what's next

So I'm behind in everything form about 2 1/2 months ago.  My next project is editing all of my photos from Seoul.  This could take a week.  There are a lot.  Here is a preview, and one of my favorite photos.  I went inside of a traditional tea garden house courtyard at the top of an old city.  A traditional neighborhood that has all of the wood houses with the funny roofs.  I quickly snapped this panorama of the neighborhood with a view of Seoul beyond it, before the lady came out and glared at me. I did think it was public space but apparently only for what she was offering.  I think it was worth the scold though.

you can't help what you love

My first inspiration in a long time. Living in a small town where there isn't a lot of cool things to take pictures of - I find my calling in the mountains.  

As Andrew puts it "a bunch of dead plants"... you can't help what you love!   Check out the rest of my roll on flickr.

Costco

 On Sunday we went to Costco with our friend Kang.  I have never been to a Costco but it's exactly like a Sam's club.  This is the only place we have even seen most of these items. We stocked up and spent a good few hundred thousand won.  But we easily could have spend around 1 million won if we had the space for everything, and the money, and a way to get it home.  Costco is in Busan and took us close to 2 hours to get there. 

 

Everything we bought from left to right -

6 pack of pasta shells. 6 pack of french bread. champagne (for our 2nd year anniversary). 3 boxes of q-tips. 15 boxes of mac & cheese. fresh bakery cookies (oatmeal raisin, double chocolate, and chocolate chip). 5 pack of "satin" dental floss. Earl Grey tea. massive tub of sour cream. 2 bags of bagels. 2 boxes of (58) packs of oatmeal *korea doesn't own oatmeal*. few pounds of mozzarella cheese. vitamin B complex. 2 pack Aveerno body wash. 48 pack of trail mix granola bars. 15 pack of combos. few lbs of sharp cheddar. 2 industrial sized prego sauce containers. 2 large bottles of salsa (with no chips).  Parmesan cheese. 5 pack of lint rollers *no dryer = dust everywhere*. large bottle of parsley, basil, and Italian seasoning.

never too late

It's never to late to share a little love.  This year was extra special being in Korea for Valentine's Day.  I sent my mom and Brittni, and even Andrew's Valentine's day present through the mail using Etsy.  Etsy is my new best friend.  People make amazing handmade stuff and then sell it online - on Etsy.  

I got Andrew Lego Cuff links and  a tie pin for work.  All of his shirts are the buttoned ones so he can't use the cuff links but he hasn't shut up about how much he loves Legos since I met him, so I couldn't resist.

Valentines for me was pretty great too! I got flowers!! and a locket pocket watch necklace (from etsy). 

 

And then we woke up and it was snowing Monday morning.  The most snow in Jinyeong in 75 years! 7 inches.

And then school got canceled. And I finished my book.  

"Yay," said the snow man!

secret project complete

After 2 1/2 months of working on a secret project, I have finally finished the final revision and it is up and running.  Here is a small preview of the actual thing I will be ordering.  love you bubbie.

Use the box with arrows to make full screen and left or right arrows to navigate pages.  It's 224 pages just to warn you

B E A R by Amanda Alexander | Make Your Own Book

Let's Go. It's Green.

Hello all!



It's Tuesday night here. We are still at work but I have a break now, my first one I have been able to enjoy since my last post at work January 13th! Things are finally starting to come together. The schedule is still a little confusing for everyone but at the end of the month I'm sure it will make sense to us. Hopefully it doesn't change too much come March. It's February 1st and we currently are teaching 31 students, so keep your fingers crossed for our You & I school.



Last weekend Andrew and I chilled around the apartment, not very exciting but much needed after the busy and stressfull work week. Sunday we went to Changwon with our friends for Kraze Burger and Lotte Mart shopping. And here we are on Tuesday and we have the next 5 days off! It's the Lunar New Year this Thursday and a national holiday where everyone spends lots of time at their families house's. First they go to their parents house for 2 days and then they go to the oldest child's house of the husband (i think, it is all very complicated). Lots of family time. We have been told by Glen and Kang that lots of things will be closed for the holiday and the traffic will be very bad from all the traveling, so we may not venture to far from home. I think maybe Friday, Andrew and I will walk around Changwon or Masan just for fun, but other than that we are just laying low to save some money.



