something i miss greatly

being able to feel God's presence when I sing at church

F is for...

FRIENDS and FOOD!!

The first weekend, I met up with Steven and Paul, my San Diego buddies!

All three of us are teaching at different English institutes now. :-)

We went to Myungdong and ate some "dahk gal-bee" (chicken gal-bee). It was spicy but so good!! They put some cabbage and marinated chicken in a large pan and cooked it for us.

The red baby-bib-or-apron-looking thing that I'm wearing was absolutely necessary because the chicken made such a mess when it was being cooked.

This is what it looks like when it's cooked. We added some noodles to it, and it was so good!

Baskin Robbins for dessert. They don't charge extra for putting whipped cream + syrup + waffle cone + a piece of white chocolate + a small piece of banana. This is what I got when I just ordered one scoop of ice cream. The one below is green tea ice cream.

This one's called "shooting star." It has these candies that pop inside your mouth. I've been wanting to try this one because they don't have this flavor back in the States. I love it!

And then...I met up with Jane too. She lives only about 20 minutes away from where I live. :-) She took me to an Italian restaurant.

I forgot the name of this pasta but it was some kind of spicy cream-based pasta with chicken. I really enjoyed it until I found a strand of hair inside my food. (Ewww) I had to ask them to bring me another one but by the time I got it I had lost my appetite.

Some of the cafe in Korea are really over-priced. A cup of tea at this cafe we went to in Ahpgoojung cost about 7,000 won ($6).

Insadong is a popular tourist spot in Seoul because there are a lot of traditional Korean restaurants and shops. One thing about this place is that all the signs (of business and shops and such) are written only in Korean. They even spelled out "Starbucks Coffee" in Korean. (All the other Starbucks Coffee signs in Korea are written in English)

Steven, Paul and I met up again and ate chicken again. :-) Chicken is about the only thing I can eat here because beef is too expensive (and I don't eat pork, of course).

This is called "ahn dong jjim dahk". It's really really good. :-)

One thing I noticed is that Koreans love sweet potatoes. They get so creative with sweet potatoes that they even make sweet potato latte. It's actually pretty good....just imagine drinking warm blended sweet potato with milk...that's exactly what it tastes like.

Once my aunt took me to this vegetarian restaurant where you can eat bibimbab and I thought the rice looked really good so I took a picture of it.

Did I tell you I eat chicken a lot in Korea? Here is Jasmine eating "jjim dahk" again with another friend of hers.

This is a dessert place called "Waffle House." They have waffles (duh) and other things like coffee, latte, and shaved ice with strawberries (strawberry bing soo). It's SO GOOD. I wanna eat it again!!!

This is the strawberry shaved ice. It's BOMB.

My friends who have tried sweet potato pizza in Korea told me a lot about it so I had always wanted to try one. So here it is! Unlike what I had imagined, it just had a strip of sweet potato along the crust. Pretty good stuff.

They have some takoyaki on the street too!

This is an ice cream bar called "ssang ssang bar" (translate: "pair bar") It comes with two Popsicle sticks so you can split it and share it with your friend! (such an Asian thing, don't you think?) I remember this used to be my favorite when I was a kid.

I saw this place when I was walking down a narrow alley in Myungdong. It says "Jasmine Singing Club." So I thought I'd take a picture in front of it.

The end.

Life in Korea

It's been more than a month already since I got here in Korea. Time flies! I promised myself that I'd update my blog today so here I am sitting in front of my tiny desk which is just big enough to hold a few books and a laptop.

After going through some complication with the general conference, I left L.A. on March 1st. I had a layover flight that stopped in Japan. As soon as I got on the plane that left Narita, Japan, to Korea, I experienced culture shock. I had 4 very heavy carry-on luggages, and on the flight from LAX to Narita, where there were more Americans, some guys happily offered to help me with my luggages. But from Narita to Korea, where there were more Koreans, no one offered to help me put my luggages down from the luggage compartment. Everyone was busy just getting out of the plane. They didn't wait for the passengers in the front to get out first. Instead, they just pushed their way out from the back. So I just decided to wait until everyone got out to get my luggages out. Thankfully, an American guy stopped and offered to help me.

I still get really bothered by people who don't line up or cut in line or push me on the subway. Everytime I complain about rude people in Korea, my friends tell me, "Welcome to Korea."

