We've worked three days in a row, and the remaining free day we walked a distance to our other grandmother's neighborhood so that my brother can get his identification card and also get answers for his impending military draft. Incidentally, there has been a string of military shootings and suicides stemmed from abuse in the military all across the country. This probably makes the already undesirable prospect of going to the military even scarier.
Stayed with grandma and uncle for a few hours once again, ate lots of sweet food. My extended family's love for sweet food and the family history of diabetes are totally not related at all; nope, totally not seeing the BIG RED SIGNS OF OBVIOUS here.
Day 12
It's my mom's birthday.
It was also the weekend, and we were all pooped from running errands every single day during the week, so we slept in for a much-needed rest.
There isn't much to say other than we celebrated mom's birthday with cake, had lots and lots of food, and chilled.
Day 13
Birthday celebration extension.
For lunch we went to Vips, a family restaurant chain of sorts. The food was just as delicious as it had been last year, save for one crucial and disappointing fact: the mangoes are not as tasty as last year's. I swear they must have changed where they import the mangoes. Also, they had gotten rid of the clam chowder soup, which I thought was the best soup out of their selection. Ah well, I was there to eat, not to be a food critic.
For dinner we all had bits of Korean-style ramen, since being Koreans, we needed our hot and spicy food quota to quell our insides after a large portion of salad and steak and soup and what have you.
We ate a shitton of food for the second day in a row. At this point, I would not be surprised if my blog entries end up becoming a sort of food blog. And I need to watch my weight.
Just when we thought we would not be touching food again for the day, who comes back home but my uncle, who bought ice cream cake in celebration of my mom's birthday; and also, he just wanted to have some beer and snacks since it was a Sunday.
My aunt is horrible at organizing her fridge and it is almost at the point of bursting with months-old food, or what probably used to be food. This meant that there was no place to put the ice cream cake in the fridge, so we had to eat it, at 11PM. Alcohol party commence~
(No, I did not get drunk, as much as drunk blogging would have been hilarious.)
And now, another round of general situations and some thoughts to consider:
The rainy season is FINALLY over. Thank god. Now people can walk about the streets dry. The bad news is that the hot weather is back - and now I truly feel the Korean summer heat in all its humid sticky hotness.
Going to the military in Korea now apparently takes as much research and effort as it would to get into a prestigious high school. So much has changed and there are information that you wouldn't easily get unless you called the MMA.
Whenever I walk the streets with my glasses on, people automatically think I am a high school girl. My mom tells me it's because I look young, but I reckon it has more to do with how girls dress in Korea - simply put, almost no (unmarried) females older than high school students walk around wearing glasses unless it was a fashion statement. Most college-age girls are also not fat, and they actually primp and prettify themselves intensely since it's just about the first time they're allowed to do that after the hellish high school years, not to mention Korea is probably an appearance-conscious society like many Asian countries.
Continuing with the appearance-conscious society thing, being in Korea does make me take care of my appearance more compared to when I'm in Prague or Ann Arbor. Most everyone dresses nicely and they're all so pretty and polished-looking; simply put, my desire to not be the one slob among the crowd becomes greater than my general apathy towards style and "looking pretty".
This is something I've noticed for years, but the way my immediate family and several extended family members speak is a little... different from how other Korean people will speak. I'm a little hesitant to say there is a difference in "accent" because it's not a problem of dialect or vocabulary usage. It's more of a difference in intonation, perhaps, or how one uses one's nose and mouth in conjunction to the speaking. Simply put, most Korean girls, to me, sound a little nasally with a hint of a whine when they speak, like they're simultaneously swallowing bursts of air. The Korean guys, on the other hand, have a certain aggressive urgency in their voices, as if they're exhaling their words out violently before the words are fully formed. Meanwhile, me, my brother, mother, and a few people on both sides of my family speak more like news anchors on TV - every syllable and its pronunciations even in breath.
Now I must bed, for this household is a family of early bedtimes.
