…language

No, this is not a post about Korean, but yet another baby post.

Neko was more interested in developing her motor and social skillz than in learning to talk, at least until recently. When other babies are supposedly distinguishing between mom and dad, asking for more and using the name of a favorite toy, she only said, “dadaddadadadadada,” and that could mean anything.

Sadly, both the Mr. and I are still “dada,” but I get the occasional “mama,” usually out of desperation when I won’t pick her up.

However, in the month of April, her vocabulary expanded from “dadadada,” and the occasional odd word (we’re pretty sure she had “done” for a while, but she used it somewhat indiscriminately). Here’s the current list:

ball
baby
banana
wow
dada
mama
more
done
all-gone (can you tell food is a favorite thing?)
up
bird
meow
bye-bye (both to say goodbye, and to ask to go outside)
hi
hello (a lot of effort to learn two words that mean the same thing!)
diaper (this was the first really recognizable word, and she’s getting better at it every day, sounds like “di-pah”)

Of course, she’s understanding a lot more than she says, and is able to follow some directions, depending on whether she’s feeling peppy, perverse or pooped. If one of us says “Diaper Time!” to her, she’ll toddle down the hallway to the changing area, repeating, “di-pah, di-pah…,” and only when she gets there does she remember that she’s not really keen on the whole changing thing, and then completely spazzes out trying to get away.

Her favorite indoor activity is using the slide, but that’s tempered by doing wooden shape puzzles, rolling cars, playing her ‘piano,’ decorating herself in mardi-gras beads, cleaning house, using pull-toys or push-toys, and sorting small objects into various bags, drawers and boxes.

Her favorite outdoor activity is using the slide. Not content with the toddler sized slides, she seems to prefer the tallest, curviest big kid slides she can find. This is a kid who is going to love the water park. She also finds time to collect rocks, chase cats and birds, run away, and stare entranced at mysterious somethings. She’s always up for a walk in the stroller, which sends her into a zen-like bliss. She’ll stare longingly out the window if we haven’t yet gone outside that day, and walk to the front door and say “bye-bye” several times, before crying if I don’t take the hint.

The one thing she doesn’t get a lot of is friend time. She naps when every other baby we know is awake and vice versa. Perhaps when the Panda-baby comes, Neko’s schedule will change and we’ll see a bit more of the other little kids. When we’re out and about, however, she is a social butterfly, and charms everyone.

Unfortunately, we’ve entered the hitting and stubborness phase, it’s just the early days, but I can tell it’s going to be interesting here soon.

T minus at most 10 days until Panda’s arrival.

…Car Show

 We spent some time at the Seoul International Car Show at the beginning of the month. Neko starred in a lot of covert cell phone pics. We’re never really sure what people do with those pics of foreigner babies, but it’s sure popular. A few people were brave enough to ask us if they could hold her and take a pic. This was mostly young couples, which was kind of endearing.

We scared this car attendant to death by trying to take a pic of Neko in front of the car. I think it was a “no touch” car, but he made it much more awkward because we’d just have taken the pic and left, but he kept pushing on her, and making her want to stay.

We also had a little driving lesson, and she used her mad push car horn-beeping skills to try to honk this car’s horn, but, thankfully, she wasn’t strong enough.

Since we were all starting to feel a bit under the weather, this felt like an ‘extreme’ outing, though only Neko fell asleep in the car on the way back.

…Egg Hunting

Some action shots of Neko from last week’s egg hunt. We arrived exactly on time, which turned out to be about 5 minutes too late (there were some avid hunters!), but several of the other kids gave Neko a chance to pick up some eggs by laying them out around her. We went to another hunt the next day, which was more like wading through a pool of eggs, so she got a chance to pick up some there too. She’s also played with them all week. None of the innards were toddler appropriate, but we can save the stickers for next year and eat the candy ourselves. (shhh!)

This generous little boy gave Neko half of his eggs. She gave some back, but kept a good number.

