Hospital Visit, Korean Snacks, and E-Mart Adventures

First of all, I am finally using the internet on my OWN COMPUTER! The past few updates were either from my school computer or the brick of a computer that came with the apartment. So yay for that!

So on Thursday I finally went back to the hospital for my checkup. Apparently it cost like 44k won (which is about 30 dollars), so we get to add that to our visa process cost list. The process itself was pretty simple - height and weight, color blindness, eyesight, hearing. And then we had to do a chest x-ray, urine test, and blood test. Koreans use pretty big needles! Ouchie. But at least it went by pretty fast.

Friday I taught my three 6 grade classes, which was actually pretty interesting. We played Simon Says with the kids and gave out my american candy to the winners. Then we would do the CD Rom videos with dialogues and make the kids repeat. After that, we would do this powerpoint of which they guessed random sports celebrities (that I had no clue about but apparently Korean people love) and where they are from, since we were learning about nationalities. So I did that 3 times in a row on Friday.

Today, Saturday, we headed towards the downtown market area of Anseong. We tried a few different snack foods, which each cost about 1000 won aka 65 cents. We got this corn dog type thing and this brownie thing that was very lightly sweet, not overpowering sweet like most US brownies.



Then we went to a local kimbap (aka "Korean sushi") fast food type place and got a little lunch. We bought a roll of beef kimbap (sogogi kimbap) and the rice dish in the stone pot (dolsot bibimbap). It gave with this very light soup (I think maybe with fish base?), kimchi, and picked yellow radish (dan moo ji). All this for only 5,500 won or $3.50.




After snacks and lunch, we headed to E-Mart, which is almost like a Korean walmart, to pick up some more supplies and food. It was pretty big, although not as big as super Walmarts in the states, of course. We wandered around for a while, and bought some random things, such as some floor mats, a drying rack (since there aren't any clothing dryers here), and some food. We are living on rice and noodles, and so we bought some things to supplement our meals, such as canned ham, canned vegetables, eggs, little sausages, tomatoes. We also bought some snacks (I found a snack that was blueberry flavored, cheese flavored pringles, and a dukbokki - rice cake in red pepper sauce - flavored snack as well), some juice, tiny yogurt drinks, imitation crab. Just an array of random assortments. It was pretty interesting carrying all of our stuff on the bus back, as well, since Aaron had his backpack, and then we had three large bags, as well as the dryer rack. So that was quite an adventure.

I also cleaned up the apartment a little bit today as well. Their vacuum cleaner is small and so light and easy to use, I likei t better than the US ones already.