Summer Vacation!!

Our work week has finally ended.  It felt like the longest of the 21 weeks we have been here which I guess means we are very ready for our vacation.  Our school has a one week summer vacation next week and we cannot wait to leave for Thailand in the morning!  We will be staying at a resort on Mai Khao Beach in Phuket.  We are so excited to spend the week before our first anniversary relaxing on the beach, doing a bit of sightseeing in Phuket Town and seeing our second Asian country.

After getting all packed and ready to go, Melanie and I went to see Gyeonghuigung Palace today.  This was the third of the five palaces in Seoul that I had been too and it looked just about the same as the other two.  It was a bit smaller than the others I had seen and there was virtually no one there which meant there were no people in our pictures either!

We will have an early morning tomorrow since it takes us over an hour to get to the airport on the subway.  But by this time tomorrow night we will have landed and be making our way to a relaxing week on the beach!  We will have a report of our trip and I'm sure many pictures to share next weekend!

 The outside gate of the palace

The main building of the palace where the king's throne was

Summer Session

We are two days into the "Summer Intensive Program" now.  Since the elementary students are on summer vacation for four weeks our school offers an extra morning session for the elementary students (just how every kid wants to spend their summer vacation right?).  So we have elementary and kindergarten students in the morning and then keep the usual schedule of elementary students in the afternoon.  Because of this our teaching schedule in the morning will look different for the next few weeks.  We have to be at work a little bit earlier than normal and start teaching our elementary classes right at 10:00.  I only have two students in my elementary class and Eric has five.  We alternate between our elementary class and our kindergarten class in forty minute blocks until lunch time.  It breaks up the morning more but I think I would rather spend the whole time with my kinders (especially since the other teacher is not having them do anything while I'm not there!!).  While one of the books that I use is a basic English language/grammar book, the other book I am using is a science book (intended specifically for ELL students).  It's kind of fun to teach something other than English for a few minutes!  Eric on the other hand has to teach from four books in two forty minute sessions.  This means his students are getting a lot of homework!  But he enjoys having the morning split up to make it go by faster.  We will take anything that helps make the week go by faster.  Only three more days of work and one day of packing before we get to celebrate our first anniversary a week early on the beaches of the Andaman Sea in Phuket, Thailand!!!

Another Weekend

We had another fairly relaxed weekend since the weather was always either hot/humid or hot/humid/rainy, making sightseeing less desirable.  We did however do a few things:  We took the new teacher, Melanie, out for her first Korean BBQ experience at Kolgi King on Friday night and on Saturday we went to the much anticipated (by Eric) Dark Knight Rises movie.  I'm pretty sure Batman is just as popular with Koreans as it is back home.  I went to get tickets for four of us (since you have to reserve a seat when you buy your ticket) right when they opened on Saturday morning and it was no easy task.  The movie was playing every half hour for the whole day and there were only a handful of shows that still had four tickets left, of course none with four seats together.  We were able to get two and two (in the front two rows) though.  Sitting in the front of a movie theater here is kind of a perk.  For one there is still a lot of room between the front row and the screen so you do not have to look straight up the whole time like you do back home.  AND they have foot rests so you can put your feet up and sit back in the Cinetopia like chairs and enjoy the movie.  Anyway, after the movie we also took Melanie out for her first Costco experience.  As always it was insanely busy but an adventure.  Today I decided to take a walk down by the river to some gorgeous flowers I had seen while riding my bike to the movie theater yesterday.  While I thought I picked a good time inbetween monsoons, I was wrong.  The monsoon came back shortly after I started.  Fortunately, I kept going and it didn't last too long.  By the time I got to the flowers it had stopped and I got a lot of pictures of the flowers.  Meanwhile I have spent most of the afternoon having fun editing them while Eric makes taquitos for dinner (very yummy!).  Tomorrow our work schedule changes a bit since the elementary kids have started their four week summer vacation and our hagwon offers an intensive program during this time for them.  Stay tuned to hear how that goes.  Also, check out all of the flower pictures on Shutterfly!  Unfortunately I had to reduce the quality on most of them to stay under the maximum file size Shutterfly lets me upload.  Here are a couple samples...

Hooray for a new bed!

The last couple of weeks we have realized just how bad our backs hurt from sleeping on what is essentially two box-spring-without-the-mattress twin beds for four months.  We knew we needed to get serious about figuring out something different.  Fortunately it didn't take long.  The same resell store that we bought our TV from also had beds for sale and we got a great deal on a memory foam mattress/frame/headboard set that was delivered today!  We propped both old beds up against a different wall early this afternoon to make room for our new bed. They were supposed to deliver it around 3:00 and didn't actually get here until 7:00 but now that we're sitting on our new bed we don't even care that we spent four hours sitting on the floor (since the table chairs were being used as a drying rack for a comforter) waiting for them to come.  We were hoping they would take away both of the old beds but when they looked at them they said no because they couldn't use them.  They did take them downstairs for us though.  In order to throw away furniture here you have to go to the local office and pay for a piece of paper to put on the furniture.  Once it has the piece of paper someone will come pick it up and get rid of it.  We will have to deal with that next week.  Tonight we are just thankful for a new bed that will hopefully be much more comfortable than our old ones! 

Also this weekend we have had the opportunity to show a new teacher around.  She arrived on Thursday night and after work Friday we took her out to dinner and showed her the neighborhood a bit.  This morning I showed her where the grocery store is and a few other things and tomorrow will show her how the subway works since she will be taking it to work at the other campus our school has.  After all the help we received right when we got here (and are still getting) we want to do as much as we can to help someone else learn their way around.