From the airport, I was immediately shipped to the SDA Language Institute in Seoul for orientation. The next day (March 3) was the last day of orientation, so basically I only had one day to be trained to be an English teacher.

The flight was more than 10 hours long and it was a torture for me! The food was so bad and the seat was so uncomfortable. I could barely sleep. I read each page of Glamour until I reached the last page and tried some sudoku puzzle.

The public restroom in Narita Airport. They had three different kinds of toilet: the traditional one, which is the one below, the western one, which is the one we normally use, and then the bidet.

SDA Seoul Main Institute, where the orientation took place

Some people from my orientation group. I didn't get to spend much time with my orientation group because I arrived late but everyone was very friendly. Will and Diane (the senior couple on left and right) even adopted me. :-)

The late-comers. We all arrived on the last day of orientation.

After one day of orientation, I was sent to the institute in Kangnam. Kangnam is known to be the "Beverly Hills" of Seoul. I see a lot of expensive cars (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, you name it) in the neighborhood. I started working the day after I got here. Now I'm getting used to this crazy/busy schedule. My first class begins at 6:30 a.m. and my morning classes end at 11:20 a.m. After that, I have a break. A long break. Then my evening classes begin at 7:05 p.m., and ends at 9:10 p.m. The first day of class I woke up late and by the time I got to my class, I only had 15 minutes left. Haha. After that day, I was never late again.

Where I work. It's supposed to be the second largest SDA institute.

The building on the left side is the institute, and the brick building on the right side is where I live. I live so close to my work! I love it.

Subway in Korea: they built this clear wall with sliding doors by the rail for safety because there have been a lot of accidents (mostly people committing suicide) and that affects the conductor as well (they get post-traumatic disorder of some sort).

Convenient store :-)


They sell socks with characters from "Boys over Flower." Hahaha. I thought these were so cute and funny. These guys are EVERYWHERE in Korea.

Now I had heard that there's Costco in Korea, but what amazed me was that the Costco in Korea looks EXACTLY like the ones in America. The way they display things, Kirkland products, pizza, hot dogs, etc. all look just like the American ones. Only difference is that Korean Costco looks actually nicer and fancier.

If there's Walmart in America, there's EMart in Korea. EMart is actually a lot nicer, though. Anyway, I saw these individually wrapped apples there. They're washed and ready to eat. :-)

From where I live, it takes about 15 minutes to get to Coex mall by bus. The foreign teachers from my institute like to go there to eat.

The one restaurant in Coex that we always go to:

Tortilla soup and fish taco

Ronald's humongous chimichanga

More pictures to come soon....

A Cool Music Video

that my friend andreia showed me:



Some interesting facts about this movie:

• The video was shot all stills - roughly 3225 still photos for the entire video, using one camera, hanging from the ceiling for the main body of the movie.


• It took 4 weeks before shooting to create an animated computer generated storyboard for the video, with 3d dummies for the characters.


• It took only 2 days of shooting for the live actors on set to re-create the 3.5 minutes computer sequence, frame by frame.


• Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets.

after watching this music video, we got so excited that we wanted to make one ourselves, too.

here's our version of the music video that's somewhat like the one above. (only better)

luana had some trouble taking these pictures because she had to stand on her desk with her arms stretched out holding her camera still. :-)

Our New Home

today, out of the blue, my mom told me that we're moving to downtown L.A.

WHAT?!! (my reaction to what she said.)

she said that since both her and my dad's work is in downtown, and since my brother has moved out, and also because i'll be leaving soon too, she wanted to move closer to her work so she won't have to waste time and gas on driving.

i've been living in glendale for the past 9.5 years...(technically, about 4 years was in san diego, though.) it'll be so weird to live somewhere else. or to call some other place my "home."

so we checked out our new place and it's only a block away from staples center. how neat is that! if i ever get to watch laker's game, i can just walk there. no need to worry about parking. but then again, how many times would i ever get to watch a laker's game?

