Eating Snails and Celebrating a National Holiday About Cookies!

I bet by the title you're intrigued about this post already, aren't you? Or maybe feeling slightly nauseous. But read on either way!

Last Thursday (Nov 10th) everyone from work went out for a Farewell Dinner for the Director. He's leaving to start up another school so I'll be getting a new boss in the next few weeks! We went to a fancy chicken place (sounds weird but it's true) for the goodbye dinner. In Korean you just order a bunch of main dishes and everyone eats off the same plate in the middle of the table, so the table ordered every kind of chicken you can imagine: fried chicken, chicken wings, chicken tenders, grilled chicken, roast chicken, jerked chicken, etc. The two side dishes were french fries and noodles with snails. SNAILS. It was put right in front of me on the table and at first I had no idea what was in with the noodles. And then they told me. And since I have never eaten snails before, I though, here's my chance! So before I could think too much about it, I stabbed one with my fork (surprisingly tough) and popped it in my mouth. It mostly just tasted like the sauce it was in (spicy of course) but it was so chewy. I mean I thought I would never stop chewing! But finally it was over, and now I can say I've eaten a snail, and don't really care for them too much! Here's a pic of the yummy delicious snail noodles:

The gray things in the bowl are the snails. And as you can see, the bowl is half empty since the Koreans really enjoy it!

On Friday it was Pepero Day, which is kinda like a Valentine's Day. Except they celebrate Valentine's Day so I dunno, it's uniquely Korean I guess! Pepero are these long butter cookie sticks dipped in chocolate. That's the most basic version, and then it gets elaborate from there. They have ones rolled in nuts, strawberry flavored, sprinkles, chocolate on the inside of the stick, etc. Pepero are very similar to Japanese Pocky sticks if you've ever had them. Anyways, at some point during the 80s this holiday started, no one knows why, some say the Pepero company started it to bring in business, but whatever the reason, it took off. It's a pretty big deal, all the kids were really excited about it all week! They even have Pepero stuffed animals. I didn't really think I'd get any gifts since I had heard kids only give it to their friends (not like back home where if you bring something to school you have to give it to the whole class!). But I really came away with a nice stash! Here's a pic of all the goodies I got:

And then the Director gave the foreign teachers presents too:

Needless to say, I have a lot of Pepero in my apartment right now. This past weekend Cassy and I went to Suwon, which is a city south of Songdo and took about 3 hours to get there by subway. I'll do a separate post about that later though because I have a bunch of pictures of it. Let's see, oh today I taught Arts & Crafts (I teach all sorts of random stuff) and we made necklaces! I took a pic of mine, they're Christmasy!

That last one's supposed to be Rudolph, and he looks even crazier because of the goggly eyes. Well I'm no artist (although my 7 yr olds think I am an awesome artist!! They are always so impressed haha). And then tonight I went and bought a Christmas tree!! Yay! They've been on sale since the end of October and I was afraid they were going to sell out of the one I wanted, so I thought I'd go ahead and get it. And then I put it up too! I also bought myself a stocking and hung that up too. Although I'm not sure Santa Claus is going to know I moved to South Korea. I'll post pictures of my tree later, I forgot to buy a tree topper and I didn't get enough ornaments, the tree is fuller than I anticipated. I can only carry so much on the subway at once! Oh they also had advent calendars so I bought one of those too! Now I need to start on my Christmas shopping since I'll have to ship them all! Alright that's all for this post, to end it I will say that it is freezing here! FREEZING!!