Few more days before our vacation but instead of feeling relax and excited. I feel so stressed and running out of time. I have to eat all the food here before we left, my husband keep reminding me to eat the grapes in the fridge or else it is going to be thrown in the garbage, and it means no more grapes in the future as in we are not going to buy this fruit in the future. So today even though I don’t feel like eating grapes I have to eat, the grapes doesn’t look fresh anymore but they are still sweet and juicy.

We bought this grapes on sale in Lotte Super the last time we shopped my husband asked me if I am able to eat them before they turns bad, I said yes but few days had passed the grapes are still in the fridge.

Anyway aside from eating grapes my assignment for today is to cook soup because  the zucchini, cabbage and carrots in the fridge will be in bad state if we left them uncooked before our vacation. I have cooked the soup just so lucky that my husband helps me to eat it or else more food is going to spoiled. I still have one dozen of yoghurt in the fridge that needs to be eaten before our vacation, jezz I am going to gain weight that’s for sure.

Yesterday was Pepero day here in Korea like what I have said it is similar to Valentines Day where couples exchange pepero sticks or chocolates. My husband came home with premium chocolate sticks from one of his student and pepero’s.

Early in the morning today I went to Family Mart to buy Pepero because  he is craving for Pepero and  he asked me to treat him, so below was my treat to my husband I bought each type of pepero I saw in the convenient store.

And this is me with my Pepero loot a long pepero stick, my husband bought it from our favorite bakery in town.  Hmmm, my loot is not that much huh, unlike last year.

It’s not yet November but stores already displays a lot of loot for Pepero Day,  small and big pepero. I normally feel ashamed taking photos but this time I took my chance to take a snap and as what I am expected my husband walk away from me.  It looks like it is a crime to take photo ah, anyway he don’t like it when I always snap here and there, he always said I am embarrassing him.

Pepero Day is an observance in South Korea similar to Valentine’s Day. It is named after the Korean snack Pepero and held on November 11, since the date “11/11” resembles four sticks of Pepero. The holiday is observed mostly by young people and couples, who exchange Pepero sticks, other candies, and romantic gifts. Lotte denies starting the holiday and instead states that they noticed a bump in Pepero sales around November 11th and after continued popularity they decided to then encourage the holiday with special gift boxes and other promotions.Some consider it to be a contrived holiday and some teachers have encouraged children to exchange healthy snacks to help combat obesity. An alternative “Garaetteok Day” (sticks of white tteok) has been proposed.

I am the only one who drink coffee here so I mostly used three-in one coffee which is  common in every store. Drinking coffee is addictive but if you don’t know coffee is actually one of the healthiest beverages billions of people consume regularly.  According to what I have read:

• a coffee containing with bitter orange, hydroxycitric acid, and chromium can encourage an increase up to 30% in metabolic rate.
• Coffee with exercise when taking 300mg averages a 20% increase in energy and fatigue while burning fat increased 107% greater than without caffeine.
•  Caffeine in coffee keeps our brains alert and receptive of new information. • Regular consumption of coffee decreases the risk of type II diabetes and many other health risks.

If coffee has an advantages there’s also disadvantages:

• Coffee when consumed in excess can be addictive, stimulate, and a mood charger. • A large amount of coffee or caffeine consumed all at once can have a negative affect on blood sugar levels that influences fat burning that could change into storing fat. • Too much coffee over time can stain your teeth.

Read more here.

This is what I got when I went to Daiso the other week, together with my travel pouch. I bought this for my husband as he is using my coffee cup because I didn’t allow him to use the other cup  in our drawer as it is the souvenir from the gym in Seoul where he worked out.

Actually the cup the I am using for my coffee is also a souvenir because the gym owner gave him two cups, I am not going to use it but he said we have two, so when he wanted to use the second one I objected. So I bought him his own cup with saucer, just right for drinking tea.

He said thank you but he still ended up wanting my cup because he said it is bigger, so the end result the cup and saucer I bought for him still belongs to me.

