2005-11-23 - Some updates, yo:

Holy shit I am being a really bad diary-keeper. Sorry, diary!

I've been meaning to tell you about the milk. It's easy to find milk in South Korea. The trouble is finding milk that is good. Most milk is unpasturized. Unpasturized milk sometimes can upset the foreign stomach, although I've never had this problem. Also, the pasturization process changes the taste, which I didn't really think much about before. Unpasturized milk has a taste I can't really describe (udder?) and don't especially like. Also, most of the milk here is whole milk. Like, 7% milk fat kind of whole milk, that would generally pass for half-and-half back home. So, there's that. There is also some low fat milk (somewhere between 1 and 2%). The low fat milk is more my speed, but because it's unpasturized, the absense of milk fat amplifies the uddery taste of the milk. Recently, I did manage to track down some pasturized milk. It's really awesome, it tastes normal. The only thing is that it's whole milk. People haven't yet thought to combine the low fatness with the pasturization process yet. So, in the meantime, I'm drinking ice-creamy milk that tastes good, over the low fat that tastes really bad to me.

Oh, and I went and bought a bottle of scotch recently. It's easy to find the hard stuff, and most varieties of the things I'm used to drinking are available. But whiskey is quite expensive. An average sized bottle of Crown Royal (my absoloute fave!) can set you back about 130,000 Won - about 130 US dollars or so. But the scotch is more or less similarly priced, and considering it's not exactly a dietary staple of mine, I don't mind springing for it.

I just finished reading this graphic novel about North Korea. it was really good! The author is a Canadian who is living in France. He went to North Korea for a few months on a contract for an animation project (random), and then made a book about his experiences. The whole thing is really insightful, and given his Canadian-ness, I think you folks back home might be able to track it down with relative ease. So, the book is called Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle. Pyongyang is the capitol city of North Korea. Anyway, the book is really awesome, and I highly reccomend you check it out.

My attempt at learning Korean is going well enough; I'm picking it up fairly well. I bought a book to help me learn, along with some audio tapes to practice along with. I can read and write it fairly well, I just can't really make sense of a lot of what I'm reading and writing. I can write my name and address in Korean and that's about the extent of my repitoire. But reading is handy for restaurants and the like. But I think I mentioned that before.

Oh, I don't know if you've noticed how in the news lately there's been a lot of talk about China being really notorious for counterfeit goods. Well, there's a hell of a lot of counterfeiting going on in South Korea, too. It's really prominent, and really obvious. Maybe the counterfeit goods come from China and are sold here, I don't really know. All I know is that there seems to be a lot of it being sold, but no one really pays attention. I just thought I'd mention that.

Another thing that is interesting is that everyone collects their food/kitchen waste in these bins that are collected three times a week. I used to think it was for compost for farmers, but actually, they take all the food wastes from homes, restaurants, and school cafeterias to make into pig feed. It seems interesting to me... then I got to thinking how spicy a Korean pig's diet must be: a lot of the food here is really spicey, which I enjoy, but which I wouldn't feed to an animal, you know? But commonly, people not only give pigs their leftovers, but also their dogs. So dogs are eating the kimchi and the red pepper paste and all that jazz. Spicey!

Anyway, so now i'm going to work on organizing my pictures and making a photo diary thingy. So I'll let you know when i've finished with that.

Oh, one more thing before I go, which I really enjoy: in the Korean language, to make whatever you're saying more polite, you tack on the word "yo" to the end of every sentence. It's polite and shows respect. But it cracks me up because it makes me thing of bad, bad, white-guy rappers and how my friends and I joke about them.