" and we were able to quickly and evenly slice the Spam to be musubi ready!

Rice: We made about 20 cups of rice. Our rice cooker (we call her Susie) can luckily make rice in 15 minutes with her quick cook function. We made about half the night before.

Seaweed: We've made musubis before where the seaweed wrapped around the entire musubi. We decided not to do that since we saw the pictures on the Spam can that only showed a strip of seaweed. We assumed that each sheet of seaweed could wrap 4 musubis.

Teriyaki Sauce: This was made the day before-a mix of mirin, soy sauce, and sugar.

Sunday morning we wake up at 8 with the intention of leaving for B2B at 10. Let me tell you, musubis take way longer than we thought! We thought we could 280 musubis but by noon, we only had 150!

By 12:30 we were at the Panhandle ready to sell. There were so many people we didn't know where to start! We ended up standing in one spot for a few minutes with the thought that people would come to us.

Didn't happen. So we chugged a few beers and walked around to different groups of people soliciting our musubis. People either had no idea what a musubi was, they were "vegetarian", or they were SUPER excited to see us. One girl actually questioned us why they were warm. Rice and meat should be warm....not cold. And they were fresh! Ugh. I found myself having to bite my tongue a lot.

End of the day, we sold about 100. We still made a profit after the materials which was great.

They unfortunately didn't sell like the hotcakes we thought they were and we didn't make as much as we thought we would.

Would I do it again? Heck yes. At least now I know how to efficiently make musubis and who to target when trying to sell them.