…Busan

Busan is on the southern tip of the Korean penninsula, so it was considerably warmer there than here in Seoul when we visited last weekend. We were even walking around in short sleeves! My cousin’s been working down there as an English teacher and we took the opportunity to visit him and cash in on some of those hotel points from Hyatt that we’d accrued in 2012. They just opened a new Park Hyatt there, and it was experiencing some growing pains and wasn’t fully 5 star yet, but the minor troubles we experienced garnered us a free upgrade to a suite (which is always nice with Neko, as we all sleep better when we’re not sharing a room), and a free bowl of fruit (most of which we gave to my cousin, as it was a LOT of fruit for one day!). Our room had a great view of the marina and these great wooden floors which lent it an old world aesthetic even in its extreme newness.

At Haedong Yonggungsa Temple just Northeast of Busan, getting ready for the lantern festival to celebrate Buddha’s birthday.

All over the grounds of the Haedong Yonggungsa Temple, there were little buddha statues.

And mini stupas.

One big Buddha (the scaffolding is to hang the lanterns for the festival).

…and more mini-buddhas

The temple overlooks the ocean, and several groups of people were holding services on the rocks below.

Slightly more traditional statues, these are behind the massive statue of the Queen of Heaven

Two Golden Pigs… are they the biggest piggy banks ever?

Mr. Adventure and Neko have no idea what’s lurking in the bamboo behind them…

…a ravenous tiger.

One of several statues of the Queen of Heaven

Later that night, we visited another temple.

…Lunar New Year at the Gyeongbokgung (Gyeongbok Palace)

Admission to the Gyeongbok Palace was free on Lunar New Years, and we’d heard that many of the locals will dress up in traditional clothing to celebrate the holiday. While it seemed way too cold for many of them to celebrate that way, a few brave souls did venture out in the silk Hanbok dresses, complete with wolly undergarments and quilted coats. The palace itself was rebuilt after the wars, so it feels a little manufactured rather than historic, and the gardens weren’t all that exciting in early February, but we did wander into the neighboring museum grounds and were surprised by a festival, complete with drumming, kites and food samples (which we missed by a hair).

Gyeongbok Palace, Seoul

Gyeongbok Palace, Seoul

The pine trees in Asia look just like they do in Chinese calligraphic art. I thought it was just a stylization until I moved here, but they really are wispy and slanty. And, this photo shows how not exciting the gardens are in February.

The slightly prettier inner gardens near the King’s quarters and the concubine’s rooms.

Traditional Drumming performance. I took this photo by reaching over the heads of the crowd.

My actual view of the drumming performance.

The changing of the guard at the Gyeongbok Palace.

They do things more colorfully here than at Buckingham Palace.

…Tokyo

In January, we took a weekend trip to Tokyo, and stayed in a fabulous suite at the Park Hyatt near the City Hall thanks to a free Hyatt upgrade. The weather was a nice respite from Seoul’s supposedly record-breaking winter, and we took several long walks to enjoy the sunshine.

Old Tokyo train station

The Imperial Palace grounds

Mr. Adventure playing with his new camera, all bundled up, but we felt it was warm compared to Seoul!

Leaving the Imperial Palace’s Garden

Sensoji Temple, Asakusa, Tokyo

On the walk to the Meiji Shrine, Tokyo

Entrance gate to Meiji Shrine

Meiji Shrine fountain

A bride leaving the wedding pavillion at Meiji Shrine

…the Annual Foreign Service Swap

I missed last years swap, as I was transiting between Florida and Dhaka, but I signed up for this one after my great experience meeting Becky a couple of years ago. This time I was matched with the Red Menace Abroad and she sent me a box I’ll dub “A Taste of Nicaragua.”

Panda baby will wear the little red dress because some aggressive laundering shrank it a bit, and we’ll try a punch mix tonight with our taco dinner, but I have no idea how we’ll use the cigars. Perhaps we’ll hand them out to strangers in the hospital after Panda’s birth, like a 1950′s movie dad.

Very fun again, I hope next year’s swap is just as entertaining!

