Thanksgiving (FINALLY!!)

So, I promised two things in my last blog- one was that i would post again soon, and the other was that I would tell you about my Thanksgiving here. I guess the first one won't be happening, but at least I am giving you the Thanksgiving update right?!

Anyways, so Thanksgiving here in Korea turned out to be a lot of fun, but boy did I have to work for it. There were several speed-bumps along the way, but nothing sopped the foreigners from celebrating Thanksgiving in Korea. Let's just say that Korea is missing a few essentials when it comes to Thanksgiving. The first being Turkey. That's right, Korea doesn't do turkey. In fact, many of the Korean teachers have never even tasted it before. And what's Thanksgiving without turkey. We made due and opted for Chicken instead. That turned out to be speed-bump number two. We ordered the chicken (over the phone), I'll get to why we didn't cook it our self in a minute, but as you know neither Caroline or I are great at speaking Korea. The 200 random words we know do not include anything that could have helped us order it except the word chicken which is the same in Korean and English. Erica was at our house too, but she too only knows a little Korean so it became a game of whether or not we thought we could do it. Our first attempt we thought went pretty well. We struggled with the language barrier but with our newly learned numbers we thought we were going to be good. We remembered how to say our address and was even able to clarify which of the five Line Apartments in our area that we live in. We got off the phone super excited and couldn't wait to see if we had done it. One hour goes by and finally our door bell rings. The guy hands us ONE tiny box of chicken that maybe has 8 or 10 small pieces of chicken in it. We thought we had ordered FOUR boxes. But we couldn't get that across so we just payed the guy, thanked him, closed the door, and then panicked! That was definitely not enough to feed 14 hungry foreigners plus who knew how many Korean teachers we invited were actually going to show up. So, we got back on the phone (with a different place- we were too embarrassed to call the first place again) and tried again. The second time we called was just as terrifying as the first and the short time I was on the phone I probably said "yes" about 15 times- about 12 of them I wasn't exactly sure what I was agreeing to but I recognized a couple words so I just said yes. My guess now is that they were probably asking where I lived or for me to repeat the order but I just kept agreeing in hopes of them just bringing something to our house. Thank goodness this time the order only took 20 minutes and we got exactly what we ordered. Success!!! With two major speed-bumps taken care of, what else could possibly be troublesome right? Did I mention that our apartments here are very nice but that none of us have an oven. Let me tell you how hard it is to make and cook food without an oven to bake things in. Not to mention, 90 percent of the foods we eat on Thanksgiving back home are not easily or even at all found here. Everyone picked a dish and was in charge of bringing it, and let me just tell you how impressed I was with the spread. Between Caroline, Erica and I, we made mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, cooked carrots medley, corn and sliced some veggies to snack on. The other foreign teachers brought fudge, stuffing, rolls, cranberry sauce, sweet potato fries, fruit, cornbread and other delicious goodies. Everything was DELICIOUS!!!!!!!

I forgot to mention that there were 9 foreign teachers there and 8 Korean teachers, so there was a good amount of people in our small apartment. It was lots of fun though. Caroline and I turned a long end table into a couch so we had 2 and there were a couple pillows on the floor, so it worked out pretty well. After eating we all played a Korean version of jacks that was really fun and just hung out. It wasn't as weird as I thought it would be not be home for Thanksgiving and having a bunch of friends from school that I now call family definitely helped!

I miss everyone a lot! I am still having tons of fun and enjoying myself though and look forward to the rest of my time here!