Thursday night, Ali and I decided to tackle going out to the movies. We knew Seoul showed a lot of English movies but weren't sure if the small Korean city of Uijeongbu would have a large selection. Thankfully, we discovered Uijeongbu has a 9 screen cinema with about 6 English movies to choose from. Most English movies in Korea aren't dubbed, but rather, show Korean subtitles, which is great for us. We saw Alice in Wonderland. A little observation about the movie theatre is that when you buy your ticket you pick exactly what seat you want to sit at on a little touch pad screen - something I hope North America will adopt.
On Friday, we went to see Ali's apartment. It's a little bigger than mine, but Ali's is for two people. She has a roommate from Florida who seems very nice. A bunch of the Native teachers from Ali's school were going out for dinner and we were invited. There's about ten native teachers at Ali's school plus there were another eight or so we met at the restaurant from another school. It seems that every foreigner in Uijeongbu knows each other. The restaurant was similar to the one I went to with my school: no shoes, sit on cushions on the floor, stove rings on the tables, and large dishes of food that keep coming out. I enjoy the local cuisine, but I was worried about Ali since she has much higher food standards than me. The first dish was a spicy soup with vegetables that Ali enjoyed. The second course was Shabu Shabu (sp?). They bring out a huge plate of uncooked meat, where you're meant to to pick up a slice and dip it into the boiling stew to cook it. Next was some noodles and lastly was some rice. Ali found enough food she could eat so dinner wasn't a lost cause for her. Korean culture emphasizes a lot of sharing so many restaurants follow this style of serving big plates of food that people pick and choose from. I love buffets so no complaints from me.
I was surprised by how many Native teachers there were; Uijeongbu is a small city so I would've guessed a handful but there seems to be maybe thirty. The people we met were from English speaking countries all over the world including South Africa, Ireland, England, Canada, and U.S.A. After dinner, we all went to a bar where there were more foreigners - Uijeongbu is home to a very large American military base. The bar was fun and drinks aren't expensive, but you can smoke in a lot of buildings in Korea which can become a bit annoying because the bars are very smoky.
Today, Ali and I ventured out towards Hoeryong Temple, located at the base of a Mountain. There's a lot of mountains and temples around where we live so we decided to finally take a look at the closest one. Hiking and mountain climbing seem like popular past-times as we saw lots of Koreans with backpacks and hiking gear going down the trail. The trail to the temple was only 2km from our house, but it was a pretty steep incline. When we reached the temple, we saw several buildings all amazing to look at. Some of the buildings had lots of small pictures on them full of detail. There was a Korean man that greeted us right away and asked us where we were from. He invited us into one of the temples for a Buddist service. Being a Sunday morning, many people had come for the weekly service. Inside the prayer temple, the wall was filled with hundreds of gold Buddah statues. I wish we could've taken a picture but there was a service going on so it seemed like a faux pas. We stayed for about ten minutes of the service where we sat on cushions on the floor and bowed numerous times.
I begin teaching tomorrow, Ali begins work on Wednesday.