( The previous swap box I got: http://adventuresin.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/swap-boxes/ )
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…Second Impressions of Life in Seoul

Some vignettes:

Tea here is exceedingly expensive. When you sit down to a meal and look at the drink menu, nearly everything starts at around $5, and there are no free refills. There are coffee and tea shops on every corner, midway through every block, and even more often than that, however, they’re also really expensive. Even Starbucks’ cheapest option is $3, and that’s for one tea bag in the smallest cup possible. Since I go there occasionally to work on writing, I try to look at that $3 as a chair rental fee. The cost is still a bit harsh after the $1 cups of tea I used to nurse all day with free water refills at the coffee shops where I wrote my dissertation in the Berkeley/Oakland area.

Now that the winter is over (more or less), I feel a lot more optomistic about life here. Still rather lonely and having a hard time meeting people on a more than superficial cocktail party conversation level (as is a complaint of nearly every ‘trailing spouse’ at some time or another, if not always), but at least going outside isn’t a battle with death. Neko and I have been on a few walks in the neighborhood, and visted some playgrounds, all of which are way too big for her to enjoy without active participation from me. That, of course, is getting increasingly difficult as the arrival of Panda-baby comes ever closer. Luckily, Neko enjoys the novelty of just being outside in our yard and poking at the mud. The psuedo-American neighborhood is nice for that kind of thing, even if you feel very isolated from the rest of the city.

Most of our adventuring happens on the weekends, when Mr. Adventure can come along. We hit a big palace over Lunar New Years, an aquarium in an underground mall, a nearby street full of foreign foods and sock vendors, and spent an entire day wandering through Gangnam (of Gangnam-Style fame) in search of a particular camera store. Mr. Adventure’s starting a photography class this weekend, so I am guessing he’ll get some assignments that will take us out and about in new places, but we’ve been saving some of the more interesting sights for the wave of potential visitors that might come our way (and yes, there’s room for you!).

The house is coming together, but the lack of useful storage has hampered the process a bit. The closet floors are all sloped at a 45 degree angle, to keep your shoes neatly displayed, it would seem, but that just means you can’t store anything other than shoes in the closet. So, even though we have great closets, we just don’t have enough hanging items to fill them, and everything else we put in there comes tumbling out when the doors open. In the kitchen there is only one bank of three drawers, all of them are 8″ deep. So, we put our utensils in one, our cooking tools in another, and our towels in the bottom. But, for everything else that might be drawer-worthy, we haven’t found a good solution. Shelves are wasted on ziploc bag boxes or cookie cutters, for example. We’re still puzzling it out. Neko’s penchant for unloading things has also meant that the bottom drawer is perpetually in disarray, or dumped on the floor, and that all our trash bins have to be displayed on tables or other furniture. It’s not very aesthetically pleasing. Once we finish hanging the remaining artwork, however, we’ll take some photos to show it all off.

Most recently, I wrote a chapter for an upcoming book on “how tos” related to foreign service life. I think it will be out this summer, and I’ll link you to it then. It was a fun little project, and I’d enjoy doing more things like that. I’ve also been tutoring and odd-jobbing it, as I was the first year in Dhaka. I’m going to be a stuffed animal doctor this weekend, for example, gotta use those mad sewing skills. I wonder if that would be a more steady source of clients than editing is….

…Seoul, first impressions

We’ve been here just a little over a month now, and it’s high time I updated you all on our new digs. Here are some of my first impressions of the city/neighborhood.

1. It’s gosh darn cold. Yes, coming from Dhaka, we expected it to be cold. However, we arrived in time for the coldest and snowiest December on record, apparently. Is this payback for all those screamingly hot days in Dhaka? Either way, it’s barely broken above freezing most of the time we’ve been here, though the last few days have been a mild 35 degrees farenheit… as a high. Those kind of sweltering temperatures have allowed me to occasionally go out of the house without a full body mummy wrap, but mostly I just look wistfully outside, dreaming of spring. We’ve had tons of snow too, and Neko’s fun little toddler pull-sled arrived earlier this week with our last shipment of household goods, so she’ll be able to learn a little about what fun snow can be.