Here’s the new kettle in our kitchen, we already had a electric kettle but we decided to buy this  one for our tea storage, so we don’t used this to boil water we just boil water in the electric one and pour the water here and drop the tea bag, doing it we save gas.

This kettle is cheap here for $14 and can fit 4 liters of water but we only used 2 liter for our tea time.

I am not really into flavored coffee, coffee and milk is already fine with me, so I seldom buy coffee on coffee shop.  Few nights ago we happened to stumble to Gs25 for late snack and I have seen this Starbucks Frappuccino (Mocha) and I remember I have these kind of drink last Chuseok when we are in Busan so believed it or not it is almost one year since I had this., haha..

So I asked my husband to treat me a drink in short I got these bottled cold coffee, I found the bottle cute so instead of putting it away on the recyclable bin in our house I keep it.

And I it is not a mistake keeping it as it serves as my bottle on our juice fasting,  here’s my first juice on our first day of our juice fasting (last Friday), it is a mixture of carrots, cabbage, ginger and etc., after drinking this juice it gives me weird feeling, my stomach feels upset it feels like there are rats running around looking for place to hide.

I was not able to started it fully that day because I have eaten the remaining rice as my lunch top with spaghetti sauce and  for dinner the songpyeon.

Yesterday my husband arrive with sets of Korean tea, from his co-teacher. We’ve been planning to drink a tea while we are on juice fasting but as we can’t read Hangul we don’t know which tea is caffeine free so my husband asked his co-teacher from the list he wrote if they are caffeine free or not.  After break time , his co-teacher gave him this treat below which she manage to buy while its break. Well it serves as her Chuseok gift to us him (Thanks Jade) just too bad we don’t have any gift for her but she said its okay, oh well maybe next time.

Chuseok  is a major harvest festival and a three-day holiday in Korea celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar. Like many other harvest festivals, it is held around the Autumn Equinox. As a celebration of the good harvest, Koreans visit their ancestral hometowns and share a feast of Korean traditional food such as songpyeon and rice wines such as sindoju and dongdongju.

I have eaten all this treats (Songpyeon) yesterday as my husband is already in juice fasting, I didn’t started yet as I still need to finish the rice but I drink juice in the morning and gives me a weird feeling.

Anyway Songpyeon is a traditional Korean food which is eaten during Chuseok. It is a crescent-shaped rice cake which is made from rice or non-glutinous rice powder. It is a variation of tteok, consisting of small rice cakes. They have become a popular symbol of traditional Korean culture.

As what I have mentioned on my health blog we are going to try juice fasting for one month and to begin with that we need a juicer. So tonight we went to appliance store (Samsung) near us to see if the juicer we ordered last weekend already arrived and it does.

A juicer is a tool for extracting juice from fruits, vegetables, or wheatgrass. This is known as juicing, the process of extracting juice from plant tissues such as fruit or vegetables.

The juicer mechanically separates juice from the solid part (pulp) of most fruits, vegetables, leafy greens, and herbs. The pulp is usually discarded, but can also be used in muffins and breads or composting.

So we tested our newly purchased juicer by juicing carrots and a small piece of ginger, we made 250ml of carrot juice. My photo above is less than the amount already because that’s my share of our sample.

Nothing new around me aside from wishing to lose weight, the other day my husband shop for our daily supplies as we run out of rice. He want to buy 10kg of rice as he don’t like carrying a big sack but when I found out that the 10kg of rice is same price of the 20kg I insist of buying it. He agreed in one condition I am going to be the one who will carry the rice without thinking I said yes despite that Kim’s Mart is quite far from our place, the money that we are going to save is the only thing matters to me.

After shopping for other stuff and paying into the counter, I asked him to put the rice on my head. Oh well, maybe he felt embarrassed to other people that he is the man and I am the one who will carry the rice he told me that he will carry it. So the result I carried three large bags and it took me forever to go home. Lol! I am just carrying less than 10kg what if I ended up carrying the 20kg of rice I might roll in the street just to go home. Silly me!