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. 

Her hair is all parted and ready to be died.

She was a bit nervous to see how it would turn out.

Look at that color.

She really thought this hair dryer was cool.

The hairdresser.  She is also my hairdresser and she knows the girls. 

The very cool end results.

Freezing Water Buddha Hike

You know it is cold when...
1.  When you look at the daily weather forecast, see that the high for the day is 28 degrees and think to yourself "Oh good, it is going to be a warm day."

2.  When you walk outside and the hairs in your nose freeze immediately.

3.  When you are hiking with your family and the water bottles you are carrying in your backpack freeze.

All of the above things happened in the last few days.  It has been so cold here in Seoul.  I heard the temperatures were the coldest in over 50 years throughout December and so far it isn't looking to warm up any in January, which is usually the coldest month of the year.

Like I said in an earlier post, we did a bunch of hiking over Christmas break.  We were told about a very cool mountain hike about an hour away from our house to a gold Buddha.   We had great directions to get to the mountain, but our directions once we arrived at the mountain on where the Buddha was were a bit sketchy.  We decided to venture out one day to see if we could find it.

Lucy is all bundled up and ready to hike.

Again, on this hike we were in very Korean country.  (Seoul is massive and there are a ton of foreigners in it.  There are areas of Seoul that no matter what time you go you will see a foreigner, the area we live in is like this.  Russ and I like to try to venture out to the areas that foreigners don't often get too.  It makes for some fun adventures and good experiences.  We have also found that the locals are very excited to help us in these areas because they don't see foreigners very often.)

We took a 45 minute subway ride then a 20 minute bus ride to get to this mountain.

At the entrance of the mountain park.

Remember what I said earlier about us not buying a bunch of Korean hiking gear and just using what we had?  Well, after 2 hikes in the freezing temperatures in my snow boots I ditched that method and Russ bought me real, waterproof hiking boots.  They are awesome and made a huge difference.

Showing off my new boots.

We were told that it was a simple hike to the Buddha and we had printed off a picture of it to show people to ask for directions.  It always sounds so much easier then it is in reality.  When we got there we realized that not only did no one speak English, but they had no idea where the Buddha was either.  We soon got cold, frustrated and family morale was very low so we just set out to hike in a random direction on a path and decided we would call it a "learning experience" for the future.

Our Buddha directions told us to hike to the 2 small houses then walk on the path between them and go up the mountain.  You can imagine our surprise when we were hiking in the middle of no where and all of the sudden came upon these 2 small houses.  With a very small path between them.

It looks like we are heading into their house for dinner.

At this point, when we showed the picture of the Buddha everyone knew what we were talking about and pointed us in the correct direction.  Knowing we were "close" shot family morale back up high again.  They pointed these signs out to us and told us to follow them.  I don't know why we didn't do that before.  It is so obvious that these signs lead you to the big, gold Buddha.

Like I said at this point we thought we were close, but we really weren't.  This path was not very well traveled and we had to hike over a small, snow covered mountain.  Everyone else that passed on the hike had these little ice clamps on their shoes that would help them grip the ground.  When they saw us coming, the girls with just snow boots on, they would freak out and point at our feet.  In hindsight, we probably should have purchased some of these ice clamps before we set out on this hike, but we didn't have them and we had made it this far so we weren't turning back.

In the sun it wasn't to bad...

...but in the shade it was freezing.

The "family morale booster".  He usually carries some chocolate in his pocket to start giving out when morale starts to take a dip.  I'm not joking.  He is a smart man and knows that if my morale is high the entire families morale is high.  Chocolate instantly makes my morale go up, so he keeps some handy at all times.

Picture taken right after he had given me some of his chocolate.  Man, I love him.

 We saw some beautiful mountain views.

We had to cross this rickety old bridge.  Who knows how old this thing was.

Finally, we saw it.

Russ and I try to expose our girls to all sorts of different cultures and all that goes along with them.  During our hike to the Buddha and especially on the way back we had some very good family discussion about what we believe and how it differs from what many Koreans believe.  In the New Testament, Matthew 5 calls us as believers to be a LIGHT to a dark world.  We try to give our girls a better understanding of what this means by exposing them to things that we encounter in the culture we live in. 

All around the large, gold Buddha, in glass cases were thousands of these small, gold Buddhas.

Then underneath in very small cases where these even smaller Buddhas.

We were at the top of a ridge with mountains surrounding us.  It was beautiful...

...and very cold.  We didn't stay long.  We walked around a bit and saw that there was a really old bell and a small residence up there, which we assumed was for the monk who did the upkeep around the area. 

It looks like the bell is coming out of his neck.

We took a quick family picture before we headed back down the mountain.

It had been our intention to eat our lunch, picnic style, when we reached the Buddha, but we were all way to cold to stop.  So we ate as we hiked down the mountain.  This is when we realized that the water in our water bottles had frozen as we hiked.  We had some nice, refreshing ice water to wash our sandwiches down with.

Eating, walking and freezing. 

This is the part where we needed the ice clamps.  It was really slippery through this part.

Can you tell Taylor is cold in this picture?  This is just about at the end of the hike.

Finally we made it back to the subway and got warmed up.

Overall, it was a great hike.  We will definitely go back and hike in that area again once it gets a little bit warmer.




As a side note--I write this blog for our family and friends back in America to read and enjoy.  I don't in any way intend for this blog to be a travel guide through Seoul.  For that reason I don't include travel directions or subway information in my posts.  I also don't worry if I don't get every detail perfect.  It is just a fun, family blog.  It would be my preference to have it password protected, since I often share personal family information and pictures on it, but I tried that for a while and I was the only person that could see the blog.  Great security but not really very fun if I'm the only person that can access it.  So I took the password off.  I recently had an anonymous person post a comment on one of my blog posts.  It wasn't in anyway offensive or anything rude, but it did get me thinking about how anyone in the world can access the blog and then post comments on it.  So, since the password thing didn't work I did the only other thing I could do.  I tightened the security settings for who can post comments on the blog and I also have to preview all comments before they are posted.  So if you comment and it doesn't show up right away that is the reason.

Trick Eye Museum

 A while ago I heard about a cool museum here in Seoul called the Trick Eye Museum.  They take 2D pictures and make them look 3D.  We decided to check it out one day while Uncle Joe was here over Thanksgiving.  We had a great time taking funny pictures of each other. 

First we stopped to eat at very small curry restaurant.  Check out the fake cherry blossom tree they had decorated the place with.  It went above almost the entire restaurant.

After a good lunch we headed to the museum.

Here is Taylor getting her ticket from the picture lady.  She looks very excited to go to the Trick Eye Museum.

Here are some of the rest of the many pictures we took that day...

Lucy is very surprised to fine money on the ground.

I have no idea where the sunglasses came from.

These 3 pictures were all one picture.  If you looked at it from different angles it changed the picture.

I love Lucy's face in this picture.

This was probably my favorite of Taylor's pictures.

The English caption on this sign cracked me up. 

 Which one is your favorite?