Summer is Almost Over!!

The season is changing soon. My son started the second semester of school last week and the month ends today. I can almost feel the autumn coming soon so it's almost bye-bye time for my very familiar friend, hot summer. 

Not too fast though. It is still somewhat hot during daytime specially if I was under the sun. But once under the shade, I can already feel a bit different. For the locals here, it's cool. For me, it's a little cold. I now need my thin jackets over my sleeveless tank tops to keep me warm and not solely to protect my arms from the sun. 

The temperatures have been slowly dropping to 18 and even 16 degrees C when the sun is not around. 

I may have to bring out our long sleeved clothes sooner than most people. I now understand why Koreans usually have a lot of these kinds of clothes which they use during the most part of the year.

It's been a while since I have experienced living in a temperate region so this year will definitely be a learning year how to cope with the seasons. 

P has been coughing every morning a few months ago but I haven't heard it for the past few weeks. I had to let him wear a jacket for sleep tonight. With the dropping temperatures specially evenings and early mornings, we will have to be extra careful of how we do things. We should be more fastidious in keeping warm clothes and blankets at night. Because the changing season can really wreak havoc to our health. That also means enough sleep, and healthy food.

The fruits in the neighborhood fields are slowly ripening. The pear and apple trees are bearing fruits that are slowly changing colors ripe and big enough for picking soon. I can't wait to find a place to help out one of these days. The grapes are getting a bit cheaper as well so we're starting to get some from the supermarket. 

During the brief summer, the summer fruits like watermelon and honey dew melons abound as cheap as 3000 to 5000 for a big bag or a decent sized watermelon. It has now gone up again to 10,000 a piece nowadays.Hmmm..I may have to do another post on fruits soon. 

Notes and notes, and bracing for the coming cold season.

Korean Legal Aid Center for Family Relations

Just a short note today about legal aid resource I got from the facebook group for expats...

Korean Legal Aid Center for Family Relations

This can be useful for someone in need of legal aid specially here where English is a bit hard to come by. 

The Daring Marketers of the Korean Road

I've seen these thing three times so far...motorbikers fly by the road while quickly tossing out little business cards.
The motorbiker quite intrigue me when I first saw it coz they usually have this loud music blaring as they speed along. When I followed them with my eyes, I noticed the little things flying out of their hands almost with perfect precision like a shuriken, but not as deadly as that. ;)

This one below is a biker tandem. It may seem dangerous but these is way better the riding-in-tandem riders we usually here in news in Ph.



These folks actually saw me take the photo, stopped and, I felt, almost got offended. Maybe what they were doing is quite not legal but I actually thought it was interesting. I am not really sure if they should be apprehended by the police.
^{I have yet get another chance for a better shot next time.}

posted from Bloggeroid

Math, Arts and Sciences on Korean Liberation Day

The season is changing soon. My son started the second semester of school last week and the month ends today. I can almost feel the autumn coming soon so it's almost bye-bye time for my very familiar friend, hot summer. 

Not too fast though. It is still somewhat hot during daytime specially if I was under the sun. But once under the shade, I can already feel a bit different. For the locals here, it's cool. For me, it's a little cold. I now need my thin jackets over my sleeveless tank tops to keep me warm and not solely to protect my arms from the sun. 

The temperatures have been slowly dropping to 18 and even 16 degrees C when the sun is not around. 

I may have to bring out our long sleeved clothes sooner than most people. I now understand why Koreans usually have a lot of these kinds of clothes which they use during the most part of the year.

It's been a while since I have experienced living in a temperate region so this year will definitely be a learning year how to cope with the seasons. 

P has been coughing every morning a few months ago but I haven't heard it for the past few weeks. I had to let him wear a jacket for sleep tonight. With the dropping temperatures specially evenings and early mornings, we will have to be extra careful of how we do things. We should be more fastidious in keeping warm clothes and blankets at night. Because the changing season can really wreak havoc to our health. That also means enough sleep, and healthy food.

The fruits in the neighborhood fields are slowly ripening. The pear and apple trees are bearing fruits that are slowly changing colors ripe and big enough for picking soon. I can't wait to find a place to help out one of these days. The grapes are getting a bit cheaper as well so we're starting to get some from the supermarket. 

During the brief summer, the summer fruits like watermelon and honey dew melons abound as cheap as 3000 to 5000 for a big bag or a decent sized watermelon. It has now gone up again to 10,000 a piece nowadays.Hmmm..I may have to do another post on fruits soon. 

Notes and notes, and bracing for the coming cold season.

