Bonus Post: Lucky Ladybird Recipe

So, after my post about the English festival, my friend @hobosinpolos asked for a recipe.

They're cute and fun, and I have all the step-by-step photos ready to go, so I thought "why not?"

First up, ingredients:

To make 2 ladybirds, you need

• 1 strawberry
• 1 black grape
• 2 crackers (I like using the Ritz kind for a bit of salt to balance out the sweet)
• a spread of your choice (I used choc spread and PB)

Basically, this thing has a lot of scope to be either really healthy or really unhealthy.

Healthy options could be using a cookie cutter to make circles of wholegrain bread, toasted instead of crackers, or to be fair a slice of anything round that fits into your healthy living ingredients, or really anything flat. A lettuce leaf would be very cute, right? For spreads, people seem to like pure peanut butter or other kinds of nut butter, but you could use a low fat cream cheese spread, cottage cheese, honey, anything that's kind of sticky and won't taste too weird with the fruit, or too runny to destroy the base.

If you want to go in the opposite direction as a tiny treat, you could put them on cupcakes, oreos, any kind of biscuit I guess. Put several of them walking around a bagel or a croissant, like I said they just have to be on something flat. You could swap the spreads for a thick jam or spread, or I suppose you could even use stiff whipping cream?! Waiter, there's a bug in my scone!

English Festival 2015

I can't remember if I've ever mentioned it before, but here in South Korea many schools and/or districts will hold an "English Festival" at least once a year. The intention is to let kids have an "English experience" for a day. It can be a very broad description depending on the organisers. 

A couple I've been to have taken contributors from many different schools in one district and is kind of like a talent show. Groups from each school put on a short performance, all in English (be it a skit, rendition of a book, or a song), or compete together as teams to solve problems like spelling bees, races, and general knowledge.

Others, like the one my school recently had, are for one school only. They focus on an intensive day of games similar to what we'd play at the end of a lesson, craft projects, English music, or cultural education.

It All Started With the BIGBANG

I'm gradually catching up, after figuring out why my phone wasn't syncing photos with my Google Drive. This was only a couple of weeks ago, BIGBANG's big comeback!

Big Bang (I'm never sure how you're supposed to write the name) were the first K-pop group I ever listened to, way back in secondary school, thanks to the Lollipop MV. Yay, colours!

I've already seen them once before, in London with Ann-Marie and it was EXCELLENT. So I was very excited for one in Seoul, which you'd expect to be EVEN MORE EXCELLENT.

Things that compounded this excellence include the fact that we finally got fanlights for this show, unlike the others we'd been to. It's something so small and seemingly inconsequential but actually it really changed the experience. I felt part of the masses of other fans, and helped me feel like less of a fraud considering there's very few parts of the songs I can sing, and I don't know any 'fan chants'.

The other aspect is that I had fan merchandise for this show. I haven't bought any at other shows because either the design was uninspiring, too expensive, or sold out. Wah. But I bought this shiny number at the London show which again made me feel more like I fit in. (I also bought a GD mug to show my undying allegiance.)

Songdo Wedding

Pre-wedding photo room for friends and family~

We were invited to a wedding! One of Nick's coworkers, and good friend, invited us and it was simultaneously exciting and a bit scary. We weren't really sure how everything worked, so I'm glad we went with another Korean friend to show us the ropes and walk us through it all.

Shameless selfies any time I put some effort in: Spring edition.

After getting photos with the bride, we gave in our gift money, wrote down our names in a very formal-looking book, then exchanged our lovely white envelope for a shiny coupon. It was interesting, to say the least. It made me feel better about not bringing a gift, or not knowing what to give like I've seen a lot of people stress over for weddings. But also felt a little bit odd?

The coupon let us get into the wedding dinner, which, contrarily to UK tradition, came before the ceremony. I'm assuming the coupon is to dissuade gatecrashers, haha.

The dinner was a huge buffet, with all sorts of lovely food. After a while we were told that traditionally, you should eat noodles of some kind at a wedding dinner! So I had a big bowl of noodles on top of all the other things I'd piled onto my plate. Oops!

Cherry Blossom Fever

Autumn is officially my favourite season, but spring is the one I've been most excited and eager to see this year. Not only has the winter been long, cold, and dreary, but Spring in South Korea has the streets full to bursting with my favourite flowers.

Cherry blossoms!

And various other blossoms because I've realised that I just shove any delicate, frilly, pastel spring blossom under the umbrella title "cherry blossom" regardless of what fruit the tree is actually destined to bear. Oops.

They were actually quite a nice surprise, considering one day the street outside my school was still a little chilly, and lined with bare trees. The next day, after a storm, they were covered in green buds and FLOWERS.

Needless to say, I couldn't stop taking pictures of them.

When we went to the 63 Building, we also walked through a lovely tree-lined street in a quiet part of Yeouido. I'd read that basically there's no point going to the Blossom Festival there, because there are more humans than flowers, which is saying something. But this street was very quiet, with only a handful of other people, and the occasional car passing by.