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

Stuffed Chicken

A friend of a friend, SH, posted a recipe on his Facebook some time back for stuffed chicken breasts. I finally got around to trying it this weekend. I didn't 100% follow his recipe, since I didn't have any sour cream, and I kind of just winged it on the spices.

I took chicken breasts, sliced them in the middle (butterfly them), and inserted cheese (I used pepper cheese) and spinach leaves (quickly boil the leaves first). Then I sprinkled on some salt, pepper and basil. At the last minute, I decided to pour in a little wine before putting it in the oven to bake. Unfortunately, I only have red wine, so my chicken turned a little purple on the bottom. Even so, it was pretty good for a first try. Thanks SH. I'll try the sour cream next time.

Go Big Reds!

The first Korean World Cup match was Saturday night, Korean time. I dug deep in my closet and pulled out my special red tee-shirt, which first appeared on this blog during the last World Cup in 2006. I bought a couple of extra items this year, a cap and a big red "towel" to help cheer the team to victory:



Obviously it worked, since Korea won against Greece 2-0. A pretty exciting game, considering... my air conditioner (sorry, aircon) is broken and the one repairman servicing Seoul can't come until the next century. So I had all my windows open. Apparently everyone else in my neighborhood had their windows open, too. I could hear the cheering whenever Korean challenged the goal. However, everyone would cheer 4 seconds too early! I finally realized it was because I have satellite service. The link delay from the groud up and back to the geostationary satellite is about 1/4 of a second, so either Skylife radiowaves travel slower than normal, or they introduced some extra delay, intentionally or not. It also seemed to me that the video was not truly in HD. I know on any given night, I can tune into this same station (SBS) on the Skylife system, and see crystal clear HD programs. But the game just didn't seem very high quality. I'm going to try some other channels next game and see if I can figure it out.

Next game is Thursday against what I'm told is a very strong team, Argentina. I do want to go watch a game in a public venue like a restaurant or sports bar, but I'm just too tired this week. I think I'll just be lazy and watch it at home again - of course, with my big red towel cheering them onto a second victory.

Bulgogi

One of the small gifts I brought The Stumbling Mom was a bottle of Bulgogi marinade sauce. We wanted to try it out, so Monday night we decided to prepare a Korean meal. Started with some Sirloin meat, which I tried to slice as thin as possible - still wasn't thin enough, but it was good. Cut up lots of small vegetables to add to the marinade sauce - onions, mushrooms and green onions. Let is soak for a few hours (overnight would have been best, but we didn't have the time):



Next, The Stumbling Mom roasted some pine nuts, I cut up some more of the "cucumber peppers", made some brown rice in the new rice cooker, and finally cooked the bulgogi:









Here is the final result. The home-grown lettuce leaves weren't very big, so I spilled a lot of rice when making a wrap. Also, the brown rice isn't sticky, which made it easier to spill. But still, very delicious.



Tuesday morning I headed up to Tennessee to meet with a colleague. Did some last minute shopping at Walmart, and drove on to Atlanta through heavy rain. Spent the night at the airport hotel, and left back to Seoul at the crack of dawn Wednesday morning.

Meat, Meat, and More Meat

Visited The Stumbling Brother this weekend, the focal point being a big meat cookout attended by me and two of his friends. He has converted part of his back yard into a meat cooking pavillion.



Here is a list of the meats that were cooked that afternoon. We added it up, and we cooked a total of 80 lbs of meat, or 36 kgs!

Brisket, qty 2, 4 lbs ea

Butt Roast, qty 4, 7-10 lbs ea

Turkey Breast, qty 2, 7 lbs ea

Whole Turkey, qty 1, 13 lbs

Chicken Wings, qty 24

Catfish Fillets, 5 lbs

Baked Beans w/Sausage, 3 lbs

Fried Hushpppies, 1 lb

Corn Fritters w/Black-Eyed Peas and Garlic, 2 lbs

French Fries, 3 lbs

SPAM, 1 can

The meat cooking equipment (that was used) consisted a gas grill:



a gas stove,


an electric "table-top" turkey frier,


an electric smoker,


and an experimental "trash can" method using hot coals.


I don't think THIS grill / smoker was used, but I'm not 100% sure:


Here we all are, sitting around waiting for the meat to cook...






The Stumbling Nephew in his St. Patrick's Day coat with Young Stumbler #4:

Sunday Visits

Went to visit The Stumbling Brother this weekend, and took the opportunity to visit some folks from my long ago past. First, on Sunday morning, went to see Dr. and Mrs. W, parents of my good high school friend KW. Back in High School, we used to jokingly call him "Dr. Dr. W", since had two doctorate degrees. However, on Sunday he embarassed me by reminding me that we also used to call him "Big Dummy" at marching band events! It was great to see them again after 25 years.





Then on Sunday afternoon, we visited an old family friend EB, who lives out in the woods south of town. He told us lots of fun stories from the old days, and we had a fun visit. EB is a Ham Radio operator, just like The Stumbling Brothers, and is encouraging me find a way to get on the air from Seoul someday.