Scabbardfish

From one ugly fish:


To one delicious dish:


According to Wikipedia's article on the order Perciformes, family Trichiuridae, there are 40 some species of this fish all around the world. Also called Cutlassfish, Hairtails, Walla Walla, or Frostfishes. They are silver colored, and because they look like a steel blade they've earned two of those those names. Now if I caught one, I don't think I would be comparing it to a shiny steel, but something from a nightmare. I would run first and wouldn't worry about cooking it.

Fortunately, this came freshly frozen and filleted, so there was nothing frightening about it at all. (Believe me when I say that getting a fish that has been filleted is indeed a joyous event here in Korea for us westerners no used to choking on bones)

Now go fry some up some sword-like nightmares and enjoy.

Dialogue.

Part 1. Chicago. 1972. This certainly seems like a dated political protest song (which it was), but these lyrics are still meaningful today, 38 years later.



Diaogue Filmed Live Arie Crown Theater, Chicago, Nov 1972

Q. Are you optimistic 'bout the way things are going?

A. No, I never ever think of it at all

Q. Don't you ever worry, When you see what's going down?

A. Will, I try to mind my business, that is, no business at all

Q. When it's time to function as a feeling human being, Will your bachelor of arts help you get by?

A. I hope to study further, a few more years or so, I also hope to keep a steady high

Q. Will you try to change things, Use the power that you have, the power of a million new ideas?

A. What is this power you speak of and this need for things to change? I always thought that everything was fine

Q. Don't you feel repression just closing in around?

A. No, the campus here is very, very free

Q. Don't it make you angry the way war is dragging on?

A. Well, I hope the president knows what he's into, I don't know

Q. Don't you ever see the starvation in the city where you live? All the needless hunger, all the needless pain?

A. I haven't been there lately, the country is so fine. But my neighbors don't seem hungry 'cause they haven't got the time

Q. Thank you for the talk, you know you really eased my mind. I was troubled by the shapes of things to come

A. Well, if you had my outlook your feelings would be numb. You'd always think that everything was fine.


We can make it happen.

Mr. Q above was sung by Terry Kath (RIP), and Mr. A was sung by Peter Cetera.

Sorry, this deviates from my typical food postings, but I just couldn't get this song out of my head today.

Android Forum

I went to the cell phone store two weeks ago, to buy a new screen protector for my phone. I left 2 hours later with an Android smart phone. I couldn't find any places among the websites here to discuss the Android from the expat's perspective, so I wasted a couple hours and threw up a forum website: The SeoulDroid, a discussion board for Android users in Korea.

There should be general Android discussions as well as Korea-related topics, so anyone can participate. Right now there aren't many topics, as I just opened it this weekend. Please join up and start some discussions!

Quiznos

We've been working late at the office a lot recently, and I decided to do something special for dinner tonight. There is a Quiznos sub sandwich shop very close to my office. The last time I went (back in March, I think) I had asked them if they delivered. They said they did. So, I've had this take out menu here at my office waiting for just such a chance as tonight.

Wanting to be independent, I decided to order the sandwiches myself. Things went kind of downhill from there. First, they didn't answer the phone, even after several minutes of it ringing. As I was about to give up, I noticed a FAX number on the menu. Well, this is great. I don't have to worry about the language, I can just FAX in my order. Which I did. I waited 5 or 10 minutes, expecting to get a call back. Nothing. So I called back, and this time someone answered. He was very nice, said he received my FAX, but they don't make sandwiches there. Turns out I had sent the FAX to the headquarter office, not the store. But, he said he would transmit my order to the store. Now we're talking. Next I got a call from the store, and I was overwhelmed by her Korean. I finally gave up being independent and gave the phone to CH.

It turns out that in general, they don't really deliver. If you are in a very few limited office buildings, and order more than $50 of sandwiches, THEN they'll deliver. Quiznos is a little expensive here, but even with three sandwiches, I wasn't going to break the $50 mark. So the only choice was to cancel or go pick it up myself. Well, by this time, I was so worked up to have a hot, toasted Quiznos sandwich, I agreed to go pick them up in 15 minutes. Nothing else can go wrong, right? Wrong.

As I said, our office is very close to Quiznos. Normally it would just be a 5 minute taxi or less (it was raining). On the way, one must pass through about 2 blocks of pretty heavy traffic. Heavy did not begin to descibe the traffic tonight. It took over 20 minutes to go that two blocks. Total time took me about 30 minutes to get there, by which time any hope of eating a warm toasted sandwich was out the window.

Regardless, we had a good meal, a litle out of the ordinary, and I got one more blog post. And here's the back of the menu. Any fool with half a brain could see which number to dial...

Misc Photos

I still have been too busy at work these days. And changing over to my new laptop as well. Here are some miscellaneous photos I haven't had time to post from the past few weeks.

