America and Korea

I know not much has been happening on the blog lately because I guess there isn't much of anything new to report.  And also because I wasn't here for a bit.  Last week I was able to take a quick trip home to Washington which was great.  I was able to spend a lot of time with family and friends which was wonderful.  I was even able to go to the beach for a day where the weather was absolutely perfect!  Flying there and back by myself and not having Eric go with me was not as much fun, but I survived :)  (And he did a great job keeping the house in check while he worked all week and made sure there was a bouquet of flowers ready for me when I got home!) The worst part of the trip back and forth is adjusting back into the time zone.  I'm not sure how I managed to make it through work today after being awake for the better part of 36 hours but I did!  The weather was beautiful while I was at home. I don't think I quite realized how much I miss the blue sky, green trees and fresh air.  It was perfect.  We will definitely be ready to get home for good when the time comes, but we both know that the next ten months are going to fly by and we will be on one final long plane ride home to stay before we even know it.  We will for sure be making the most of the rest of this year in Korea!

A Seoul Spring Saturday

We had a beautiful spring day here yesterday and we spent nearly all of it outside with some friends.  We had planned to go to Children's Grand Park with some former coworkers but since it was such a nice spring Saturday the park was beyond packed and I don't think we could have even found a square of grass to sit on.  So instead we ate some dalkgalbi (spicy chicken) for lunch and spent a few hours walking around and catching up with our foreign and Korean friends.  We decided to head back and go for a walk through the park later in the evening shortly before it got dark which was a great time to go.  We were able to hear part of a concert and saw a neat fountain and light show.  It's also officially cherry blossom season so the park is filled with cherry blossoms as well.  We ended the day by walking (again) to our favorite buffet restaurant and eating way too much good food.  All in all it was a great Saturday with great weather, a lot of walking and good company.  We spent our Sunday in more relaxed fashion at home.  Even in spring a pot of applesauce in the crockpot sure smells good and Eric is cooking up some burgers for our dinner.  One more week of work for me and then I am headed home to America for a week on Saturday!  I'm very excited!!

Here are some spring pictures...

 Cherry blossoms and flowers are in full bloom!

 A fountain and light show in the park

We even saw baby ducklings for sale... so cute!!!

Seoul Museum of History

It's officially feeling like spring in Seoul!!  Although somedays are still only getting to 10 or 12 degrees C, it definitely feels like spring to us now!  However, spring in Seoul also brings the yellow dust, basically sand and dust particles that blow all the way into the city from the Gobi dessert areas in China and Mongolia.  This past week the yellow dust was especially bad, you could even see it and feel it while walking on the street.  Saturday it rained hard all day so that at least washed away the dust for the day.

I started teaching an extra after school this week for first and second graders.  It is only once a week and still during my regular work hours, but I'm actually quite thankful I have a little something extra to do since I currently have a little too much down time at work.  Plus the fact I get overtime pay for it is always a bonus too.  It looks like I will start teaching a class a couple times a month for some of the teachers as well.  This sounds like a bit of a challenge for me but I'm hopeful it will go okay and maybe I will even find some teachers who already know some English and I can have someone to talk with at work finally!

Today was pretty nice and sunny so we decided to head out into the middle of the city and go to a museum we had not been to before, the Seoul Museum of History.  This museum was all about the history of the nation's capital city from when it first started in the 1300s and was known as Hanyang, all the way up to the busy and bustling city it is today.  We found some of the recent history to be the most interesting, how Seoul went from being a poverty stricken shanty town after the Korean war (and even as far into the 1980s in some places) to the enormously populated, industrialized and tech-savvy city it is today in such a short time.  All of the history was very interesting though as it took you through the Joseon Dynasty, into the Japanese occupation of Korea until the end of World War II and through the Korean War and all of the hard work it took to rebuild and turn Seoul into the city that it is today in a relatively short amount of time.

Yesterday when I was walking through a subway station I noticed a rather large group of older Koreans all gathered around, standing and staring at a television.  For just a split second I thought, though I'm not sure why, maybe there was more news about something in North Korea.  No.  It was a soccer game.

This picture couldn't be more true.  No one is the slightest bit worried about any sort of conflict breaking out.  They have always talked and always will.  In the meantime we will continue to find a slight bit of humor in the American media reporting.

We will upload our pictures from the museum soon but here are just a few...

 They even had a 1:1500 scale model of Seoul today