Hope you're all doing well! We miss you all a lot.
This week was a pretty great week because Wednesday was Children's Day, a national holiday. For me, it really broke up the week and made it feel very short and, for Jesse, it was very short since he had no classes on Tuesday, due to Sports Day at his school, and then was off Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
At my work, we've gotten a third new teacher: an opera singer from South Africa. She's very nice and it's good to finally have enough staff. On Tuesday, we had a big party to celebrate Children's Day and we had a treasure hunt, a clown, a games room, face painting, and lots more. I got to do face painting, which was really fun.
Me concentrating very hard on the face painting.
On the holiday Wednesday, Jesse and I met up with a bunch of foreigners who are part of this Korean meet-up group on the internet and we decided to celebrate Cinqo de Mayo instead of Children's Day. We went to a Mexican restaurant in Itaewon (the foreigner district) and had lunch. We met a lot more people from Uijeongbu who we hadn't met yet, which was nice, and we got to eat some Mexican food - a rare treat in Korea.
Happy Cinqo de Mayo!
After lunch, we all took the subway to watch a soccer game at World Cup Stadium. We arrived late and there were long lines for tickets but we managed to see the last few minutes of the first half and all of the second half.
The half-time show was a bunch of little kids doing Tae Kwon Do who were totally insane. They were doing a million flips and spinning kicks, and chopping boards with punches and kicks - it was very cool but made me a little more terrified of making my students angry.
Kids doing Tae Kwon Do
I usually find soccer to be painfully boring but it was actually a very high-scoring game with a lot of action. We were watching FC Seoul play Seongnam. FC Seoul was the home team and the stadium was packed with more than 60,000 people, all wearing red (FC's colour). It was neat to be a part of such an enthusiastic crowd, especially when the home team won 4-0. Every time they scored, fireworks were set off and the crowd went nuts. Luckily three of the goals were scored in the second half so we didn't miss much of the action.
Fireworks after and FC Seoul goal.
After the game we just explored around Seoul a little and had dinner and headed home.
Friday night was the goodbye dinner for one of the teachers at my school, Mikey T. He had been in Korea for 2 and a half years so there was a very big crowd to send him off. Everyone went out for duck galbi (cooking duck on the grill at your table) and there was probably about 40 of us. Then we went out in the 'bu (downtown Uijeongbu). I was so excited because everyone was talking about going to a noraebong (private kareoke) and I haven't been yet and am dying to go but they didn't end up going until 4 in the morning so I went home before that and missed it again.
Saturday (yesterday), Jesse and I went back to Seoul for this massive music festival called World DJ Festival. We met up with some other teachers from my school, my cousin Paul and his friends, and some other people we've met since being here. It seemed like every foreigner in Korea was there, as well as tons of Koreans, obviously. There were 4 stages (one for techno, one for rock, one for hip hop, and another miscellaneous stage). We had a lot of fun and saw some cool acts in both Korean and English. The festival went from 2pm Saturday afternoon until 6am Sunday morning but we left around 2am because it was getting cold and we'd lost our group in the crowd and we were tired.
Crowd shot by the main stage.
Today we're just taking it easy and doing errands and laundry and that kind of stuff.
Happy Mother's Day to both our moms and all the moms reading this blog!! We're both sad to not be with our moms on Mother's Day but we're thinking about you!!
Much love,
Ali and Jesse.
