Because we haven't had a real Christmas in a few years - Korea and Laos were where we spent the last two - we decided on something a little more traditional to help ease off the homesickness. Christmas gear is a little challenging to find but I scored a tiny tree and some baubles, then bought a huge, huge tub of candy canes off Gmarket, Korea's Amazon.
I handed them out to my office buddies who smiled and said 'delicious!' with the dead eyes of people who clearly don't like what they're eating. It's okay, I have made that same face so many times (ginseng candy, ddeok, soondae) it felt good getting some sort of revenge.
We spent Christmas Eve drinking beer and eating lamb skewers at a Chinese restaurant in town and then hosted a feast on the day. As I had around 273 candy canes to use I busted a bunch of them up and made these which were delicious.
Tom was a cooking CHAMP and made roast chicken, roast pork (with crackling!), mashed potatoes, veggies, pavlova, and creme brulee to feed about 12 hungry homesick westerners. I made crumble and some rum punch because I'm lazy.
After a round of secret Santa, we set up the projector and watched Home Alone on the big screen/wall.
The following day we woke up, went to school and then came home to a problem.
We'd left our drinks out on the 'porch' because it was appropriately cold on Christmas Day, and overnight it froze. Our pipes also froze which left us without water for THREE DAYS. We ended up lugging our still-dirty Christmas dishes to a friend's house to make sure they weren't super revolting after we returned from Taiwan. And after three days of not showering, doing laundry and using our toilet we were ready to leave Korea for a bit.
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