Our new bed!! It doesn't even take up as much room as our two twin beds!

Swimming Pool Field Trip

We took the kindergartners to an indoor swimming pool today for our monthly field trip.  Both kids and teachers alike had a blast.  Many of the kids brought tubes to float on and seemed to love being in the water.  Field trips to swimming pools always make me nervous but after a few successful ones with my 20+ daycare kids last summer and another successful one today with eight 3-5 year olds I think they're getting easier.  Eric Teacher wasn't planning on going very deep in the water but of course the kids changed that with their splashing and jumping on him very quickly!  After going back to school and having lunch many of the kids fell asleep after what we would call a very successful time at the pool! 

 Emily, Elizabeth and Kate

 Elizabeth wanted to swim by herself but she was too little to stand even in the shallowest part so I had to help her

David trying to catch Eric Teacher

We got A LOT of cute pictures from the pool today so check them out on Shutterfly!

Day Trip to Incheon

On Saturday we went to Lotte Department Store because I still have a gift certificate one of  my students gave me on Teacher's Day.  However, it didn't take me long to realize I wasn't going to find anything affordable even with a gift certificate in a store that makes Nordstrom's look more like Target.  Luckily the gift certificate can also be used for groceries at Lotte Mart so I think I'll take the cash to Namdaemun instead!  Speaking of Lotte Mart we went there yesterday too and saw Elizabeth (my kindergarten student) with her mom!  She seemed shocked to see us at first but then got very excited.  This isn't the first time we have run into students outside of work, especially at the stores close to home.  Now on to our adventure of the weekend...
We decided we wanted to take a trip into Incheon this weekend and try to go to the beach.  Since we live about as far east in Seoul as you can get and Incheon is outside of Seoul all the way to the west it was quite a long ride on the subway.  Fortunately the subway wasn't overly busy today so we were able to get seats pretty much the whole way!  After about an hour and a half on the subway we arrived at Incheon International Airport where we were supposed to be able to take a bus to the beach.  We found the bus that clearly said "Eulwangni Beach" on it in both Korean and English so assumed that was the right one.  But like a few of our other adventures it didn't turn out quite as we planned.  We rode on the bus for quite a while, never coming to a stop that looked like it could be close to the beach so we just kept riding.  Finally when we were the only ones on the bus I guess we got to the end of the route because the driver turned around to look at us and said "goodbye" in Korean.  We assumed that was his way of saying "this is the last stop so get off" so we did.  We still saw nothing that looked like it would lead to the beach but we were right in front of Chinatown so we decided to walk through there instead.  It was filled with many Chinese restaurants and little shops selling Chinese things.  There was a nice park nearby where we could see the Korea-USA Bicentennial Monument and a statue of General MacArthur.  We decided to board another bus that would take us to the Wolmido Boardwalk where we could at least see the sea even if we couldn't be on the beach.  There were some carnival rides and a lot of restaurants up and down the boardwalk.  However, not feeling much like having sliced raw fish for dinner we got on a bus that would take us back to the airport.  For some reason we found walking around the very large air conditioned airport rather entertaining and a good place for people watching.  It was also nice to figure out exactly where we need to go when we leave for Thailand in exactly three weeks!  We even had dinner at the airport too before boarding the subway for the trip home.  Not quite the day we had planned but fun all the same.  It was actually really nice to just sit and see the scenery from the subway (since most of it was above ground once we got out of Seoul) and the bus.  Incheon is still a bustling city but not like Seoul.  It's also a big port town so the scenery was quite different than what we see here and the sky was SO blue.  Although the sky was fairly blue in Seoul yesterday, it is normally pretty hazy and appears cloudy most of the time. 

 Korea-USA Bicentennial Monument.  The sky was so blue in Incheon!

 General MacArthur

On the Wolmido Boardwalk

Summer Thunder

We saw (and heard) our first impressive Korean thunderstorm this afternoon at work.  I'm pretty sure it was strong enough to shake the whole building a few times!  Or at least make the windows rattle good!  It looks like there could be more of it tomorrow and Thursday too.  Eric even got a short video showing the rain/wind/lightning/thunder (aka summer in Korea).

An Outing to Namdaemun

Well it stopped raining yesterday, earlier than it was supposed and even giving us time for a nighttime bike ride along the river last night.  Today we decided to check out Namdaemun Market to see if we could find any good deals on anything.  We went to Namdaemun shortly after we first got here and got a good deal on a couple nice backpacks.  Namdaemun is where you can find a lot of knockoff brands or fake brands for cheap (though the price for foreigners is often higher than for Koreans).  Today we wanted to look at wallets and there were sure plenty to choose from.  After a bit of walking we found a man with a big mound of wallets without much organization or orderly display so knew his prices would be quite cheap compared to the tables with a very orderly display.  Not only was the price great (10,000 won, less than $10), but the guy charged us the same price as he was charging the Koreans.  We don't expect them to last us too long but are excited by our find all the same.  Eric is still on the hunt for a fake Rolex or other watch and I have decided that I will probably need a fake Coach purse before we go home.  I thought I would just find out how much one cost when I walked by one today.  The man told me and I said okay and turned to keep walking, as I did the man quickly lowered the price by 5000 won.  I told him no, it's okay I was just looking and kept walking.  He followed me (with the purse) and continued to lower the price by 5000 won.  I guess maybe I should have gone ahead and bought one today with the price getting so low!  Or maybe I at least learned a strategy for bargaining!  Here are a few pictures from Namdaemun...

 Checking out some shoes

 Namdaemun Market

 Thinking I will need one before we leave :)

Our find for the day: 2 cheap wallets :)