Day 8: Laundry Day

This was a fairly non-productive day, for obvious reasons!!! After getting home so late, I didn't wake up until almost noon today! (There goes half the day!) I spent the day just puttering around my apartment, doing some cleaning, and also attempting my first run at laundry, Korean-style.

In my bathroom/shower room, is my washing machine. Steven had showed me how to use it when I first moved in, but god help me if I can remember how to work the darn thing! All the buttons are in Korean, so I really have no idea how to work the damn thing. Anyways I piled in all my dirty unmentionables, and just pushed a bunch of buttons until it started to make a noise that sounded like cleaning. My machine has this weird display screen, where the laundry cycle counts down its steps from 84 down to 0. I guess there's exactly 84 steps this machine goes thru to clean my clothes? (cause it makes a slightly different noise for each step...) Whatever...

Now drying is a different story! Notice how I've never mentioned my dryer? That's cause I don't have one!!! I don't know if Koreans just don't do dryers at all, or maybe I just don't have one. Either way Steven had bought me this funny contraption for my apartment to dry my clothes on. It looks like a giant metal praying mantis/torture device that I'm apparently supposed to use to hang my damp clothes on. I tried numerous times to set this device up, but I really have no idea how it's supposed to work! My clothes are hanging on it precariously right now as we speak, but I think that if I look at it the wrong way it'll collapse before my very eyes.

Tonight I was invited to another Park family outing - this time it was Ester's (the youngest daughter) piano recital! This was a thoroughly enjoyable experience! The kids are adorable and could all play piano quite well (a few of them were my 5-year old kindergartens that I teach!) Steven told me that music lessons, especially piano, are very popular here in Korea. It was fun to check it out anyways.

I was invited over to their house, upstairs from my apartment, for pizza after the recital. This was my first time having pizza here in Korea, and it was pretty tasty actually, despite containing ingredients that I could not fully identify (including potato - who would've thought that giant slices of potato on pizza would taste so yummy!) The one thing I really do need to mention is, and this comes as a bit of a sad day for me, is that I believe that I ate...red meat. I gave up eating red meat entirely 7 months ago, and honestly have not touched a piece of beef or pork since, until tonight... I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure that one of the toppings on the pizzas was pieces of hamburger... I saw them on the pizza before I ate it, but my Korean family was so excited to have me over for dinner, and were eager for me to "enjoy Korean pizza", that I didn't have the heart to either decline the pizza, or pick off the meat. They've been so kind and so gracious to me, I just didn't want to appear rude... And so I ate it. There! I said it! It happened! Many of my friends predicted that I wouldn't be able to last very long in Korea without eating red meat, and I had been convinced that I could do it, but here I am a week into my trip, and I have cow digesting in me at this very moment... Ugh... *I FEEL SO GUILTY!!!*