My personal goal is to get all my photos up on Flickr and finish my project. So we'll keep in touch during this much needed 5 day weekend!

Saturday afternoon.

Hello all,

It's Saturday afternoon here.  This wont be long, but I just thought I would give a few updates on Korea.  I still haven't been able to do any regularly blogging due to my top secret project.  It is a computer project and my file crashed last week.  So I had to start over.  I will be close to finishing  this weekend and then next week/weekend is our 5 day weekend and I will have lots of time to finish my project and upload the last month of our lives in Korea.  

Recently our school has hired a new teacher for the computer courses that Andrew and I were doing every 3 days.  We now have about 30 students.  It's been a little tense since our school was under the impression that we would have 100 students by this point.  Andrew and I will miss these computer days for they were very easy on us, and they are now replaced with more classes.  We now have 4 spring classes and 5 red classes.  So almost a 1/3 of our classes are just beginner kids.  Our schedules have been slowly changing from the recommended schedule of our classes and school.  But next month  we will only be teaching 5-6 classes a day.  

On a more interesting note we ate live octopus last night!  It was still moving, but conveniently cut into small pieces. We also had Japanese style sushi and raw fish, salmon, oysters, and some other stuff I didn't know what was but wasn't cooked.   Andrew got a couple of pictures on his iphone so you can look for that soon.

Okay back to work.  Anneyong

Baby, it's cold outside!

Soooo.  Once again we are having water issues.  This time it wasn't the girl upstiars flooding our ceiling.  Yesturday the water pressure started to get really slow.  This is normal when someone is using the water in for laundry or a shower, but it started to decrease to a dribble around 9:30.  We texted our landlord who came over this morning and told us that the pipes which carry water from Gimhae to our town had frozen and bursted! UNDERGROUND!  Apparently Southeastern Korean can't handle below freezing temps at night.  They said it would be fixed today, but it takes 5 hours for the water to pump it's 15 miles distance to us. 

On the plus side, all of those years of boiling water while camping really paid off this morning!

Soon Enough

Hello Family and Friends-

I know I've been MIA from blogger and flickr for awhile.  I wanted to let you know I haven't died.  I'm just really busy. I'm working on a top secret project that is taking up all of my free time. So in a few quick words (because I'm at work) I will share what we've been doing. 

For New Years we went to Seoul with Becky and Nick.  When I'm done with this project (roughly 2 weeks) I will post my photos and tell you about my favorites, and better yet what I want to do when we go back in June.

The weekend after we went to home plus and Bugoh Hawaii with Kang and his family.  We Enjoyed a great day of tubing, ice sculptures, and a traditional Korean Bath House.

This week at work has been crazy hectic!  We have had open classes every day, where parents and perspective students can sit in on our classes and see just how well we teach.  With reassurance from Glen, we are great teachers!  Tomorrow (Friday) we are coming to work around 9:15 am to go to a kindergarten orientation to hand out notebooks and hopefully get our student count up.  I think we are around 25 students now.  If we have around 60-70 students by the end of March we will be able to stay open.  If not we have been told our friend Jack (who owns lots of schools) will help place us at a new school, probably in Masan or Changwon.

At school I've been learning a little Korean.  I use these words almost every class.  I included how to pronounce them, and not in the grammatically correct kinda way.

Hurry - "ball-ie!  ball-ie!"

Folder - "pie-ile"

Memorize - "way-ou-say-yo"

Then this weekend we finally have a little time to ourselves.  I think Andrew will take a little time off from his video games and do some sketching and reading, and I will continue to work on my top secret project. (It's a secret because it's a surprise, but I will show you all when I'm done with it).

And in the meantime you can check out Andrew's Blog to read more in depth about what we've been doing!  Especially since I've been told by more than one of you that "Andrew is such a great writer!" I agree, so enjoy.

The Christmas Season

Most of you don't know that I am a list fanatic when I'm excited about something or need to get a great deal of things done. This Christmas Season was no different.  I won't go into detail of how Andrew took this, but I've included a picture so you can feel the same way.

This is how our Christmas Season started.  It didn't go as planned but we did accomplish everything on the list.  I did post the remainder of the posts in reverse order, so you should scroll down and read the posts as they took place over the weekend.  Enjoy!