Eric and Stephanie's Korean Adventure: Time is Flying

If the first three weeks are any indication of how fast this year is going to go by, it will feel like we are coming home tomorrow. Neither one of us can believe that we have already been here three weeks and started our fourth week of work today. Our apartment is set up just about the way we like it and starting to feel more like home and less like a hotel. We are starting to do much more cooking in our tiny kitchen and finding our way around the city seems almost easy now.

In other news, I think we are closer to President Obama than we ever been in our own country. We noticed lots of extra security everywhere we went yesterday with the Nuclear Summit taking place here this week. Obama also made the front page of the newspaper here with his binoculars looking into North Korea (we have read that tourists get beat or shot for doing that).

Since Eric woke up on Saturday with the cold I had a couple weeks ago I ended up venturing out on my own Saturday morning. This is a much bigger deal than going somewhere by myself back home! I was nervous about going out on my own without knowing how to ask for directions or even having a way to contact him to tell him if I got lost but like I said, getting around the city is almost easy now. So I took the subway to the Korean Folk Museum at Gyeongbokgung. It was an interesting place to learn about Korean life many centuries ago. Our Saturday night was spent at Dunkin Donuts eating donuts and grading the tests we had given on Friday. Sunday we went to one of the largest tourist attractions in Seoul, the N Seoul Tower. It is located on Mt. Namsan and is the tallest structure in Seoul. It is also located at the geographic center of Seoul and from the observation deck at the top you can see the entire city all the way around. Eric has been longing for some more Kolgi King (Meat King) so we went there for a dinner of pork, beef and duck Korean BBQ style (aka BBQ-ing at your table on the floor).

This will be a busy week at work for us as we have test scores to input and report cards to do for our elementary students. They do monthly report cards here instead of only two or three times a year. We will be writing a lot of report cards over the next 12 months! On Friday we are taking our kindergarteners on a field trip to a Chinese restaurant so they can supposedly practice manners. That should be interesting for some of my little ones...

We are in the process of putting all of the pictures we have taken on a Shutterfly page but with the poor internet connection we get at home and the limited time we have to sit at a computer at work it is taking a while. We are hoping by the end of the week we will have that up to date so you can see ALL of the pictures we have been taking if you would like.