August 29

I'm sorry that I haven't posted in a few weeks. I always post on Sundays, and I haven't been home at all the last two Sundays. Work has been time as usual. We has a field trip on Friday that ended up being quite a dud. We went to Seoul Children's Park, which has a small zoo, a play area and I guess a bunch of other stuff. Our bus drivers didn't know how to get there, so we ended up getting there way later than expected, after driving in circles. We missed the puppet show that we were going to watch, but went to see an animal show instead. The show was great, and the kids loved it. The problem was that it was a little long. By the time it finished, we only had 20 minutes to see the rest of the park. We got to walk by the elephants, lions and tigers, and then had to go back to the bus. We ended up being at the park for a total of about an hour, and on the bus for over 2 hours. The poor kids didn't understand why we couldn't go into all the other places that we had to rush by to get to the bus.

Some of my favorite quotes from the past few weeks:

"I think I am just a little bit insane." (This was completely random, out of the blue)

"One time my dad went and talked to the police, and when he came back he wasn't allwed to use his car for a week."

"A frame is a picture's house"

We learned about different kinds of sentences in grammar class. On one assignment, I gave them a type of sentence, and a person. They had to write that type of sentence that the person might say. Here are just a few:

(Exclamation, Father) "Yeah! I'm staying home with my daughter!"

"Oh no, my bread is done!"

(Command, Grandfather) "Don't run and don't cry."

(Command, Boss) (This came after spending a good amount of time explaining what a boss is, mostly by using the director of the school as my boss as an example.) "Drive me to the airport."

"Don't give the students any homework today."

"Teach the children what boos means."

These picture were taken on Halasan in Jeju. The trail that I took down kind of followed this stream for a few kilometers. Every turn the path took produced yet another beautiful, peaceful view. Every time the stream showed up again, I couldn't help but think "Oh, it looks just like something Bruce would make." I realize that in reality, it's the other way around. Bruce makes stuff that looks just like nature. Just the fact that I had that thought so often is a testiment to how talented Bruce is at what he does. The other picture is the top of the mountain, which is currently a dormant volcano.

For now I am getting prepared for my trip to Nepal. I still don't know exactly what we will be doing. Our team is preparing skits and stories to show the villages that we visit. We will be sleeping on the dirt floors of villager's homes. We will be bringing basic medical packs, and doing first aid. The places that we are going don't have schools or any medical posts. You can only get to them by hiking. There are six of us going. Other than that, I don't really know much about the trip. I am super excited. I leave in three weeks!

This week was a crazy week at school. We had five new teachers start on Monday. None of them had any orientation period. They all just had to jump into teaching right away. On Wednesday, one of the new teachers didn't show up for work in the morning. He didn't have a cell phone yet, and wasn't answering his home phone. We had to cover his classes for him. Meanwhile, someone from the school went to his apartment to try to find him. They found a note that said that he had gone back to America. I guess that happens every once in a while, but it had never happened at my school before. Now we don't have a teacher for his class, and the parents are un an uproar. We are in a scramble to find a new teacher, but the whole process of hiring a teacher takes a lot of time. Personally, I couldn't believe that anyone could be as irresponsible and inconsiderate. It's guys like him that give English teachers a bad reputation here.

More about my vacation:

My five day vacation started with a train ride to Busan. I took the KTX, which is a bullet train. I thought that it would be kind of cool, but the truth is that you don't feel like your going any faster in a bullet train than you do in the subway. It doesn't even looke like the land is going by that fast. The trip took a little less than three hours. Busan is on the South-east coast of Korea. When I got out of the station, the first thing that I saw was this fountain. It was really cool. I took my stuff to the hostel, and decided to go for a walk to explore the area.
I ended up going to Igidae Park, which is just a long strip of rocky coast between a mountain and the sea. You can walk for kilometers along the rocks, and it was absolutely beautiful. I hadn't been to the sea since I had gotten to Korea, so seeing it was amazing. The park is on a small peninsula that used to be some military post or something until just a few years ago, so even though it is an amazing place to go, the government refuses to advertise it at all. There were very few people there, and I only saw a few foreigners. The only downfall was that I hadn't expected to do any hiking-like activities, so I

