We are very happy to welcome our baby girl to our family. In this video we show our time in the hospital and Yul meeting his little sister for the first time. I also show you all the food I ate in hospital as honestly, Korean hospital food is very good! Watch the video to find out her Korean and English name.
It’s been a hectic few months of adjusting to a newborn again but slowly starting to get some sort of routine now. I’m aiming to get a few hours a week to work so please expect more videos soon. Hugh has switched up his work schedule and is keen to create more content again. Later in the year I’ll be starting some more comics again about being a bilingual and intercultural family. Stay tuned!
I am now in my third trimester and currently as I’m writing this, I’m now as pregnant as I’ve ever been! Yul had just arrived at this point of my first pregnancy.
In this video I talk about a scare early on, all my awful symptoms, IVF and Seoul hospitals.
Usually these days we try to have both Korean and English subtitles embedded in the video but as this video is quite long it wasn’t possible. But next video will have!
Did you have to cancel your trip to Korea? Are you planning on traveling to Korea soon? My parents are looking forward to coming back to Korea maybe early next year. I hope this video is helpful when planning your trip. A big tourist attraction in this area is Gyeongbokgung Palace, which is actually a huge area to walk around. People hire hanboks to wear and walk around the palace, but all that walking is going to make you hungry.
It’s convenient to head to this street and find a restaurant to eat at. Locals also eat here and there is a big range of food that will be satisfying, especially after all that walking. Even living in Seoul, I wasn’t that aware of this food street, but now I know! One of the great things about doing these tourism videos is that we learn something too, and in this case, we got a chance to actually go out as a family.
In this video we head to our local markets to show you the type of food we often buy from there. One of the stalls was selling dalogna, which has become internationally popular recently because of the TV show ‘Squid Game’. While this show is definitely NOT FOR KIDS, it features children’s games in it. Dalgona is a honeycomb candy where children try to get the shape out without breaking the actual shape. It’s been around for several decades but popularity had dwindled in recent years. It’s now been very much revived and apparently there have been huge lines for it as young adults are keen to try it. We were lucky to find it locally without there being big lines.
You may have heard fruit and vegetable can be expensive in Korea, and while that can be true for big supermarkets or department stores, it’s usually decent prices at markets like this and sometimes can be very cheap. Food in general at markets tends to be cheap and it’s an easy way to put together a meal for at home with a variety of meat and seafood, as well as already prepared side dishes.
Hugh and Yul try out some different food in this video, as well as attempting the dalgona game. This is probably the most natural situation we have filmed that shows how Yul is bilingual. You may notice that he uses English when talking to both of us, he will use Korean when talking to Hugh directly and English when talking to me directly. When talking to both of us he may mix some Korean and English into one sentence and this is called “code mixing” and is normal at this age. This is different from “code switching” that bilingual adults use as this is more a part of bilingual development as he learns both languages, but even at this age he is well aware of which language a word belongs to.
Yul switches between languages easily and is a similar level in both. What he speaks is not “Konglish” as I’ve seen some people say, as Konglish means English words that have been absorbed into the Korean language but have changed somewhat in meaning. Konglish is also different from English loan words in Korean, which retain their original English meaning. Yul competently speaks both languages, knows when to switch and only code mixes when he knows that we will understand. There is a lot of myths about kids and bilingualism, one of them being that they are confused, but it’s really not true at all.
It’s been hard to make any content at the moment, for example comics are just too exhausting, but when we can film a bit I can edit it into little videos. In this video we are back in the countryside to visit Hugh’s parents for the Chuseok holiday.
It’s been about 2 years since we’ve been back there and we made sure Hugh’s parents were vaccinated so the risk was low for them. It was nice to be back, but also quite exhausting for me at this stage of my pregnancy. Hugh did get a chance to fly his drone though, which is near impossible to do in Seoul without special permission. The other reason why it’s been hard to make much content lately is because firstly, we are really not going anywhere due to the current situation of the world. And secondly, Hugh is very busy with his company, so even filming at home becomes a challenge.
That said, I am glad when we can do something as it’s great to be able to look back in years to come. The charye (ancestral memorial rites ceremony) is still done by Hugh’s family, but may eventually fade out as Hugh may be unlikely to continue the tradition. But I am always happy to be included in this element of Korean culture.
We also went to the Goseong Dinosaur Museum, which we have been to before, but Yul doesn’t remember. I suspected the actual museum would be closed but at least there are the outside attractions and the real dinosaur footprint fossils to see. Yul heard me mention “museum” and got really excited because he loves museums. At least he was satisfied with everything else, but would have been nice to actually go inside the museum. So many things catered to children like museums are immediately shut in these times while places for adults stay open. While it’s been hard for everyone, children have been so negatively affected during this pandemic. Hopefully next time it will be open, and in the meantime we try to book for the Natural History Museum in Seoul when we can. I definitely miss the days of deciding to go to a museum on that day and just showing up and being able to go in!
Now that Yul is almost four, I have a better understanding of why so few families live in the countryside and prefer urban areas. The Korean countryside is not really set up for young children, at least in this area. Korea is very mountainous, so it’s great for adults that want to hike, but it means all valley areas are usually farm lands. I don’t mean the western ideal of rolling hills and space type farmland. With not much space the areas are often taken up with green houses for growing produce, sides of the roads are all irrigation ditches and many things are dangerous to children. It’s not an idyllic lifestyle.
Yul couldn’t understand why there was no convenience store or park for children there. In order to go to a park we have to cross the bridge to the next town. The one time we went to a playground, he was disappointed that there were no other children there to play with. Countryside areas no longer having families living there is a big problem these days, but I can’t blame families for moving when so many rural areas don’t have the infrastructure for raising children. You would think a rural area would have more places for children to play, but there was less than what is easily accessible for us in Seoul.
That’s some of my thoughts and perspective after living in Seoul for years and then going back to a rural area with a child. Hugh’s parents will retire in years to come and want to live closer to the sea, so will move. I’m hoping a more seaside area will at least have more public access areas that our children can enjoy in years to come when they visit.
Yul’s English has been exploding lately. He is quite confident in both English and Korean. People often ask if he favours one over the other but he doesn’t really. He just chooses what is appropriate for the situation. When playing games by himself he just decides whether it’s an English game or a Korean game and will talk to himself in that language.
However, because we live in Korea and he has a lot of exposure to other kids speaking Korean, there are some words he prefers to say in Korean, even when it’s in an English sentence. He knows the word in English too, and he knows I know what it means, so he will decide to use the Korean word instead of the English word. In this video we talk about which words they are!
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