Day 3
The entire day could be summarized as thus – YJS eats.
It was truly a day of eating, and I now worry that I would leave Korea with a distended digestive system and newly acquired rolls of fat by the end of the month.
For lunch, my mom, aunt, grandmother, cousin, and brother went to a Gamjatang restaurant for lunch. My brother and grandmother had spicy squid while the rest of us ordered Bbyeo-haejang-guk (for the easily intimidated by strange jumbles of letters, it means bone hangover-relief soup). It’s a spicy soup with chunks of pork neck bones inside. It was quite delicious, and a good lunch choice in the cold, rainy weather. It was exceedingly spicy, however, and by the end of lunch, everyone was sweating profusely.
After taking a break, my mom and brother, my cousin and I went to E-Mart for some serious grocery shopping spree, since my mom was going to be in charge of meals during our one-month stay.
The great thing about (large) Korean supermarket is that they have a sample section for food. Yes, I know other countries have sample stands for food as well; call me biased, but the stuff they have for samples are tastier.
The food selection that day certainly was in the tasty side: grilled fish, pork, beef patties, roasted duck, tofu with sesame and peanut salad dressing, ice cream, yogurt, and there’s probably more that I’ve forgotten by the time I write this. Since we were in charge of babysitting our little cousin, who was as energetic as a beagle, we followed him all around the food aisle as he raced up and down and tried everything. By the end of the grocery shopping, I’m sure I could just have substituted what I ate with an actual meal.
Day 4
The first day of work at Holt. This time, my brother was there as well. We took the 90-minute trip to Holt Post Adoption Center.
The office was crazy busy as always; workers running to and fro, phones ringing every five minutes, the endless clickedy-click of computers and the whirring of fax and printers.
Everyone seemed the same. Philippe with his French-accented Korean, the Michigan alum Esther with her constant English-Korean code-switching, Ms. Lee, Ms. Seol, and the head of office, Ms. Kim. There are also one or two new faces that I do not know.
There was a warm welcome, and then a pile of letters to translate. “We’d ask you to come every day if we could!” they said. We could have, if it didn’t take us a whopping 90 minutes to get to the office via bus and subway. We’re here to work, yes, but we do need a life, too.
In the span of four hours (and an hour total of bathroom breaks, mini-breaks, and waiting for the staff to not be too busy to give us work), My brother ended up translating four letters and I did ten. This roughly amounts to half an hour per letter.
“You’re a monster! How did you do that?!” he exclaimed.
I’m not quite sure myself; somehow a month’s worth of experience last year had apparently made me into an almost automatic translating machine. Even I was surprised at how fast I was processing Korean to English and vice versa. Well, that’s the first time I've felt competent in months.
Day 5
We went to Times Square shopping mall.
Stealing a landmark name of NYC aside, the main reason we went there was because it was a new shopping mall; the go-to place for shopping and hanging out is supposed to be Coex Mall in Seoul, but not only is it too far from where we are, but apparently Times Square was supposed to be just as grand and fancy.
To get straight to the point, it was big and fancy, but it wasn't as awesome.
We played at the arcade, ate lunch, and I went window-shopping (and actual shopping) with my mom while the boys played in the arcade some more.
Fun meter: 3/5. It’s a good place to go shopping and eat something in-between, but there is nothing much else to do. Additionally the place was too goddamned hard to locate from the subway station since the signs were unreliable and the passageway convoluted.
It's raining on and on and on and god dammit, it needs to stop.
