Monday, Nov 25

Maehan’s Citizen’s Forest

I just would not want to live in a place with no fall foliage.

Got up early-ish and headed by bus to a park in Gangnam that looked pretty on Instagram.

The Bus. Sigh. When I put this park into NaverMaps (Korea’s GoogleMaps) it basically said there was no way to go by bus from my house to that park. Well, THAT can’t be right! So I cobbled together two sets of directions…from here to Point A, then from Point A to the park. On paper it looked perfect.

Unfortunately, the real world sometimes doesn’t match The Paper. Sigh. It took me 2.5 hours to go an hour’s worth of bus distance. The plan was park, then brunch cafe. But getting to the park took SO long…and I forgot to put a protein bar in my camera bag (I ALWAYS carry a protein bar with me for low-blood sugar moments. But I’d eaten it at the hotel the other night when I got stuck out in the middle of nowhere and ended up at home without having had dinner – and forgot to replace it) that I was starting to get hypoglycaemic…and the cafe was over 1000 meters away and…ugh. Had to give up on The Plan. I expedited the park visit…and fortunately got an uber right away to bring me home.

The uber driver was adorable. “I love English speaking passengers! Today you are my English teacher!” and then proceeded to talk for the 45 minutes it took to bring me home. He has a YouTube channel where he shares his rides with English-speaking passengers and their conversations. He took a picture of us together, I wish I’d asked him to take one with my camera, too. Why do I always think of things too late?

Spent the afternoon editing pictures from the park.

Kind of want to take it easy tomorrow, stay home, but I hear it’s going to get MUCH colder on Wednesday and maybe even snow, and then it will be WINTER and my fall leaf hunting days may be over. So I kinda feel like I should head out once more.

Tuesday, Nov 26

From yesterday’s adventure at one of the many incorrect bus stops I was at

Annnd I stayed in all day. Was a nice, quiet, lazy day…plus it started raining really hard around noon, so it’s just as well I stayed home.

Had an unpleasant surprise when I went to edit some pictures from this past month…SO many already edited pictures were just GONE. I take HUNDREDS of pictures usually when I go out to shoot…then I spend a good amount of time going through them one by one, comparing similar ones to pick the best…and I rate them in Adobe Bridge, so I know which ones to work on in Photoshop. Then I can spend a LOT of time editing. And to have the edited pictures be gone AND all my intial ratings, is REALLY aggravating!

It probably happened recently when my laptop hard drive was full again and I had to move all my November pictures over to the external hard drive. I think maybe sub-folders didn’t copy over…and as soon as I THINK things are copied to the external, I delete them off the hard drive…then empty the recycle bin to reclaim space. It’s an older laptop with really not enough memory and storage to be using Photoshop and storing so many pictures, so it fills up really quickly and then programs stop working, so I have to quickly clear things off so it’s functional again. And I guess I somehow didn’t copy over edited images (which doesn’t make sense, but I don’t know how else to explain it). And there was an update recently in Bridge, so maybe the new version isn’t recognizing the ratings on the images rated in the older version? Again, I don’t know if that makes sense but I don’t know how else to explain it.

And now I have to do a whole bunch of editing all over again. UGH. So I spent a lot of time today going through folders, re-doing the ratings, so it’ll at least be a little faster when I go to re-edit. SOME of them are saved in the Week in Review folders, pictures that I’ve used in weekly blog posts…but only a few from each outing go in the WIR posts.

Just annoying.

Cut my hair a bit. Need to do more. Usually I go for a haircut on the class breaks…but last time (end of August) she did such a weird job, the weird layer just needs to grow out more before cutting anything…so I just took off some of the back length and from my bangs. But I’m always so careful to not do Too Much, that I need to do a little more next time I wash my hair.

Started a new book. Happy to be making time to read again. Wish I had a better reading spot, and better lighting. Once it starts to get dark outside, reading time is over.

Wednesday, Nov 27

Waiting for uber

Snow! Pretty! Cold!

Went with a friend to Costco (her membership) and got a “regular” (and by “regular,” I mean “not Korean”) rotisserie chicken. Score.

The sample lady forced a thimbleful of this Moscato on me and it was deeelicious and I had to bring a bottle home with me.

I shop very differently at Korean Costco than I did at NY Costco. Here, I always need to consider: how am I getting this home…and where am I going to put it all? So, only the vital neccessities 🙂 The caramel popcorn and Moscato are already gone.

Read for a bit while the light was good…and worked on RE-editing all those pictures (see Tuesday).

A pretty low-key day.