ended up walking for about 5 hours along these rocks in my flip-flops. Needless to say, my feet were hurting a little by the time I got back that night. The next morning I went over

towards the most popular beach in Busan. I didn't want to actually go to the beach, because it was so rediculously crowded and touristy. Instead I went to the APEC House, which I guess they held some confrence for worldwide leaders at in 2005. It is a cool building on a great little island. I guess that after the confrence, they just turned the building into kind of a museum and it hasn't been used for anything else. APEC was close enough to Hyeundae Beach that I ended up going anyway and just walking along the water's edge. The water fealt great, but there were so many people that there was no chance that I was actually going to attempt to find a place to sit and go swimming. That afternoon I got on a flight to Jeju! More about Jeju to come....

Summer Vacation!

I have had an amazing week. We get one week off for summer, and I have definately made the most of it. I spent five days traveling around Korea, most of which were spent on Jeju, which is a volcanic island south of the mainland. The last three days I spent with my mom and aunt Viv here. I'm not very good at giving short overviews of things, so I will save pictures and details from my travels for later blogs, and just tell you about Mom and Viv's visit today.

I met mom and Viv at the airport on Thursday. I was coming back into Seoul at about the same time as they were. We went back near my place and checked into the hotel. Then I brought them to a local outdoor market. It is a place that most tourists don't go, and I think that they enjoyed it. They saw lots of things that they didn't even know what they were, and saw the "down and dirty" side of Korea.

On Friday we got to Explore some places around Seoul. The first thing we went to was North Seoul Tower. The tower is like a little space needle type building that is on top of a small mountain in the middle of the city. It was extremely hot and humid, and getting there was quite an achievement, but it was worth it. There were some guys doing some changing of the guards type thing that we got to see. At the base of the tower, all the fences are covered with little locks that people put on. I have no idea why it started, but there have to be millions of locks that have been added over the years.

Our next stop was Gyeongbok Palace, which is just like every other palace in Seoul, and I guess just like all the ones that Mom and Viv saw in China. There are mostly just a lot of buildings that all look like eachother, and are furnished about the same too. One of the buildings was kind of in the middle of a pond, so that was kind of cool. Again, it was really hot, so the break that we took to have slushies was really refreshing, and allowed us to keep our energy up. After the palace, we went to Insadong to do some souvenier shopping. By the end of the day, we were pretty beat, and ready to rest at home.

On Saturday we spent most of the day touring the DMZ (DeMilitarization Zone) on the boarder of North and South Korea. We went on the same tour that I blogged about before. We started at the Joint Security Area, which is supposed to be controlled by both sides, but now is divided down the middle, with each side patrolling thier own part. On the South Korean side, 95% of the soldiers are ROK (Republic of Korea) military, and 5% US military. The JSA is the best part of the tour. It was kind of a hazy day, so we couldn't see too far into North Korea, but we could see a little. We also got to see a tunnel that North Korea dug to try to suprise attack Seoul, and the commuter train station right on the boarder that will be the Northermost station on the railroad line once the two Koreas reunite.

After the DMZ, we saw a live show in Seoul called Nanta. It was a non-verbal show that was based around master chefs preparing for a wedding. It was mostly a rhythmic/music type of show using "instruments" found around the kitchen (similar to Stomp), but included comedy, martial arts, audience participation, a little magic, and a token love story. It was an amazing show that was fun start to stop. I would go see it again in a heartbeat.

We had Sunday morning to just go for a walk, and sit down and talk in a nice air conditioned mall. It was so nice to have family here, and it was hard to have them leave. I think that they were ready to go though, because they had already done a long tour of China before they came here. I still haven't really grasped the idea that I will have to be back at work again tomorrow.

Even though I haven't been teaching for the last week, I have some favorite student quotes to share from before the vacation. My students were learning about family in Social studies. They were given a writing assignment to tell about how they are the same and different from their dad. Here are some of my favorite responses:

"We both don't like poison."

"My dad sleeps with loud sounds and I don't do that."

"I am sad when my mom is ill, and my dad is sad when my mom is ill."

"What makes my dad sad is when he cannot se me and what makes me sad is when I can'ts see him"

"My dad and I are the same because when I wear pants, my dad wears pants too." (written by a girl)