HABA Olympics

Today at school I was fortunate enough to snag seats to the Haba Olympics. The 6 and 7 year olds split up into a red team and blue team, one class of each age on each. It was the greatest thing to watch. They were all so so so happy and so so so excited to be playing the rediculous games that the gym teacher had come up with. I only got to hang out and help for an hour because I had to go teach the 5 year olds. ugh. They are a handful to say the least. We are working on saying the phrase, "Lets see. One book, two erasers, three crayons, four markers, and five toys". They are cute but a bunch of little monkeys. Anyways... I would like to introduce the 6 and 7 year olds of Haba!! They are all hilarious. I hope you enjoy this exclusive olympic footage.

They don't exactly have this much energy during class, but pretty close.


In the beginning of this video, from left to right, you have Cindy, Nicole, Nick and Dorothy. And yes...Nick does have a mullet. It is wonderful. In the video before you can also see all the usually lovely Korean teachers as well as a shot of the other native English teacher Ryan.

river hill

Last weekend David and I headed up the Han river, about 20 min outside Seoul, to meet up with his co-workers to hang out on river hill. It was such a wonderful weekend spent eating delicious (and super cheap) Korean food, riding on boats (and a lot of "I'm on booooat" singing), wakeboard watching, dock jumping and overall enjoyment of being outside the city playing in the sun.









Once again we stayed in one of the "love motels". Apparently this area is infamous for being THE place to bring your mistress for an hour or two. Not only is it close to the city but also seen as somewhat romantic. Although I see nothing romantic about places that rent by the hour and have a red light option in the room. The funniest part of all this was that rooms could not be booked for an overnight stay till late in the evening because the motel wanted to make as much money as possible through hourly rentals...oh so romantic. ick.

Swine vacation, river bike rides and football matches

Life in Korea has been pretty great lately...especially since I have had the greater part of the last two weeks off from work.

Two Wednesdays ago I was teaching my rowdy 6 year olds like normal when one of the Korean teachers rushes in and says that we all have to go home. Super confused I went out and asked the other English teacher at Haba what the heck was going on and he informed me that the school just found out that one of the 5 year olds, Raphael, has swine flu and that we do in fact get to go home...for the next week! While neither of us were to concerned and actually pretty happy about this surprise vacation the rest of the school was in chaos. Korean teachers were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, talking a mile a minute on the phone with parents and getting all their students ready to leave. Everyone was gone within a half an hour, it was ridiculous. Eventually our won jon (boss) told us that we didn't have to come back to school until the following Thursday or Friday and sent us out the door saying:
"uh don't tell that Haba playschool is sick...not good. And if you have fever call me. But don't get fever please."
So needless to say I tried not to get a fever and spent a lot of time doing this

and it was glorious. Ended up going back to school on Friday and I was actually happy to be there. I sort of missed most of the kids and we had a really fun day making menus of our favorite food and talking about building houses.

As for the swine flu, all the Haba kids are fine now but we do have to take and record our temperatures twice a day. Apparently the Korean government has issued a new law saying that if one student gets swine the whole school must shut down for a week. While David's school is ignoring this law (he has had whole classes absent because they have all been sick) I'm glad that Haba shut down. It will be interesting to see if it happens again.

In more exciting news I had a GREAT weekend playing on the Han river and watching soccer with David and Danny (a friend from Western who just arrived in Korea two weeks ago). David and I rented bikes at Hangang park and spent Saturday afternoon riding along the waterfront.It was really really nice to be by some sort of large body of water for a change. After the ride we headed to Seoul world cup stadium for the South Korea, Australia soccer game. Surrounded by a massive amount of people, free beer samples and a Hyundai car stage, we enjoyed a picnic of fried chicken and MGD.
Around game time we met up with Danny and headed into the stadium and had a great time cheering the red devils on with all the other Koreans (and in David's case heckling the few Australians who ended up on the wrong side of the crowd). Most exciting thing was the South Korea, ranked 48th in the world, was able to beat Australia,16th, 3-1.
All in all it has been a great couple lazy weeks but now its time get back into the daily 9-5 grind...ugh

some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. -gilda radner

Japan!

Here is a small slideshow of my summer vacation trip to Tokyo, Japan. For some reason it starts at the end and goes backwards...and doesn't show all the pictures haha. To see the whole slideshow click the link at the bottom. Don't worry its not too long. Out of over a thousand pictures that we took I was able to pick out the 180 best!

http://s595.photobucket.com/albums/tt38/World_Travels/Japan/?albumview=slideshow

Lately

A lot of eating, playing and teaching.

Who doesn't love breakfast for dinner (brinner)? It was almost perfect with pancakes, scrambled eggs and something we have decided to call "beefcon". What looks like the pork bacon that we are all used to turned out to be slices of beef. Didn't taste like bacon but it worked.

Saturday night was spent in Itaewon, which is known as the foreigner district. It is really close to a big US military base and the area caters to the foreigner crowd. It has bigger clothes, mexican food and even more English friendly then other areas of Seoul. Found a great mexican restaurant where we sat at the bar enjoying margaritas, chips and salsa, a wonderful bar tender named Dean (who sang along with David to the cover band playing Eric Clapton)

Talking with Smiles, who we met at the reggae bar...not quite the same as Boundary Bay reggae night.

Sunday night after a long day of eating spicy noodles and watching Harry Potter we decided to have some comfort food and made chicken wings and mashed potatoes. Special note about movie watching in Korea: Since we don't know how to check movie times it is best to head to the theatre whenever you feel like it and buy a ticket to the next showing. You also get to choose your seats in the theatre when you buy your ticket. Kinda sweet when you figure out where the best seats are.


In regards to teaching it has been getting a bit easier and a lot more fun as I am getting to know the kids better. Had another wonderful conversation with Sam (Cat in the Hat is a crazy monkey boy). He was trying to tell me in the best English that he could how he watched a documentary about dolphins having hands when the dinosaurs were alive. And how when a "giant rock crash the earth" the dolphins moved into the ocean and lost their hands. This was news to me but I told him that was called evolution and he said "yes yes teacher" and went back to his pokemon cards without a second thought. Next it is just one week of teaching until my two week Summer break!! First week will be spent exploring Tokyo!! So excited and will undoubtedly take a million pictures!

And lastly a video of a lovely Korean monsoon. This happens all day sometimes.

Mud is Love

So this weekend David and I trekked down south to Boryeong to partake in their annual week long Mud Festival. The day started off with an early morning train ride to take us the 3 hours south. Once we got there we were greeted by David's co-teachers and two rooms in the "love motel", a place that the Korean's are not used to having people actually spend the full night but only a couple hours. From there we went to join the masses in the mud! Everything was centered around a big amphitheater that was having contests and playing music all day. My favorite part was the self paint stations down on the beach. There were just big things of mud with paint brushes in them to paint yourself/others. There was also a mud wrestling pit...kind of crazy but oh so much fun. Other highlights of the weekend include: a never ending shellfish feed (so proud of myself for actually enjoying eating those guys) where we got to cook everything right in front of us, fireworks in the rain, having a very random morning with the boys in the hotel room, getting to chat on the phone with my family, finding real life elephants and getting to watch David turn into a little kid with excitement, getting to see and swim in the ocean, having a strawberry shake while waiting to leave for the train and getting to relax on the way home knowing that pizza and bad tv were waiting. One of the weirdest things was that although it was mainly tourists enjoying the mud and beer there were also quite a lot of Korean families there too. There were also a TON professional photographers sticking their cameras in everyones faces. Apparently there is a huge photo contest and everyone is hoping to catch the best shot of the festival. It was strange to just be walking around or playing in the mud and all of the sudden have 5 or 6 huge cameras in your face. There must also be about a million pictures of David and I covered in mud. Great fun, even if I think there is still mud in my ears.









You know...just feeding elephants. In the middle of a beach town.


We spent a couple hours here watching the people still crazy enough to play in the mud despite the never ending rain and wind.