Thanksgiving in Korea

Happy Turkey Day everyone! The sweet potato casserole is made, the pies are baked, and the turkey is sitting in the brine getting ready to roast. Sounds like an all-American day huh? Well, this year is rather interesting. You see, the Koreans have already celebrated their Thanksgiving, or more specifically, Chusok. Chusok is the major harvest festival and is celebrated on the Autumn equinox. So we're the only ones eating and celebrating. The stores are even open.... which makes it really convenient if you need something last minute.

To start our Thanksgiving celebrations, Holly's class had a Thanksgiving feast. The kids sang songs for all of us - It was really cute! Videos to uploaded soon!

Holly's class

Today, we are headed to the base to take part in the Thunderbolt Feast, our squadron's annual dinner with the AMU (read maintenance squadron). We prepare a full Thanksgiving dinner and serve the guys and gals who make sure that our A-10s are "ready to fight tonight" and bring our pilots home safe everyday. It's a wonderful tradition, and we are so proud to be a part of it. We fixed Ronnie's momma's macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, and Grandma Iris' pecan pies. The girls were such big helpers in the kitchen. They helped chop the pecans, wisk the eggs, mash the potatoes and stir the macaroni. It was a lot of fun telling them about who gave us the recipe.

Sarah and her sweet potato hands. What you don't see is the Group Commander and his wife sitting across from us cracking up at Sarah.

The dessert table - as someone put it, think of the millions of calories sitting on this table.

Finally, tomorrow we will have our family dinner while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade that we DVRed. Yeah for watching on delay - we can fast forward through commercials. Still have more cooking to do but I have two wonderful helpers to assist me.

As I head off to the land of elastic pants, just one final thought.

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, For love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

Love, the Olivers

It's an old... family tradition

Thankfully, I put my prized cookbook in our quick ship things. Prized meaning it's the one with all the family recipes that my mom put together for my sister and I for Christmas back a few years ago. Truth be told, she was probably sick of us asking her how to make cornbread dressing, or banana pudding, or how to cook a turkey (that's another post). These aren't recipes that one can find in one of the family bibles, they are only the ones that you learn by the side of a great cook cause they sure aren't written down anywhere. Luckily and thanks to my mom, they are now in a cookbook and in electronic form on my harddrive (that's somewhere in this mess). I broke into the family recipes today and started my holiday cooking with one of my favorite memories - Grandma Carter's banana bread.

Grandma Carter is my great-grandmother on my mom's side of the family. When I was growing up, we would go and visit that side of the family almost every summer. As soon as my sister and I got off the plane, my grandparents would head straight over to my great-grandparents house, as they had the good fortune of living 15 minutes from the airport in Seattle. When we would get there, my grandma was in the kitchen whipping up a snack for us while my Grandpa Homer would give us all sorts of grief and really bad Homer jokes.

Once the bread went in the oven, we sat down for a game of Cribbage and my sister and I did our level best to beat my Grandpa Homer. He cheated, bad - even worse than I do, cause at least my "cheating" is merely loopholes in the rules. Then the bread would be done, and we would have to convince my grandma to cut it early. The aroma was too much to bear to wait for it to cool properly! We would get a slice, then take a loaf over to my grandparents' house for later.

So, I broke into the family cookbook and this time, I even had helpers! Holly and Sarah donned their aprons and together we mashed the bananas, sifted flour, and mixed the batter until done, but not overly mixed. The girls decided that they wanted to add chocolate chips (for some reason, I think Bill was here egging them on......) Then had to wait the excruciating long bake time until the timer went ding. Guess I don't need to tell you what we had for dessert tonight.

The other family tradition - Daddy licks the bowl

Our banana bread!

Let it flurry!!!!

We woke up on Sunday morning to the first snow flurries of the season! The girls were so excited, so we ran downstairs as quick as we could get warm clothes on. It wasn't cold enough to stick around long, but there were some big beautiful flakes coming down.

Sarah showing me her gloves

The girls trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues

Not sticking much, but there are some flurries on the car

Everland!!!!

This week has just flown by! We have been unpacking boxes, sorting and organizing most of the week. But, Wednesday was Veteran's Day, and since we all had the day off we headed to Everland.