Baby Steps to Solve My Laundry Dilemmas 1

Ever since I bought the Kamaru sleeping bag, I had been worried how I will be washing it. The first time that I washed it was after P went camping in the tropical Philippines. It was not such a worry to just simply hand wash and hang dry the sleeping bag outdoors since there was plenty sunshine.

I had only hand-washed it once during winter when we moved here early this year. It wasn't that hard to dry it coz the air is dry during winter. I simply washed it in the tub at night and hung it there to drip dry overnight. Then, hung it out again on the laundry drier rack in the room the next day.

We have our new 10KG washing machine now that looks like it can handle such stuff so I took my risk in using it to wash the sleeping bag today. I had given up on searching online for the Kamaru washing instructions (done that before to no avail). I thought that a decent Philippine brand like that would have a decent after sales, even just a wash care instruction. But I was disappointed. The same thing goes with the comforter that we got ten years ago from a mall in the Ph. The only stuff I found to read was 50% polyester - 50% cotton, approximate size 88" x 92" and the item: comforter. A lot of other information were missing, and I did not even see  the brand! How crazy is that! I don't think the stuff was that cheap to go brandless. Even non-branded stuff has a company name but this one has none.

So going back to my first guinea pig in washing big stuff in my washing machine, the Kamaru sleeping bag seemed alright after a quick run in the machine. I let it run on quick cycle, and just a small amount of laundry powder since it's made of nylon and can easily be clean I think. It is now hanging on the drier rack, hopefully to dry before tonight. :D

The next on the list would be the brandless comforter and the disgustingly colored-orange Dalmatian-printed comforter. Which one will go first? I've no worry with the orange one coz it's made in Korea and they do wash their comforters in the machine all the time without much fuss. It's the other one that I stressed about without any drier balls to use and crossing my fingers that it will not clump and useful after the tumble. *Sigh...

Oh boy! Am I really living in my own world that just a little sleeping bed washing success made me write five paragraphs about it? Duh! (There might be a part two on how the others turn out. ^^)

Going Solo by Roald Dahl-- post reading post

I have just finished the book which was the sequel of Dahl's autobiography “Boy.” It took me almost four days to do in between the other stuff that I need to do.
My son has already finished reading it before I started so I asked him how was it. He said that he some parts were boring but some were cool. He meant the landscape descriptions as boring and the dog fights as cool.
The book starts light with humorous anecdotes during the author's voyage from England to Africa. It was quite engaging for me as a start but the book got darker with the onset of the world war. It ends with the young Dahl, after his eventful stint as a war pilot, coming home to meet his family, specially his mother.
It made me shed a few tear, honestly, as a mother, as I read the last bits of the book. My son will most likely become a soldier at one point of his life in the future since his nationality requires him so. They really have no choice unless they change into a different nationality.

Going back to the book, Roald Dahl is one classic writer of his time, indeed, as his storytelling would have the soft and gritty part to it. He made me see wartime from a war pilot's point of view and what it was like during that time. It wasn't heavily retold with the brutality of war but spiced with some lighter mood.
I, as a reader, am truly thankful for Dahl's work of literary as he tells his own story.
Now, I must search and reread the first book next since it's been a while ago that I finished reading it and I almost already forgot how was it.

posted from Bloggeroid

KIIPS language book

posted from Bloggeroid

P @ 10

Banana Chocolate Bread/Cake (Brake) :D

Today is P's 10th birthday and I made him this as his cake using a...ta--da-da-da..Korean rice cooker. Thanks to evanandranchel blog for the original recipe which I tweaked a bit by adding two tablespoons of cocoa powder.

For future reference, I am reposting the ingredients here.

1.5 C white flour
3/4 C brown sugar
1.5 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
2 T cocoa powder
1/4 t cinnamon to taste 

1 C mashed ripe bananas (2-3 frozen or fresh bananas)
1/3 C softened butter
1/4 C milk
1 egg
 

1. I simply mixed the dry ingredients and added the mixed wet ingredients to it. 

2. Then, I buttered  the rice cooker pot before pouring the batter in.

3. Since it's all powder and white flour (I haven't found any wheat flour around here yet),

I just set it to cook like cooking a regular white rice. It took 35 minutes in my 6C rice cooker.

It turned out to be just about moist enough for my taste but slightly sweeter. I guess the cocoa powder really packed a lot of sweetness after adding it to the original 3/4 C of brown sugar. I can probably decrease the sugar to 1/2 if I wanted to add the cocoa again next time.    