There's a "Mister Tofu" near my new home. This day my eyes were bigger than my stomach. Here you can see I made the mistake of ordering not only a bowl of tofu stew, but an extra side dish of an egg (it's basically a vegetable / cheese omlette). Boy, was this omlette huge - MUCH bigger than I expected. There was enough food here for two people, and I hated to leave half of my food (but I did).



Here is a small bucket/bowl a got over a month ago to go with the small air conditioner we installed in the office. This is a semi-portable unit, and requires you to empty a water resevoir periodically. We were told it would last for several days before needing to be drained, and when it needed draining, an indicator lamp would come on. To our surprise, the light has never come on. I even unplugged the pipe one day to check for water (maybe the lamp is broken), but no water. This new bowl is as dry as the day I bought it.

"From ???ing garden gather fragrance ??? of the vanished flower of a hundred years before"

"Little Flower -- but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is".

Hmmm, okay. And here is the aircon, er, air conditioner that this bowl is meant to service:



Need to do some Kolon shopping?



Years ago, when my eyesight was better, I used to carry around my pocket computer, the HP200LX. I still have it, and from time to time I turn it on to see that it still works. Back in those days, there was a very active international "club" of active users, and we still maintain a very inactive mailing list. Recently one of the members in Germany located what he believes might be the perfect HP200LX replacement, and turns out it is made right here in Korea. That would be the MBOOK by the UMID company.

Another member in Portugal wanted to get one of these new computers, and arranged for me to buy and ship it for him. But before boxing it up to go overseas, I took a photo comparing the old and the new. It's a nice design, but I didn't power it up. While I make jokes about my failing eyesight, I seriously wonder if I could even be comfortable working on this small of a screen. Anyway, I'll look forward to Alberto's report from Portugal in the months ahead.



By the way, my ruler is NOT crooked - the camera distored the image.

"New" Address System

I was at the factory outside of Seoul for about 10 days straight since moving, and didn't get a chance to go report my new address to the Immigration Office. I almost forgot, until last night I suddenly remembered. First thing this morning, on the last day (you get 14 days to change without penalty), I went down to get it changed. It really wasn't any big deal, but when she handed me my card back, she showed me the new address, and it wasn't anything like the address I had given on the form! I didn't want to question it (don't rock the boat with Immigration, is my motto). On returning to the office, I asked CH about this, and he said that this was a new form of address that the government was adopting, although it wasn't widespread.

Well, for all these years in Seoul, I had finally gotten used to the address system. Now they're changing it? Did a little research online, and found this post from 2004 (!) describing the new address system, which is like we have in the USA. Street names, street numbers with odd and even numbers on opposite sides of the street. Wow, this has been around since 2004? Here is the official website, you can translate an "old" style into the "new" style, and also see a map showing street names and house/building numbers. But wow, at least 6 years going and it's still not popular?

How Many Real Estate Agents...

...does it take to sell apartments in one building?



There are FIVE real estate agencies all next door to each other in my building! And there's at least one more around the back - there could be more. Amazing...

Even More Signs

After reading my friend Tuttle's post on signs, inspired by his friend Jo-Anna's post on signs, I couldn't help but share these two bathroom signs I saw last week at lunch. Don't quite know what point they are trying to make - are you supposed to climb over the stalls? Or hang like a spider from the ceiling?

Panorama

Click to enlarge:


Click to enlarge:


Found some free Microsoft software that makes panoramic images. I played around with the view from my new home. You give it a series of images (which of course have to have been taken ina panoramic sequence), and the program automatically "stitches" them together. Pretty cool.

Posville

That's the name of my new apartment building. Here are some photos of the new place. Still organizing, but I'm basically comfortable and it's liveable and cozy.

Crazy Busy

Well, let me try to catch up on the past to weeks. The first excitement was my move. I've known for a couple months now that I would be moving, but there were some issues setting the exact move date. I had located two possible new places, and I coudn't decide which one. Suddenly I found an online advertisement for an apartment that turned out to be perfect. It is just a 10 minute walk from the office, and located right at Sindorim subway station. At this station, there is a huge "Technomart" building, which includes numerous shops, restaurants, a movie theater, and yes, technical shopping, too. I claimed the apartment, and began he process of moving.

The first order of business was to downsize. The new place is a large studio apartment. Not exactly a one-room, but almost. This downsizing required me to sell my treadmill and my refrigerator. That took up an interesting half day, helping the truck driver wrestle these down to the truck:



Moving day went smoothly, despite the constant rain. I think the two moving guys had under-estimated the job. They worked extra hard, and we still didn't finish until 7pm or so. I couldn't believe how many boxes I had.