Everland is the largest theme park in South Korea and, conveniently for us, it's about an hour's drive from us. This place is amazing! They have a little bit of everything that you need/want in a theme park - zoo, roller coasters, kid rides, and the best caramel popcorn! They just started their Christmas Fantasy festival, so the park was decorated with Christmas trees, wreaths, and ornaments galore! We were greeted at the front by Santa who gave us Rudolph noses.

First, we headed to Aesop's Village. Holly and I went on the Tortoise and the Hare train ride, while Ronnie and Sarah went to scope out the "ball pit." Let me tell you, the ball pit is fun for ALL AGES and I challenge you to find anything like this in the States.... Loads of small soft foam balls with tons of compressed air shoots that either shoot the balls up in the air or at someone.
The rest of our day was spent riding rides, watching the parade, riding even more rides, then going into the zoo area and Safari ride.

We had a lot of fun! Good thing we bought season passes, the girls are already asking when we can go back!

Moving Day - Korean Style

It should come as no surprise that life in Korea is a little different than life in the US. We know this and accepted it long before our passports were stamped. However, the way they do moving day was a sight to see.

As any other household goods delivery goes, the truck rolls up with a couple of workers ready to go. There is also a point person who works with you on the paperwork, keeping numbers straight and noting any damages done to the crates, boxes, or furniture. So, how do they get everything up to the apartment. One would assume via elevator right..... If that's what you thought, you are dead WRONG!

So, for your viewing pleasure, here is move-in Korea style:

Now remember, we live on the 11th floor. They used a lift and taped the top of the lift to our rail. Then they zoomed boxes, furniture and everything else up and down the lift. Pretty amazing sight to see, especially when another worker magically appeared in our apartment. We figured out that he had "ridden" up with our boxes.

Meters, Grams, and Liters, OH MY!!!!

Remember back to when we were in school learning different things and thinking that you will "never" need to use this. Parents, if you have children in school, get them to read this....

Unfortunately, my mom and dad were right. There I said it.... They were right.

I am having to use some of the stuff I learned back in school that seemed so pointless to learn at the time..... Because ***surprise**** Korea uses the metric system. YIKES!

I'm on a crash course trying to remember everything I swore I would never need. It's just crazy the amount of math I'm doing and relearning. Such as how to convert degrees Fahrenheit into Centigrade for the temperature outside to what the appropriate setting is for the oven. Yes, our oven is in centigrade, as are the AC and heating units. They give distances on the highway in meters and go kilometers-per-hour. Gas is sold by the liter - which is equating to about $5/gallon by the way. Meat, seafood, or dry goods aren't sold by the pound, it's grams.

So kids, listen up... You may need this one day. So pay attention and remember those conversions. And I'll give you a quick tip: 1 mile equals 1.6 kilometers, and 0 Celsius is 32 Fahrenheit.

And if you see my mom and dad, tell them to stop gloating....

Train is a-Comin'

Going on the Metro once a week is starting to be our thing to do on the weekend. Like any major city (think DC, Chicago, NYC), Korea has developed a wonderful Metro system with lines coming in to Seoul from all directions.

Our first excursion was to Suwon just a few stops up. Great first experience for us and the girls! The ticket machines are also in English, so we bought our ticket quickly and away we went for 1300 Won one-way (read a little over $1). Most of the seats were taken, but two ladies made room for Holly and Sarah to sit down. They just loved all over the girls for the 20 minutes it took us, and the girls just ate it up!

This weekend, we decided to venture a bit further. It was cold and overcast, so we went to the Aquarium in Seoul. Again, they have a wonderful system here and have a fully interactive map on their website. All you do is enter in your start point and your destination and the map will tell you the route, if you have to transfer, what your fare will be and the estimated time. Not only did the trains ran exactly the times that are posted, we were at our destination at the estimated time the Metro system said we would be there.

We also had in-train entertainment with live infomercials! We had the opportunity to buy dried crab (we think..), a multi-tool with a built in flashlight, and a love song/soft rock 6-CD set with lyrics.

After a full day of the Aquarium, walking around the COEX mall, and finding the yummiest cupcakes we headed back home on the subway trying to think of where our next subway adventure will take us.