Hi everyone - nice to be back to tell you about our week.

We did our voice recording work - we each (J and E) earned 30,000 won a little less than $30 for 30 minutes of work. Pretty good huh? It was intense for 30 minutes reading sentences - pausing - reading more - sometimes having to repeat sentences. They were pretty funny I had ones like
"You are so determined"
"Do not talk to me like that" (I seem to have had quite a bit of practice with this one)
"I'm sorry you have cancer"

John's were mostly about the weather he said one of his was
"This hot weather is perfect for making love." Or something along those lines. Pretty funny huh?

The rest of the week we have mostly been working on projects and shopping for John's birthday which was yesterday. We bought him some Korean style walking shorts and a shirt. Netta did a collage for him and Olive drew him a picture. Netta was very creative with the wrapping as we don't have any wrapping paper - it involved a big store bag and lots of plastic bags. She made a tag for the gift bag with nail polish as the media. Very creative and lovely.

We also attempted to make him a rice cake. I had seen one on a blog and found a youtube video that showed how to make it so Netta and I gave it a try while Olive was napping on Friday. We were missing some of the equipment but tried winging it anyways. Well it looked beautiful but tasted incredibly dry. The cake is steamed - not baked - but it did not work. We will try again with better equipment next time. It's tricky because is not so practical for us to buy lots of stuff as we know we will have to get rid of it when we leave. Oh well we will figure it out. If anyone is interested here is the link to the cake we tried to make http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/mujigae-ddeok

Netta was very disappointed about the cake and so we decided to buy one at one of the local bakeries. We have been ogling them since we arrived. That helped Netta get over the disappointment of the failed rice cake. We found a beautiful whipped cream and chocolate cake and brought it home. We didn't even mess with plates we all just grabbed spoons and dug in. It was really fun - we devoured the whole cake - oh my!!! There were some charming things that went along with the cake adventure. They packaged it up with birthday candles, a little package of matches, a plastic knife (not needed) and they even put some popper things on the outside of the box. Unfortunately these fell off and were lost before they made it home. Netta went back to look for them but only found one that had been used and the other one was gone. Oh well. The cake also had a tag on it that said "Please understand how I feels with my healty present". No those are not typos that is how it was spelled - I tried to take a photo but the writing is too small to catch. Just another example of the fine English we have found here. Good thing the cake was so yummy.

It was a good day and a good week.

John is rehearsing now (Sat) but hopefully we will have an adventure tomorrow to report on soon. I will post pictures of the cakes next.