✒️A tiny home🏡 and questions from friends

Now we've moved from my grandma's apartment to a small studio apartment on the fourth floor of a building called the Cube Tower. The room is called an officetel. It is one big room that is living room, kitchen, office, and bedroom for all of us! We fold up our beds every morning and put them in a big cupboard. There is also a bathroom.

There is a little divider bookshelf that almost splits the room in half.

The walls are mostly cupboards for storage.

Here are answers to questions my Wade King 4th grade friends in Bellingham sent me:

         Thursday, February 26th, 2015
Hello, everyone! I hope you're having a good time. I wrote down all the questions you asked me so I can answer them all as best I can. 

           LIVING IN KOREA~ I like living in Korea so far, and it it's fun. Most of the time, we walk, or ride the bus or subway.

           SCHOOL~ for everyone who asked about school, I have no idea about most of it. School starts later and ends later. For me it is 9:00-1:50 three days a week and 9:00-2:40 the other two. School hasn't started yet, so I don't know much about it. 

  I do know that the playground is mostly just an enormous sandy field with monkey bars, a jungle gym, a row of bars for climbing and doing tricks on in one corner, and a bunch of lines for track racing and a pair of soccer goals for playing soccer. 

The picture above is from the school's website. The trees aren't actually green right now, because it's winter.

  I also know from past experience that everyone has a pair of slippers (like indoor shoes, not fuzzy bedtime slippers) to wear inside the classrooms.  

  When I went to the school to take a test, I counted floors. The school has 4 stories, and in most buildings the 4th floor is marked 'F' because the Chinese word for  the number 4 sounds like the word for death.

The elevator buttons in our officetel.

           WHAT I'M DOING ~ today I am starting piano lessons. Most kids do so many after school activities that they barely have time to play. I will also be doing art (Japanese anime drawings), swimming, and ukulele lessons.

My piano class.

Examples of chibi manga characters from my sister's learn to draw manga book.

           FRIENDS ~At the place where I will be doing piano lessons, there is a girl who is 1 grade above me. She speaks really good English, and is from California. This is her 2nd year in Korea. I think that we will be friends, and she even goes to piano at about the same time as me! I also met two 4th grade girls who talked with me and one girl showed me a song on her phone. The song kept not working, but we fixed it in the end. One of the girls is going to be in the same 4th grade classroom as me!

           LEARNING KOREAN ~ it isn't too hard for me here, but since this is a new culture, and the last time I was here I was in first grade, I don't know a lot of things. My mom speaks Korean to me at home, and now we check out Korean books from the library that we have to finish before we can choose more English books. 

         FLIGHT ~ on the airplane there was a game thing on the back of the seat in front. You can choose to do things at 'Asiana Littles', 'Movies', 'entertainment', or 'kids'. If you go to Kids, you can choose videos (little kids movies), games, or movies. I watched Wreck it Ralph last time. It also had Rio 2, the Box Trolls, Big Hero 6, the Princess and the Frog, and the Pirate fairy. On games, there was a matching game, a Disney character game that kept crashing the whole thing, Zuma, pac-man, and a game where you picked a section for mini games (like one where you had to move a cat on an island so it catches fish, apples, etc. but avoids anchors. My favorite is the only one I'm any good at: when you click on a spot, it shoots skewers to catch gummy bears). At one point in the flight, lots of lights turned off and everyone either slept or watched movies. I turned on my light and drew a picture of a mechanical girl fixing a machine.

          WEATHER ~ The weather is pretty good. The first week was colder. It snowed on and off for two days, but it melted when it reached the ground.  Now it's starting to get warmer. A few days ago, there was something called '황 사' ( huang sa ). You might recognize the huang part from the word yellow in Mandarin Chinese: huang se. It is called the yellow sand in English. 황사 is what happens when the wind blows in a certain direction and the wind carries dust and sand from Inner Mongolia and the Gobi desert. When this happens  the air may look hazy and people wear masks and don't go outside a lot.

Siri thinks tomorrow is going to be too cold...

           FOOD~ I refuse to eat anything spicy so I've been having sort of a hard time finding food that I like, besides tonkatsu (Japanese style pork cutlet) and duk (Korean rice 'cakes'). After we moved in to our little apartment, things have been better because my dad brought things to make food like what we have in America. You'd be amazed at how much I felt at home after a few meals of Indian food!

           SPORTS~ pretty much the same as in America, but with less football and more ice-skating and swimming. People also love to hike. Korea has lots of mountains.

My cousin MinSeo at speed skating lessons.

Hiking on the mountain.

           FAVORITE THINGS: 
                                 - favorite place~ The LIBRARY in a little indent in the wall by the English book section where I can read Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and Geronimo Stilton. At our little apartment in my little corner.

                                 - favorite Korean food~ duk: It's a delicious rice cake thing. Some  of the time it has a sweet honey or bean paste filling. Here we are making some with my grandma.

                                 - favorite things to do~ draw and practice my aiming on my mini bow I made from a Q-tip. I'm currently trying to make a chibi manga comic book. Manga is a Japanese style of art and chibi is a type of manga that is super simple and adorable.

          HOUSE WHERE I LIVE~ see above.
          And, no Christian T, I DID NOT TRY THE SQUID~

                                                                                             Ella