Ice Gallery

Today we went on an adventure to the "Ice Gallery."  It was an art gallery but all of the art was made up of ice sculptures.  They had a lot of rooms and buildings carved out of ice.  The best part, according to Eric, is that the whole place is kept at -5 degrees Celsius.  They had coats you could put on before going in, which I gladly did (Eric took his off part of the way through).  Then you just walked around and looked at the art and we took pictures of course. It was actually pretty neat (and refreshing from the heat we have had lately)!

The miserable heat wave we have had seems to be over for the most part.  Seoul experienced the most consecutive days of 35 degrees Celsius (or more) temperatures since 1994 over the past two weeks or so.  Between the heat, the humidity, and the stagnate air it was pretty awful.  People were dying and being hospitalized so the news was telling people to not go out if you didn't have to.  Fortunately it seems like it will be a bit cooler this week and hopefully for the rest of the time we are here!  It was very rainy (and humid) today.

Also a few other things happened this week:  We had our first wedding anniversary so we went out to dinner at a nice Italian place at the Walkerhill Hotel, Pizza Hill, and it was even on top of a hill with a pretty nice view.  Walkerhill is also where the largest casino in Korea is, so we stopped to check that out too (no we didn't win anything).  We tried out some of the "100 won" (about one cent) slot machines where you could actually pull the handle to make it work.  It didn't spit out coins if you won though so it wasn't all that cool.  Eric tried his hand at Roulette too.  It was pretty amazing to see the kind of money people were spending (and losing) on a game that seemed to be 100% luck!  Eric looked kind of funny with his four chips worth about $10 while the other two guys at his table had at least hundreds of dollars worth of chips.  I will say every single person in the casino was dressed very nice and it seemed to be a pretty upscale place, a bit different than what I have seen of La Center!

I also got another student in my kindergarten class, Johnny.  Now I have nine students and eight chairs in my classroom.  It is starting to feel a bit crowded and I am hoping I will either get a different classroom or another teacher to split the class soon.   

On Saturday we went to the western-food-only restaurant Travelers with the two new teachers that are currently working at our school's other campus.  We also got ourselves a water filter pitcher so now we can finally have water that is not only clean but also tastes good!  No more buying bottled water all the time or drinking the bad tasting water from the tap!

 Pronounced a little differently but pretty much the same name in Korean

 Notice the shorts and flip flops and no coat...

 Pororo is that penguin on top of the igloo.  I'm going to show this to my kindergartners tomorrow and tell them I went to Pororo's house.  They are obsessed with Pororo!