Thursday, Nov 28, aka American Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving dinner: the traditional big ‘ol slab of pork belly

Well, Week One of vacation was definitely the more active week. Week Two is being the slug week. I just want to lay in bed. I get up periodically to do something slightly productive: work on a blog post, (RE)edit photos from November, I’m doing a couple different online courses on videography and social marketing so I’ll do a unit or two of one of those, then I get back in bed to read then nap. It’s delightful. And it will be over all too soon.

But, today, she is Thanksgiving. Koreans celebrated their Thanksgiving back in September on Chuseok. They don’t recognize the US holiday at all (obviously), so a friend and I tried to find a Thanksgivingish type dinner at a restaurant. There were a couple but they were already all reservationed up. We ended up at a “western” restaurant with jazz music, which seemed to add a little extra festivity.

I’m not usually one for live music. I like music as background when I’m doing other things. But just sitting and listening to music is…yeah. BUT – this was actually very enjoyable. The band was very good: a singer, pianist, bass player, saxophonist, and drummer. They were all good, but the saxophonist was particularly good! They played all American classics, like Pennies From Heaven, She’s So Sweet, Mona Lisa, etc. One song I didn’t recognize, that was long and sort of soulful with a lot of saxophone, made me start tearing up as it had a very “New York at the holidays” vibe. It was a little bittersweet.

But it was nice to be out on the holiday with a good human…doing something a little special.

Last year I got one of the convenience store’s weird ham, cheese, egg salad, lettuce, and strawberry jam sandwiches and just sat out on the veranda by myself. The weather was so mild. This year we had the most snowfall Seoul has had in over 100 years.

Sad to say I have pictures of neither the jazz artists or the snow. My only snow outing was to Costco (yay, rotisserie chicken) because I don’t have any sort of walking-in-snow footwear and there was too much snow to avoid walking in it or slush. And at the restaurant I really wasn’t sure if it was cool to take pictures of the band while performing. Korea is typically extremely photo-centric, so when No One Else was taking pictures, I figured I should just follow suit.

Got home after eleven o’ clock! Woohoo, that’s late for this girl to be out anymore. But overall, it was a good Thanksgiving.

Well, except for the fact that everyone from back home forgot I existed – well, I got messages from two friends, but that’s it. That was a little boohoo.

Friday/Saturday, Nov 29-30

Also from this week’s bus fiasco

So, this morning when I woke up, I sent guilt “Happy Thanksgiving” to all the family/peeps back home, ha ha.

Lumping these two days together cuz they were pretty much identical, except my hair was greasier on Saturday. I only left my room both days to go down and pick up a grocery delivery.

Sunday, Dec 1

DECEMBER?!?

Every new month is such a surprise. After 771 of them you’d think I’d be over the monthly shock.

But yay, today I Did A Thing. Kinda proud of myself cuz it was with PEOPLE and I did not bail. I had to literally keep saying to myself all day “be EXCITED not resistant.” It was a meetup but with a tour guide, so it cost 20,000w ($15 US) which was fine with me cuz he had a CAR and drove us around all over the place. It was me and two other women…one who’s just passing through on her way from Japan (where she has lived for 25 years, wow!) to Belgium to be with her fiance..and the other who is military civilian here, only been here for a few months, so she’s still in the adjustment phase. But she’ll be here for two years. And we’ve already talked about meeting up for dinner soon.

From left to right: Tour Guide Harry, Belgium, Moi, Army

ANYWHO…we went up this hilly scenic drive (sadly it was very foggy/hazy today) to a viewing pavilion. We would have gotten nice sunset shots from up there but Mother Nature was uncooperative. So we sat in the cafe up top and had tea and chatted…then we drove to another rooftop cafe that was all Christmased out. I had a chestnut tiramisu which has been all the rage, as chestnut is a popular flavor here. Then we came to Seongsu. which is near me, and had quick dinner at a little place called Heavy Steak (?) which was surprisingly good for being so fast and inexpensive.

Traditional teas. They all had that. I had grapefruit ade (shocker).

We parted ways after dinner and I got an uber even though I was near the bus because my knee was…not so good. The second cafe was a rooftop atop a hilltop. A long steep hill. So a driver was in order as she (knee) and I needed a little pampering.

And now I’m home. It JUST started raining as we left the restaurant, so I got wet even with the uber…but now I have an Earl Grey cream crossiant that I grabbed at the cafe in the sky, so I’m going to enjoy that while I watch my nightly k-drama episode and then go to sleep.

Seongsu

Seongsu

In all, a good day.

Only two days left of vacation. I’ve already started waking up in the middle of the night with pre-class anxiety. Ugh.

Anyway. See ya later love ya bye.