Some things I'll miss from my old apartment, the doggie-decorated hooks:



the four-burner stove (the new place just has two):



And as a testament to my poor housekeeping skills, this hairpin was in the floor of my closet when I moved in back in Feb 2008. Two and one half years later, it is still exactly where it was, plus a little extra dust:



Goodbye Room 1404

Choices - NOT

When I first came to Korea, there were four really big shopping "mart" stores (think super Walmart-like). Carrefour, Homeplus, Homever, and E-Mart. Carrefour was closest to our apartment, and coincidentally seemed to have the widest selection of products to choose from. Over the years, through a series or acquisitions, there are now just two big ones left, Homeplus and E-Mart. You might think that when two stores merged, you would get a super-set of each stores product lines - the best of both worlds. Instead, they went the opposite way. At eash acquisition, I observed the product choices seemed to be fewer and fewer.






Then we have this article in the morning newspaper "Retail chains cull range of products on shelves". Well, to me, this isn't news - they've been doing it for years already. But apparently they're getting serious about it now. One chain will take an "intelligent" approach, and eliminate products that don't sell well. Maybe logical, unless one of those products happens to be my favorite strawberry jam or my real, American-style mustard! Another chain will restrict manufacturers to just one size of their products - the example being given was laundry soap - you will now only find one size of each brand on the shelf. I guess from now on it will only be 50Kg bags of laundry soap, purchased once a year, or 1Kg bags purchased every week.

I'm not sure how this is going to play out. If I worked in this industry, seems like I would already be acutely aware of the large reductions in product choices over the past years. Cutting the choices even further seems like the last thing I'd want to introduce. At some point, the customers are going to revolt.

Well, let's see how it plays out. In the meantime, I'd better stock up on mustard and jam - and oh yeah - laundry soap!

Babysitting

As a public service, I will post some baby-sitting do's and don'ts on my blog today (click on any image to enlarge):

Korean Elvis

The Stumbling Mother reports the following appeared on her whiteboard recently:



I take partial responsibility for the awkward looking man on the left, but that's all. Someone else's been changing my artwork!

The Stumbler vs. The Chair

Met a couple of friends for a pleasant dinner and conversation last night (review to be posted on ZenKimchi Dining soon). After dinner, we chose a decidedly Korean activity of sitting out front of a convenience store to chat and have a few beers.

I am reminded at this point in the story that although I am losing weight, I still have quite a ways to go. In the middle of our conversation, suddenly my chair broke and I went flying to the ground:



I escaped injury, except a small scratch on my elbow, not to mention embarassment. To add insult to injury, one friend suggested I switch to Lite beer! You won't hear me saying this anytime soon: "One more bowl of rice, please..." It's time to redouble my efforts at weight loss, before I do further furniture damage.

Sleep Study

Well I finally got around to having a sleep study done last night. I went to the Seoul Sleep Center, apparently one of the, if not the, premier place in Korea for sleep problems such as apnea (a nice English review here).



Since this place is about 45 minutes away for me, I scheduled it so I could do everything in one trip. I arrived at my appointment time of 5pm, and met with one of the English speaking doctors for about an hour. Then I want to a nearby small restaurant for dinner. After eating, I still had some time to kill, so I stopped at a nice coffee shop and had some tea. Finally around 8:30pm I went back to the sleep center to my appointed room.

Lots of pillows, so I was happy:


And there was a TV, watched a little bit of the movie "Paycheck":



The two night-shift nurses proceeded to hook me up. There were more than 20 sensors hooked to my brain, face, nose, throat, chest, torso, and legs. When all done, I felt like a walking robot:







The nursing staff weren't fluent in English, although one of the nurses was pretty good. The task of answering a questionaire, and installing these numerous sensors was pretty funny with the language barrier. But finally all was successfully completed.

I went to sleep at the appointed time, 11pm. The only issue was my sleep position. They wanted to collect some data with me sleeping on my back. I can't sleep on my back. In fact, it is almost like torture for me to sleep on my back. I tried like a good patient to sleep on my back, but after about 15 minutes I gave up with excrutiating pain. I rolled over to my side and promptly went to sleep. The nurses weren't too happy, but what could we do?

They woke me up again at 5am, telling me the sleep study was over. He removed all the sensors, then said I could sleep longer if I wanted (I did). Seems like they should have just let me keep sleeping, but maybe there is a reason. I woke up at 7am, and took a shower to wash the glue from my hair and body! I was hoping to get some preliminary comments from the nurse, but alas, the shift had changed and the nurse who knew English had gone home. So I'll have to wait until next week to get the official results.

One good news - the doctor warned me that my sleep problem might be so severe, that they would wake me up during the sleep study and get me to use the CPAP breathing machine. In fact, she strongly suspected this would happen. But, it didn't. I can only guess that my sleep problem is not the severe type. Wish me luck.

-The Sleepy Stumbler