Another month, another adventure

Wow! It's been nearly a month since my last post. Sorry to say there isn't too much excitement to report, but I will report what excitement I've had.

The weekend after Busan I traveled with a group of people from Iksan to Geoje Island to visit our friend Greg who lives there. On the way there the person who was driving took me through some beautiful country side in Korea. When I say breathtaking views, I mean my breath was literally taken away! One particular view was of a man made lake carved in the center of a valley. The water was nearly turquoise blue and the hills were green and thick with trees. Oh man, words cannot describe!

Here's a pretty terrible shot of the lake I described above.


When we arrived in Geoje we went to the rooftop of Greg's apartment for box wine (gotta love Franzia), imported cheeses and good times. Greg is a photographer so while we were up there we took a few good shots. I also had the opportunity to eat some amazing Thai food and Greg's World Famous Sourdough Pancakes.

Here's the view from the top of Greg's apartment, AMAZING!


We also took a few fun pictures I think are cool. I had no idea I could kick that high!



The past couple of weekends after that I have stayed in Iksan doing a little exploring on bike and on foot with Stormy. We rode our bikes for four hours one day just riding around, doing a little shopping and looking for good times. That night we had a picnic on my rooftop, which does not have view that Greg's rooftop does, but hey, it works.

Last weekend was Brian's 23rd birthday! We took the week to try and celebrate. We had good times dancing and eating ice cream cake.

Brian said he was going to wear a suit so Stormy and I took the opportunity to dress up!


Here's the ice cream cake we got for Brian! It was yummy!



Brandon and Kim bought a "Pimp" hat for Brian for his birthday...it's essential


As for my classes, this week there are no adult classes but we have been doing interviews for the next semester. I was accidentally late on the first day of interviews. Su Min, a guy that works in the office called me at 9:15 (I was supposed to be there at 9:00am) and asked where I was. I had just bought a cute new dress, so I knew just what to wear and my hair was a hot mess, but I made it work only to walk outside and see that it was raining...YAY! There was no time to think or change so I rode my bike in the soaking rain as fast as I could all the way to school. I arrived at 9:40 and proceeded to do 35 interviews. The past two days other teachers have been doing interviews and have only had about 10 interviews all day... I wonder why I was so lucky?!

My kids classes are rolling along better than ever! THANK GOD FOR THE STAR SYSTEM! I give them a star everyday for having their book, pencil and homework. If they misbehave stars are taken away. At the end of the week the stars are counted and whoever has the most gets stickers or candy! I didn't think it would have the impact on my classes that it has, but they are like little crazy angels! LOVE IT!

Magic Time has become quite a breeze since the implementation of the star system! They finally listen to me and I spend a lot more time teaching rather than trying to correct behavior issues. I give them one warning, then they lose a star. Who knew it could work so well?

In August I actually volunteered to take on an intensive kids course where I will be teaching the same group of kids for 3 hours...yeah, I said it, 3 HOURS! It will be fun and I can't wait to blog about them.

I will take pictures of my classes this week and upload them so that you may all see the amazing kids I get paid to hang out with!

Busan...or Pusan?

This weekend Brandon, Scott, Stormy and I took the weekend to visit our friend Greg in Busan. Greg lives about two hours from Busan and we all live about four hours from Busan. Busan is the second largest city in Korea and has some of the most beautiful beaches also many Korean people pronounce it Pusan.

We went out Friday night with almost all the teacher in our office and stayed out a little too late, which put us behind for our original 9am departure time, but we did manage to leave at 9:45 so not too bad! We rented a car and the road trip there was a great time! I usually hate being cooped up in a car, but I guess after being cooped up in a plane for 14 hours, a 4 hour car ride is childs play.

The entire ride was spent laughing at eachother and talking. We were following Greg's driections all the way until we hit traffic in Busan. Once we were there, something told Brandon and Scott that we should just abandon the directions and find it for ourselves! Usually this is a bad idea. I wasn't in a hurry and was enjoying the car ride so I didn't put up too much of a "lets get directions" fuss. We tried to stop at a gas station (the usual place for directions) and have them type where we were going into our GPS (since none of us are really good at hangul - Korean writing). They were no help so we set out on the open, I mean over crowded, streets.

We were just going in the correct direction with no idea which road we should be on when we were all laughing at Scott for some reason and he saw a Korean girl laughing at him in the car next to us. Scott said, "Great, she's laughing at me? What is she laughing at?!??" then he rolled down his window and yelled at her, "WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?!". She said, "You're funny!". It was then we realized she spoke english so we asked her for the direction of the beach. She pointed for us to go straight but when we came to a fork in the road we ended up just taking a left not knowing if it was the right way.

We asked another man and he told us to keep going, then we saw a sign! At last we had fumbled our way through Busan enough to make it to the beach! We were feeling so lost we were contemplating hiring a cab and following it to the beach, but our dumb luck found it for us.

We arrived just in time to relax a little and walk around. It was getting dark and chilly so we stopped into a little store where Stormy found some long sleve shirts. They were uniforms for a private elementary school in Busan. We bought them even though they were four sizes too small and dubed ourselves, Team Discovery.

Team Discovery met up with Greg who join Team Discover, uniform and all. Then we rented our killer beach side love motel. Love Motels are super nice and super cheap. Some are a little skeezy, but I've stayed in some really nice ones too. This one was really nice, it had all the wonderful touches any proper Love Motel should have such as a mirrored wall right beside the bed and a mirrored headboard. The bathroom had full mirrored walls and the shower had a full body blaster and you could stratgically move the shower head to different locations. It was awesome!

The view from our room was amazing too!


On Saturday night we had dinner at a cheap little Korean kim bap place and enjoyed some beers on the beach. Greg is really into photograpy and he brought his camera out to take some photos of us shooting fire works and playing with sparklers. The results were pretty awesome, you can check them out here along with some other pictures from the weekend --> http://www.flickr.com/photos/comatosed/3588490470/

Sunday we spent the entire day laying on the beach and enjoying the sun and surf. Greg was the first to get going and then Brandon, Scott and I joined him. The water was super cold so it felt amazing just to wear a body suit and go swimming! I took the surf board out and watch the guys try to ride in the 2ft waves, and I even managed to catch one (on my belly of course)! Scott got to his feet on his first try, it was awesome!

After about 45 minutes of pseudo surfing I was wanting to work on my tan so I headed for the beach. I forgot how spectacular laying out can be. Just relaxing with nothing to do and no where to be was a great feeling. When the boys came in they were crazy hungry so we bathed and took a cab to a little area and had Sam gyup sal (grilled pork). It was delicious!

The day was long and we were all tired and packed it in pretty early. We woke up and Brandon drove the entire way home while the rest of us slept. He managed to miraculously get us home in about 3 hours :)

Overall, the weekend was a winner and I enjoyed it to the fullest! I have a feeling a lot of weekends this summer are going to be that way!!!

Here are a couple of pics: