"I want to eat this dish is a hard grunge"

Happy 추석, everybody!

추석 (the romanization is "Chuseok") is like Korean Thanksgiving, celebrated on August 15 of the lunar calendar. It's the second most important holiday in Korea, after the lunar New Year, and the whole extended family gathers to pay respects to the ancestors and eat great food and generally enjoy each other's company.



Well, I'm here in DC and my brother is in Massachusetts, not in Korea, tragically enough. So we spent about an hour conference-calling relatives in Korea last night.

It was really good to hear everyone's voices, especially when one of our baby cousins insisted on talking on the phone, too, and then couldn't think of anything to say. So cute! It was good fun, but it also made miss Korea a lot, not to mention Korean food. I especially miss 송편 ("songpyeon"), which is a special rice cake often eaten on 추석.



Mmmmmm. I looooove me some Korean rice cakes. The reminder prompted me to set my Facebook status this morning to: 추석이라 그런지 송편 먹고싶다~~ ^^

Now, before y'all go reaching for your Korean-English dictionaries, it means: Maybe it's because it's Thanksgiving, but I'm craving 송편.

When my former math prof copy-pasted it into Google translator, however, he got: I want to eat this dish is a hard grunge.

I... what?

Anyone ever play the Babelfish game, from back when Google didn't have a translator yet? You take a well-known quote (or song lyrics, or an idiom, etc.), translate it into another language with Babelfish. Translate the translation into another language, and so on, and eventually back to English, and then see if anyone can figure out what the original quote was. There are, of course, many variations on this.



ANYWAY, since I couldn't have 송편 but still wanted something a little out of the ordinary, I made a zebra cake. That's what I logged on to say in the first place, I just got a little distracted.

My life in a nutshell

I finally got settled in my room, which is a big improvement in my living situation since the last post. For one thing, I'm not living out of a duffel anymore, and have more than six t-shirts and three pairs of jeans to choose from. It also means running out of underwear less quickly, so laundry less often! I moved into the room as soon as the last subletter left, and spent a whole day cleaning and unpacking instead of studying... Oops. :)

Well, so I will be spending the next ten months or so of my life in a room about the size of a nutshell. It is easily the smallest space I have had to occupy since the one-bedroom apartment in Eagle Heights in Madison, and then it was only because I had had to share the room with my mom and younger brother.

This room here is actually tiny.

The room came furnished with a lofted bed, a desk, half a chest of drawers (the bottom drawer is AWOL), a chair, and a bookshelf, all of the Ikea variety.





It's hard to snap just one picture that will convey a sense of the whole room because I can't get far enough back.

I actually don't mind having a small room since I don't have much stuff, and it's much easier to keep it tidy. What I do mind, however, is the nutshell of a kitchen.



Makes me really miss the kitchen of Hatherly College, stripes and all.



Hey, but I still have a kitchen! I don't have nearly as much time to bake and cook now, given that I have spent a staggering majority of the past month holed up in a corner of the (windowless) second floor of the med school library, and expect to continue this trend for much of the rest of the year.

However, de-stressing breaks are good for the soul. We just finished the first unit on Thursday, so I can relax just a little bit before jumping into the next unit on Tuesday. And you know what that means: Chinese takeout, hilarious Korean TV shows, a new YA novel, and baking.

Oh yeah, I've been fantasizing about my wild, wild weekend for a while now.

(By the by, Becca sent me the recipe for the Golden Grand Marnier Cake so I could share it here! Go check it out!)