2. Everyone on base drives a white, late 90′s sedan. Ok, not everyone does, but nearly everyone seems to have one. Several of our neighbors have been kind enough to lend us cars so that we can go grocery shopping while we wait for our own, and every time we’re in the parking lot looking for these borrowed cars, we have to be very careful not to get into the wrong car, as they all look exactly alike. Thankfully, even though the car we’ve bought is also white, it’s more of a wagon/MPV, so we won’t lose it among the throngs, or at least not as much. It’s currently in the transfer process (from Korean-registered to diplomatic-registered vehicle), and we’re hoping to be able to start driving it by the end of the month. We tried to get a middle of the road car (pricewise, sizewise, etc.) which was surprisingly difficult. The car we ended up with will definitely take us around the base, but will also be reliable enough to go “out into Korea” on occasion.

3. Meeting people is HARD. Both due to the cold, and our untimely arrival (i.e. in the off season), there haven’t been many welcome events or invitations. Dhaka was fabulous for it’s community life, and so far… Korea is just not living up to my expectations. All the embassy families live in one neighborhood, so I expected to meet a lot of people and have play-date, coffee and other invitations all the time. But, instead, Neko and I spend most of our days cloistered quietly in the house. Another reason to dream of spring and the chance to encounter people outside. Everyone I’ve talked to about this agrees that summer’s the time to meet people. I’m trying to build up a friend list, but I only know about 3 people, and they all work during the day, so I’m kinda stumped for ideas. Luckily, there’s a play date scheduled for Friday, hopefully Neko won’t be asleep the whole time. They always seem to be at 10am, her preferred naptime.

4. Korea loves kids. When we go out with Neko, she’s a constant attraction for people of all ages. On the street, in the subway, at restaurants, etc… people take her photo, tap on glass to get her attention, allow her to pet (mangle) their furry coats, touch her toes… she’s a total star. I’m not sure if it is because she’s so popular, or because she enjoys getting out of the house, but she’s absolutely thrilled to see the Ergo or stroller getting prepped for an excursion. Sometimes she’ll even carry the Ergo into the living room, holding it out to me, begging to go somewhere (typically when it’s 3 degrees and snowing fiercely). The only neighborhood where she hasn’t been an absolute rockstar was Gangnam (yes, of the song). Are they too cool there?

 

 

 

Christmas

8:40 am Christmas starts out right with Neko giving everyone a nice sleep-in.
A few minutes later we notice the snow!

9:00 am Neko begins to cry because we won’t let her eat her stocking orange whole. She also nets a pack of teething tablets and a crinkly pouch if apple snacks from Santa. Daddy’s goofy solar flower toy is her favorite though, once the automaton penguin breaks. She also likes his M&M candy cane. My stocking scores a heap of candy, fun crossword puzzles and some nice towels for the kitchen, to replace the ones that got Dhakafied. We eat cinnamon rolls.

10 am Full of cinnamon rolls, and flush with stocking gifts, we start to make family calls. We only manage to get one call in before Neko poops out.

11 am Mr.A and I start to open presents while Neko naps.

12 noon, make a second family call, wake Neko for the excitement.

1 pm, Neko gets to open/see her presents. The ball pit is a huge hit, as is the little ornament.

1:40 the balls from the ball pit begin to be removed from the pit. We’re in for a messy house. We wondered a lot about our mysterious last gift, so if you sent something electronic, we didn’t get a gift message…. Let us know its from you.

2 pm, we made the last family phone call today, then sat down to play with the toys, trash and ribbons. We watched a few episodes of Top Gear while dinner cooked.

6pm, we ate dinner. Neko was most impressed by the bacony green beans. The diet mashed potatoes (we only had fat free milk and no sour cream) were mediocre. The cherry pie was, as usual, awesome.

8 pm, we rounded off the night with Neko running around the house giggling whenever she came into the room. Then, suddenly melting down and wanting to go to bed. Proper toddler already.

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