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....