Pac Man :b

P also made a set of Magic Choc using melted chocolate by himself. I used his leftover white chocolate to write on the cake. His Keun Appa gave him the Magic Choc set and it worked just perfect for his birthday project. :)

I hope nobody asks why he chose GEEK design from the numerous stencil set that was available. :)

P the Geek

posted from Bloggeroid

Banking in Korea for Foreigners

Why would a bank have an area labeled as "Two Chairs", I wonder?

This is what I noticed as I sat and wait inside a Woori Bank branch in Chungnam on a Monday morning. Not only is it a bit odd as a signboard but the spelling doesn't look like English at all with the double dots above the CAPITALIZED letter "I." Maybe it's a bit of a German word? ^^ It's just weird. 

I asked my husband about it when I got home and he said that maybe they just thought it was "cute" to have those two dots on top. Eh? Seriously? In a bank? @.@  

posted from Bloggeroid

 On a more serious note, I finally had to open my own bank account today. First stop, Shinhan Bank, followed by Woori Bank. I prepared my Foreigner's card and told the ajussis that I want to open a new account. (Dojang manduro juseyo, that's the best Korean I can muster.) It turns out, I got it mixed up again with the personal stamp called "dojang." It should have been, "TONGjang" I had to repeat it a couple of times before they understood my faulty Korean but I managed to get a queue number anyway. The queue slip reads "Sangdam jangu" - consultation window :D

Here is how it went..

Shinhan Bank

1. Got the queue slip with a staff's help. Sat and waited.

2. When my turn came up, I went the teller and told her what I want to do as I hand her my Alien Card. 

3. She immediately called their in-house phone interpreter, spoke for a few minutes with her, then handed me the phone. 

4. The call center agent verified that I want to open an account. Here's how the conversation went after the initial greetings and whatnots..

Agent: You wanted to make an account?

Me: Yes. 

Agent: Why would you like to open an account?

Me: Just for savings. I just want deposit some cash. I just need a savings account.

Agent: Yes, it is for savings. What it is your purpose? Will you be sending money abroad? 

Me: Not really. Not yet anyway. I just need a regular savings account.

Agent: What it is your purpose? Where will you be getting you money, is it from company salary? 

Me: (starting to feel annoyed at this point) Not really. I just want to put my money in a bank. 

She almost exhausted my reasoning skills. I only want to open an account, a regular savings account. Why does it have to be that complicated? And it doesn't end there.

Agent: Okay. I would like to speak to the branch manager please. 

Me: (Silent, thinking why would she want to speak to the manager now. Did I do something bad that the Manager is needed?) What's that again?

Agent: Can I talk to the branch manager...teller please.

Me: Ah, ok. (Felt relieved.)

5. The teller spoke with the agent on the phone, and started giving me the paperworks.

6. I had to fill up and sign at least 4 pages. 

7. At the end, I only got the bankbook and I have to wait for three months to get the card. Seriously? (My husband got his right away last time if I remember it right.) 

This Shinhan Bank branch doesn't really make me feel good whenever I finish a transaction with them. 

Woori Bank 

1. Got the queue slip with a staff's help. He gave me the necessary forms to fill up. 

2. I filled them up, sat and waited quite long but it's okay since I already got most of the paperwork done. 

3. My turn came up, said my line in Korean, handed her my alien card along with the forms and the teller immediately started encoding into their system.

4. She verified with me that it isn't a credit card that I am applying for. She also asked me if I'd want phone banking and internet banking. She gave an additional paper when I told her that I want the internet banking.

5. I also asked for Gyotong Card and she showed me the T money logo on a debit card. She explained a bit about it but I really didn't understand. I almost felt that I will not get that card.

6. At the end, I got that same card, along with the PIN card (secret card) and a bank book. 

Mission accomplished!  I just need to deposit some cash on these new account to try out the cards and passbook next time. Note that I didn't need to have any amount for initial deposit to open an account, unlike in my home country. 

Notes: It's better now that I am familiar with the typical terms in a form now. I just need to remember a couple of things:

1.TONGjang NOT dojang for an account

2. debit card is called Check Card

3. Sumyong is the name. Signature is usually a small area BESIDE it, not on top I think, since Koreans typically have short names and traditionally use small roundish Dojang. I signed it on top though, since my name is quite long.

I just feel a bit strange having to sign a lot of these forms without any idea what they are all about. "Never sign anything that you don't understand." really bugs me. If only there's a clue. Ah! That reminds me, one the papers from both banks had something to do with tax, I think. Go figure what exactly it is for. 

That's it for tonight. It's already past twelve.