Modicum of Mementos (or Manda has more pictures to share)

I love the cute stuffed produce and food in the picture above, I'm trying to figure out if I want to get one to bring home with us! I am a fan of the banana, but there's also toast, a burger, and donuts down in the very bottom row. They're just too cute. 

So welcome to another round of me posting various interesting pictures from our location here in South Korea. I like taking pictures and I especially like finding things of interest, so this should be fun for everyone! Of course, any questions are welcome, I will do my best to explain things though. 

I understand that the delicious items found in this bag are a regional specialty here in the Cheongju area. Unfortunately my searching has come up with nothing, so I'm not sure what you'd call them. I'll keep trying. 

This is the delicious contents of the above bag. Take a moment and think of waffles, delicious warm waffles that not only taste good but smell amazing too. That's what these yummy treats are, but the large walnut shaped ones have a sweet bean paste inside while the peanut shaped ones have peanuts. Both are delicious and can be found while walking around on the streets. Some of the stands that sell these also have waffles too which are delicious. 

We found a delicious little restaurant around here with very reasonable prices and I'm slowly looking at sampling the various items on the menu. The one above was from this week. It's bibimbap and it is quite amazing. Bibimbap has many variations and it sometimes served in a hot stone bowl. This was one of my first introductions to Korean food at home at a small restaurant near Indianapolis. In the stone bowl you're supposed to stir everything together and that helps ensure that the usually raw egg placed on top is cooked.

This is one of my favorite little girls-- trying on my glasses. She's seriously too cute. 

Homework has become a big thing here at our hagwon, a project taken up by our director. I'm sure you've noticed my many criticisms of our boss's English abilities and I see errors probably everyday. This was one of them and I'm just not really sure what's happening?

Periodically I take toys from small children and photograph them. Nah, not so much. I ended up with Carley's Pokemon toy, however, because she was not being very good and I took care of it until class was over. It was kind of cute and I figured I'd get a picture. 

Another unique thing I've seen while we've been here has been this inflatable baby-shaped body to display diapers. There was the Huggies brand one and another Korean brand. It makes sense, it was just a rather interesting thing to see. 

We went to a local mall that's also part of an apartment complex (huge, rich area of the city) and I thought it was interesting that there is a female parking lot for the customers. Makes sense considering that South Korea has very high sexual assault rates, sadly. :/

This is really cool and I wish I had gotten a better picture, but they're moving so quickly on this building that I didn't get the chance. Looking through the doorway on the floor you can see the tubes placed for the ondol heating for the apartment. They were placed very precisely and it's pretty neat to see how it works. The ondol heating pumps hot water through the pipes to heat the room/home from the floor.

This unique work of art was found on the Chungbuk University campus here in Cheongju. There's a handful of art displayed on the grounds which I may post later, but this was particularly cool. 

 

Finally, on our walk across the river from Shinae (downtown) I spotted this on one of the pillars. It's pretty neat. The text in the balloon reads: "where is human rights?" and if that isn't a cool message, I don't know what is. I've enlarged the image below for detail and easier to read text. 

I'll keep hunting around for more photographic evidence of life over here. Hopefully some video too!