Day 39

• Today I walked a different route to get to the subway and found a really good grocery store. Its only 2 blocks away so now I will not be dependent on Chin taking me grocery shopping on the weekend. Though I am looking forward to going to Costco with Chin tomorrow, I wonder if it will be similar to the one back home.
• I took the subway to Emart, which is 2 stops away and got my bunny!!!! His name is “toe key” pokey. “Toe key” means rabbit in Korean, and I added pokey to make it more like the song hokey pokey. I will have to ask Chin tomorrow what pokey means in Korean. I don’t want to accidently call him a bad name. He is really cute. He got to ride on the subway home with me which was fun carry his cage and getting loads of strange looks from people. He is so tiny and cute! I gave him an apple and he didn’t know it was food. He sat on it for a while and then after 20 minutes he realized it was something he could eat and now it’s his new favorite food.

Day 38

• Oh no, real world zoo is on TV again. There is a chimpanzee spinning around in an office chair. (Lucas: should we tell them that all of the chimps we sent into space came back with super intelligence? No, I don’t think we’ll be doing that.)
• Mmmmm, mashed potatoes and stuffing left overs. It’s almost like being at home; if only I had some tofurkey leftover too!
• It’s Friday night and I am at home studying Korean…. Nerd!!!!!
• So the other day my soup tried to kill me. I noticed before it could complete its mission; take that soup! I was stirring my soup before I took a bit and noticed it had shrimp in it. I told Mike and he looked for shrimps in his soup but didn’t find any. I realized that if I had gotten his bowl of soup I would have eaten it without know it had shrimp juice in it. So that explains why I was getting allergies that included red eyes and itchy skin. So I think the best to avoid soup all together. Try to kill me now soup! Sucker!
• Here a person gets new license plates whenever they register a new car. The car doesn’t have to be new to get a new license plate. So that means when I gave Angela my car she would have registered it and gotten new license plates for it with this year’s date on it. So there basically isn’t a way to show off whether or not you’re driving a new car because anyone can put a new plate on their car. So when ever people do get a new car they leave the factory foam stickers on to show that it’s new. I was wondering what those blue thingys were, I just thought people put them on their car doors so they wouldn’t bump other cars that they park next to. Guess not; it’s a status thing.

Day 37

• Thank you Mike for coming to work with me! Today he helped me figure out how to send money to my bank account back home. I needed to open up a remittance account and he knew a bank specifically for foreigners. He got the English speaking help line phone number for me so I could ask someone what information I needed to present when I went to the bank to open this type of account. I went to the bank by myself with a print screen page from their bank website and my list of needed information according to the help line and said ‘e go’ which means ‘this.’ It’s the greatest word ever! I just point and say ‘e go’ and people can understand what I want. Sure enough, I got my remittance account despite my bank tellers limited English.
• Today was Thanksgiving! Hooray! We got a full Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, ham, dinner rolls, stuffing, mashed potatoes, succotash, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. I brought corn, black pepper, and butter too. There were about 20 people there and everyone needed instructions on what the food was and how to eat it. I showed people that we cut the rolls in half and put butter on them. And that they can put gravy or cranberry sauce on their turkey. Also, we put black pepper on the mashed potatoes or gravy on that too. I really enjoyed sharing this meal with all of my friends from work. And don’t worry, I staged that photo of the pumpkin pie, we used forks hahahah!

Day 36

• So I have to watch my mouth because saying the word “crazy” is a swear word. Hahahah! So saying “that’s so crazy” is extremely offensive. OOOps, once again, thank goodness Mike started working in the office with me to teach me all of this stuff.
• Tomorrow is Thanksgiving! We are ordering Thanksgiving dinner from the army base and having dinner after work. Unlike you all, we don’t have Thursday and Friday off of work, booooooo! But we will have turkey, ham, dinner rolls, veggies, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and even pumpkin pie. I told Chin we need to find forks for everyone because I refuse to eat my pumpkin pie with chopsticks. I’m pretty sure there is a law against it. Yup, the law clearly states no eating Thanksgiving dinner with chopsticks; back me up here Rhett, you’re an officer of the law. Anyways, after work today I went to two different convenient stores before I found what I hope is butter. You can’t have dinner rolls without butter. I also got some cans of corn, can’t have mashed potatoes without corn either. Although corn is easy to find, they put it on pizzas here, butter was harder to come by. Dairy products are not really served that often.
• Angela! You won’t believe it! They have “Glee” with Korean subtitle! I finally got to see it. It was the one with Glenda from wicked. I only caught the last like 8 minutes of it though. Who knows if I will ever find it again, damn this cursed TV with its poltergeist and lack of Tivo!!!!

Day 35

• I had cereal today for the first time in over a month!!! Hooray!!! So I figured out a system. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they offer a mixture of cornflakes and checks but do not offer soy milk. Only of Fridays do they offer soy milk in little juice boxes so I have to try to take more than one and save it for the following week to use on the cereal days. Last Friday the lunch lady caught me and made me put it back. I need to be sneakier next time.
• I am like Cher or Prince. Wait, that sounds terrible. Let me explain. There is no letter z in the Korean language so my last name cannot be translated. So now I have a bank account from Citi Bank that says only Renee on it. Apparently, I am the only Renee in all of Korea so it’s fine.
• Online banking here is really interesting. You open your online banking account and save a security code to your flash drive. In order to look at your account you need to plug in that flash drive to any computer you are using. So if you don’t have that flash drive plugged in then you can’t check your account.

Day 34

• Today was great! Just when my day was going from bad to worse I got a phone call saying there was a package waiting for me down stairs. Actually, the guy at the front desk called Hye Jung because he has seen me with her and he doesn’t speak English so he asked her to tell me. Anyways, it was a care package from Jane! It was a Halloween pumpkin full of all the candies I was craving!!! So today became reverse Halloween! I walked around the office giving candies out to my closest friends. Don’t worry Jane I have only 5 close friends at work so all the rest of the candy is mine  I will try to stick to no more than 2 pieces a day till it runs out. Getting Halloween candy from home was such a special treat; thank you so much Jane!

Day 33

• So the poltergeist in the TV is back with a vengeance! It still turns on all by itself on Saturday mornings, but now it turns on by itself on Sundays too.
• So the company replaced my refrigerator when it broke the other week and the old fridge has been out in the apartment hallway every since. I don’t know who’s supposed to do something about it but I sure can’t carry it down a flight of stairs by myself so I just left it out there. Today there was a note taped to it. Since I don’t know what it says I can only assume it’s not a love note.
• I watched “Point Break” in English and thought of you Lucas. I sure wish I could have seen “Point Break Live” before I left.