Birthday fun

Celebrating with my Korean friends from the left:
Jang (dont know the next two people) Taehyun, me, JB, Hanmie, Kevin, and Sung-o

I not only turned 30 this year I got to do it in Korea! How many people can say that! Pretty cool already :)

Birthday day 1:
I showed up to school (with my tiara that came in the care package...hand made of course) and Mark had all the kids bring me cards and some of them had little "presents" they made. It was so sweet. They all said one nice thing about me (which because of the crown most said Miss Pupper is a queen) Then we celebrated Sung Min's birthday because I share my birthday with my student. His mom had brought lots of treats, enough for both mine and Marks class. It was fun. About mid day security comes to my room to deliver a HUGE bouquet of flowers...From my mom and dad!!!! So unexpected and wonderful. Then a few minutes later the office staff Jenny, Unna, Hyeji, and JB comes in singing with a cake for me. The staff is so wonderful!
At the end of the day a few of the staff took me out to eat. Mama and papa bear, Gigi, Joy and Chris, Vanessa and Rob, Mark, Karen, Sunghwa, Brie and Jordan made it out. It was really nice. From there some of us walked to Cafe de Moim for a party. Simo, the music teacher for my kids, shares the 15th of october as well. We had a joint party at the cafe with dancing and live music. Almost all of the Chadwick staff showed up and many played instruments and sang at the open Mic. It was so much fun. (I don't have the pictures from this event yet...but I will get them when I can)

Day 2: Saturday (still my birthday because it was the 15th in the US ha ha) Brie took me out to lunch for my favorite Kimchi jigae. Then Joy and I met Hanmie, one of the security staff, for a night out. We ate dinner with Hanmie and Jung, then played pool. Hanmie kept disappearing from the pool place and we couldn't figure out why. They took me next door to the nooribong room and it was all decorated with balloons, candles and a cake....that is where Hanmie had been :) My Korean friends (and joy) celebrated there. It was SO fun, we laughed, danced and sang.

My First CARE PACKAGE!!!

I love you all! This is the best! I'm so excited to look through all the books and the notebooks my mom sent. I got skin stuff and peanut butter haha :) I got Peets Coffee (decaf? Whatever it's Peets!!) There are an array of teaching books! I have a LOT of reading to do. I'm so happy to have them! I got Coffee Creamer!! I Can't wait to have Peets Coffee with Creamer tomorrow! No more of this skim milk thing ha ha.

Best of all I got star shaped glasses and a wonderful card signed by caring people! You are all amazing and you made my week to have this all put together!

(By the way this is titled "First Care Package" in hopes there will be more...because this is fun! :) ha ha)

안녕하세요

For those of you who don't speak Korean that says "annyeonghaseyo" and means hello! I am officially enrolled in Korean language classes. I have had 3 classes so far. it is a college course at the university of Incheon in Songdo. I love it so far. Korean is not an easy language but learning the characters and sounds has already helped me with my teaching.
I can now relate the sounds they use to the sounds we use so they can learn English better. My students are excited to help me learn Korean and think it is funny that I am studying letters and sounds just like them :)

I will keep you posted on how it works out ha ha :)

Back to the real world

So photos of Jeju have been posted on flickr. I had an amazing time. We finished our trip with a couple museums, visit to Jeju City and a day at the beach. We did so much in a week. I'm glad we came back Saturday so we have one day to recover and one to make sure we are ready for work on Monday haha!

In other news the weather has changed. Today was the first day I could put away the A.C. remote and open all my windows. It is so nice to have fresh air running through the apartment!

Jeju day 4

So day 4 we woke to a much more relaxed scene. Brie and I were so sore from the hike we took it easy in the morning. Wednesday was the Korean holiday of Chuseok. Koreans travel to where their ancestors are from to pay their respects. Everything is of course closed down so we had to limit our travel. We got a bus near this beach and hiked (again) all around this volcanic beach. Jo attempted to float away on a piece of fence she found on the beach. She was only mildly successful. We went up this one hill to a smoke fort where the Koreans used to send up smoke signals when they were being attacked. It was a great view (although my legs thought otherwise!)

We then walked to a temple across the street with a huge gold Buddha in it. There were beautiful buildings there and we went inside one of the temples. It was a bit of a flashback to India. We walked up (far to many) stairs to this cave at the top where there was another alter.

We tried catching the bus back or a cab but on Chuseok it was difficult. We called our hostel host and she tried getting us a cab but no luck. Eventually she called us back to say she found a neighbor who would pick us up in his truck. She came with Tamna her dog and we hopped in the back of the truck with them and had a very chilly ride home.