Twilight

it is very rare to see a book-based film to turn out as great as the original book. twilight, by far, was the most disappointing film i've ever seen. i'll admit that i cheated. i read the reviews on rottentomatoes.com before i watched the movie. naturally, it didn't receive that great of a rating. so i guess i could say that i was biased.

the movie was so poorly made due to poor directing, poor screenwriting, and poor acting. not one thing was satisfying for me, except the prominent jawline of robert pattinson. one of the reviews that i read informed me that the movie was made with a low budget. and i could tell. the music was horrible and the movie was kind of choppy.

and the worst of all was the performance of the actors. they sucked.

i think that they totally misanalyzed the characters of the book.

the way i saw it is like this:

edward cullen in the book is very mature, of course, because he is 100 years old or so, and very protective of bella. he smiles a lot in the book. however, bella's favorite "crooked smile" could not be seen in the movie. in the book, he has the sarcastic humor but that was not seen in the movie either. he's way too scary in the movie. he glares all the time...so tense. he's supposed to easen it up a bit when he's with bella. and what was up with climbing the tree??? what the heck??? that was so uncalled for. instead of those forest scenes, they should have inserted more of coupley stuff to show how their relationship develops. everything happened just so quickly in the movie.

in the book, bella is very mature for her age probably because she went through a lot...her parents getting divorced, and who knows what else. she cannot connect to her peers because she's mature for her age. however, though she appears to not care about lonesomeness, and very independent, she has that emptiness in her that cannot be filled until she meets edward. she hides this, either consciously or subconsciously, but she wants someone that she could relate to really badly. with edward around, though, she acts like a typical teenager. she becomes a little more cheerful, and also more vulnerable and dependent on edward. one thing about bella that is indicated clearly in the book is that she's clumsy - she falls all the time and gets injured a lot. but in the movie, she tripped maybe once. ugh!!!

kristen stewart, the one who played bella in the movie, did not catch any of these qualities of bella. the whole time she had the same face. a BLANK face. and the way she talked...she almost mumbled the whole time. the way she stumbles and blinks her eyes when she talks...that's how she really talks. i saw one of her interviews...and she mumbled and stumbled just like in the movie! i saw no difference in bella and the actress herself.

i bet they made a lot of money thanks to all the girls who fell in love with edward cullen (which includes me).
they'd better make the next movie better than this. and the actors should take more acting lessons.

New York

This year, my family flew to New York for our annual family trip. It was the farthest we have ever traveled since we came to the States.
We flew red-eye and boy, was that a torture. Our flight departed LAX at 9:25 p.m. and arrived at JFK at about 6 a.m. The problem was, my sleeping schedule had been messed up - I had been going to sleep at 3 to 4 a.m. and waking up around 12 p.m. And guess what? 3 a.m. in LA is 6 a.m. in NY! So I was wide awake during the flight and as soon as we arrived in New York, I had to start moving because we had a packed schedule ahead of us. We all took a nap that afternoon as soon as we checked into the hotel.

NY was bit of a culture shock for me because I have never been outside of California (except Yellow Stone and Grand Canyon). Driving was not an option for means of transport. Walking was a preferred method. (I never walk. I even drive to Vons right down the block.) Everywhere I looked, there were skyscrapers and yellow cabs. People walked so fast and all the pedestrians ignored the signal lights. (Jaywalking is not possible/allowed in Cali.) There were people walking on the street and stores open in the middle of the night unlike the suburbs in Cali. I know I sound so silly as if I've never been to a big city. Haha. But it was just so different from what I am used to.

Overall, I loved New York.

I'm glad and somewhat relieved that I liked NY because one of the schools that I applied to is NYU. It's still not determined which school I'll be attending, but now I know what to expect if I end up at NYU.
Now, it's time for some pictures!

This book saved our butts from getting lost or running out of places to go. Almost EVERYONE that I saw (that are tourists) had this book.

At the airport, waiting for my parents to return from restroom.

Guess what the first thing we ate in NY was? Solongtang!!! We went straight to Little Korea as my parents were fatigued from long flight and craved Korean food. Yum!

View from Empire State Building

St. Patrick's Cathedral

Museum of Modern Arts

The fastest man on earth

Time Square

self-explanatory

Central Park

Look how big this sandwich is. I wasn't manly enough to gulp it down in one bite so I had to break it apart first to eat it.

There are a lot more pictures I took but uploading these pictures is a pain (I never knew). If you'd like to see more pictures, please go visit my page on facebook.