Pound Family Adventures: The Flu

The Flu of 2013 has come to Korea and hit the Pound home hard. First, Russ went down with it.

Laying in the ER waiting for his fever to come down.

About 2 days later Lucy was sick. One day after that Taylor came home sick and I was the last one. It was a horrible flu. We were each sick for 3 full days then it took about 4 days to recover. Because of the sickness and a few other small events we haven't taken very many adventures lately. So, today I will just show you a fun restaurant we ate at recently and a small adventure Taylor had.

Maple Tree Restaurant~
A very popular type of Korean meal is often called Korean BBQ or as Americans call it beef and leaf. They cook the meat (beef or pork) on a grill right on your table and you often eat it with rice, kimchi and big lettuce leaves. Most of the time, it is cheap to eat Korean food at a restaurant, but beef and leaf is the exception. It is at a minimum $20.00 a person, which is why Russ and I don't eat it very often. If you can get an awesome Korean meal for about $7.00 why spend $20.00? But one night when Lucy had a birthday party to attend we decided to take Taylor out to eat on a special date. We were told the Maple Tree Restaurant was one of the best places around for beef and leaf so we checked it out.

Immediately they get a 10 for atmosphere. It is a little bit of an upscale restaurant that has fake maple trees all through it.

They bring out your "free" side dishes first. They were pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but since we love Korean food and we were starved we ate most of them right up.

The salad in the back had some sort of peanut type dressing. I didn't like it too much but Russ and Taylor loved it. I have no idea what the salad on the side was but it was a bit spicy and looked like grass. It was delicious. The white glob in the front is tofu and then they had some mushrooms and 2 types of kimchi.
Next they bring out a pan of hot coals and put them on your table.

Isn't she just precious. The purple hair is the adventure I will talk about later.

The metal thing above sucks the heat up and keeps the restaurant from getting to warm. They put a grate on the coals and cook the raw meat right at your table.

This is the beef. We liked it better then the pork.

The lady that is helping usually cooks our meat for us. Since it doesn't seem like they do that for everyone we assume they do it for us because we are American.

They bring these big lettuce leaves out for you to wrap your meat and some rice in.

The front leaves were good, the back ones tasted to leafy to me. They were a thick leaf. Russ decided he didn't like them either.

I like to take a lettuce leaf, put a little meat on top of it, add some rice and some kimchi then roll that thing up and take a big bite. As a friend of mine used to say "It is like a party in your mouth!" Delicious!

After dinner we went to a local bakery and got a few sweets and some coffee to share. It was a good evening with our oldest daughter.

She took a picture of us.

Taylor's Adventure~
Often your kids ask you questions that they know what the answer will be. Questions like "Mom, can I stay home from school tomorrow and sleep in?" Gonna be a quick no answer. But every once in a while your kid will ask you a question that they think they know the answer to and you totally surprise them by your answer. These are my favorite questions and Taylor recently asked me one. "Mom, can I get a stripe of purple dyed into my hair?" She was sure the answer would be no, but instead my answer was "Sure, that sounds pretty cool." She was totally shocked that I would say yes to that question. My perspective was, I have so many questions that I have to say no to this is an easy one to answer yes.

So off to the beauty salon on base we went.