When we were back we had planned to cook a Chuseok feast. So we got going and we actually made a great team and prepped and cooked in no time. We had marinated beef, marinated chicken, salad, sweet potatoes, zucchini and tofu, and kimchi. We had so much food we invited everyone from the hostel to eat with us. It was awesome we got everyone out of their rooms sitting on the floor eating and drinking together. Our host Ilene ate with us too. It was a very fun night!

Jeju Days 2 and 3

So Day 2 was full of amazing adventures just like day one. We had our full group of 8 today so we headed to a spot called sunrise peak. This is a big crater (volcanic island and all) overlooking the ocean. We headed for the entrance and just as we did Rhoda realized she was missing a sock in her bag and ran to buy some. We waited then started off again. This time I noticed my hiking boot felt funny. I looked down only to see that the rubber on it was completely deteriorating. My shoe was literally falling apart as I walked! I dragged my feet in my what were now shells of shoes to the store Rhoda had gone to and bought sneakers there for $15. Then we were on our way for real. We hiked to the top, up what felt like a million stairs, to see the crater. It was so beautiful. We had beautiful sunny weather until we hiked back down to the water where we found a cool restaurant overlooking a little lagoon type thing. It began to rain so we snuck inside the restaurant where there are what is called "diving grannies" These older women have a tough job of diving for abolone and it is a dying job but very cool to see these women in there 70-80's in full diving suits take off into the water. We (yes me too) ate abalone and sea cucumber. It was good!

We took a bus to the volcano tubes. These amazing 5 mile long tunnels formed underground when the volcano erupted. We walked through one section and took some cool photos inside. From there we stopped in Seogwipo for dinner. I ate fish again...I know :) It was delicious!

This morning 4 of us got up at 5:30 to start our trip to Mount Hallasan. This is the heighest mountain in Korea. We began about 9 and finished about 4pm. It was a long and tough hike but so great. There is a crater at the top...because it is a volcano...duh! haha. The trip down was harder than up, uneven rocks and bad shoes make for a bad combination. But for $15 I didn't expect top quality haha. Anyway we made it up and down safely. We decided the best option once we got down was to go to a spa. It was amazing! Much needed help for our muscles and minds. We left so relaxed, got some dinner and shopped for our dinner tomorrow night. Tomorrow is Chuseok so we are making our host at the hostel a chuseok feast. I will let you know how it goes :)

Things in Jeju are going really well!

Jeju-do day 1

I'm in Jeju island for a week. We get a week off for the Korean Thanksgiving holiday "Chuseok." Good thing about this is we all really needed a break but the bad part is we don't get even one day off from next week until December 22. That is a long time!

I am here with fellow teachers, Brie, Jo, Elizabeth, Rhoda, and Jeffery. We are staying in a hostel in the south western part of the island. The hostel has a very "home-y" feel and we really like it. The woman who runs it is named Isabelle and is extremely helpful. We all tell her where we want to go the next day and she figures out everything to get us there. She talks to the cab drivers to get us home too.

Jeffery, Brie and I flew in yesterday and spent today exploring. We took the bus one town over with 3 other people (from Canada) that we met in the hostel. We walked from the bus to this amazing waterfall and walked right into the water. We hiked back up and decided to wander down the street to see what we find. We went down one road to these lava rock tide pools. We climbed all over them. It was so cool to see the patterns the lava made flowing into the ocean.

From there we walked towards the other falls but got lost and stopped for lunch. After bimbibop we walked to the other falls. These falls were a walk through a beautiful park that look like a jungle. The second falls were smaller but beautiful just the same.

Next we walked up this looooooooong staircase and hiked up to a place called "lonely rock" We walked along this big cliff and saw a beautiful view of the ocean. Jeffery and I noticed a staircase so we made our way down and discovered a very cool pool of water hidden behind these big volcanic rocks. People were swimming so we joined them. We sat on the side of the pool and let the waves of the ocean wash over us until one giant wave came, washed us off the seat and across the pool. It was fun and scary all at once :) We, again, climbed all over the lava rocks and then headed up to the cliff to see the "lonely rock." Walking along the cliff was a gorgeous view and the waves were amazing. It was much like PV only volcanic haha.

Korea has this thing where in parks all over the country there are work out machines. They are mostly for balance and agility not like weight training but they are in almost all the parks. Surprisingly (but also not) they were at the top of the cliff in this park. We decided to try them out. It was a lot of fun :)

We walked back to the bus and headed back to the hostel to meet the rest of our crew that had just flown in. We walked to a restaurant from the hostel and had kimchi jigae for dinner. We are now showered and definitely ready for bed! Tomorrow we are aiming to see the volcano tubes on the northern part of the island!