back to the old house (again).

i'm still blogging at third and fairfax, but i've actually left the big city, and went to another big city :) i did spend some time in the province, though, as i hadn't been since...well, since the last time i blogged about it. i am constantly surprised with how much the province has developed in the last few years, but remain delighted that life in our little town pretty much remains the same.

our families in the province do not have very big refrigerators nor freezers; almost everything is bought fresh from the markets for cooking that day. whenever we need ice, we have to go to the ice house in the center of town--thankfully for my cousin minky, it is a very short bike ride away. it is a small, open-fronted shop (without electricity) lined in galvanized steel, with giant blocks of ice covered in rice hulls for insulation, stacked on the floor. the blocks are hand-sawn down to these manageable blocks to take home, where we further chisel them down with an ice pick into jagged rocks to cool off our drinks. i know they are essentially the same as premade ice cubes, but somehow the quartz-like chunks do seem to make our drinks taste better than the ones that required so little effort.