From soccer season...

Remember when it was warm outside? I had wrote this post, and then forgot to publish it! My bad.

 

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The littlest has picked up a lot from watching her older brother and sister. But I realized, she thinks she should stand with one foot on the ball whenever she stops. And the ball is all the way up to her knee!

Newest tea at the commissary

O'Sulloc is a Korean tea company that the commissary here carries. Usually there's only two varieties, but I spotted a new box the last time I was in.

 

This is called "Memory in Jeju", and the description is Jeju Camellia flower blending tea. Jeju is an island art the southern tip of Korea, with a semi-tropical climate, where a lot of Koreans take vacations. The family and I went last summer, so we could visit a beach...and it rained a lot of the time. But I did get to visit the O'Sulloc tea plantation and the museum and tea shop there.

"Memory in Jeju" is very floral smelling. In the tea bag along with the black tea are tiny chunks of dried pineapple, flower petals, and a few sugar konpeito crystals.

When brewed, the tea is light-colored, mild-tasting, with a much lighter floral fragrance, but the fragrance persists to the third brewing. (yes, I reuse my tea bag.) I'm saving it for special occasions, but I like it very much.

(I have a feeling this reads like a non-native English speaker. I don't know why, English is my first language, really, I swear! Isn't it funny when that happens?)

I found a new spicy food

 

That's a bowl of pork bibbimbap. At the restaurant¹ that has Vicky's favorite noodles (japchae), I usually get the beef bibbimbap, but I was being wild and crazy today...The thing is, that rice isn't really brown. It should be red. It turns out, the pork meat is covered in a spicy red pepper sauce, and in this hot bowl full of rice and veggies, which gets all mixed up, the pepper gets everywhere.

 

It's definitely proof that I'm able to tolerate spicier foods than before we moved here. Okay, it took a plate of pickled radishes², a bowl of cold vinegar soup, and two cups of water, but I ate it!
 

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1 Yujin Katusa Snack Bar, on Yongsan South Post ^↩

2

In the Korean grocery store, they're called "mat pickles". The kids don't like them, and Jay only takes some to be polite, so they're mine, all Mine! muhahaha! ^↩

Spanish and El Caballero Fantasma

That would be, The Ghost Knight, written by Cornelia Funke.

I've been studying spanish lately (more than Korean, sadly) and I've found that small children's books are about my reading level. The library here has a small selection. Curious George was a doable, because I know it so well in English, and El Pinguino was fun, especially when the penguin pinched the lion's nose.

But, I was hoping that maybe my vocabulary would be sufficient for a grade-school level chapter book. Amazon says this book(English version) is for 8-12 year olds. Unfortunately, I'm finding it's not (sufficient, that is), but I'm using google to translate for me as I go along, and this book is interesting so far. I say "so far", because it took me all evening to read chapter one. yep, pretty slow.

But the next chapter is "Los Hombres Muertos". The Three Dead Men! oooh!

Book list

Let's see, I haven't wrote one of these in a while. But, I would like to see how much I read this year.

 

One of my Christmas presents from Big J and the kids was a stack of books.There was Portal, by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor, Too Many Curses by A. Lee Martinez, the Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 anthology, and Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit by Corey Olsen. I've read them all except for the one about The Hobbit... I will probably get to that soon.

 

Star Trek the Next Generation, A Hard Rain by Dean Wesley Smith, with Picard solving film noire mystery on the holodeck. Not the best, but not bad.

Korean-English board book on vegetables. I wrote down all the words to improve my vocabulary.

 

The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle. Fantasy set in an alternate Tudor England. Rather good, interesting "elves", and system of reincarnation. It was a Barnes&Noble recommendation in an email. First in a series.

 

Baen Books Free Short Stories 2013. The last story was by David Drake, and in his intro to the story, he mentions Manly Wade Wellman. This is rather serendipitous, because yesterday I had been trying to remember the name of the author who wrote the John the Balladeer stories. I read them when i was a teen, and they are the rare horror-fantasy that I like. Drake's story is about fantastical events, too, and is quite good.

 

Total books Read: 7