As you've probably heard, North Korea fired artillery shells at a South Korean island that's only 12 km away from North Korea's coast. As it stands now, U.S.A. has just started going through some drills and war games with South Korea, which had been planned well ahead of the attack. North Korea is saying that if these drills go one inch into their waters than they will attack. Since U.S. has a lot of firepower here for these drills, South Korea is not too worried. South Korea really doesn't want a war. When they were originally attacked, they waited for 13 mins before firing one third of what North Korea fired at them and the government is coming under pressure that they should've responded much heavier to North Korea. So that fact might help ease your mind.
Anyway, on to less missile-heavy matters, last weekend I went into Seoul early on Friday because I was going to see a show with other public teachers called "Miso" (Korean for beautiful smile) and my co-teacher told me to go in early and see this traditional palace where they do a ceremony of changing the guards. So I went in early, took some pictures, and did some sightseeing all by myself, a first time thing for me here.
The show was really good and there was no language problem since it was pretty much non-verbal. At the beginning the screen laid out the whole story in multiple languages so you could understand what would be coming. The performers were dressed in the traditional Korean attire and did a lot of dancing and acrobatic moves.
The next night was Ali's co-worker's boyfriend's birthday so we went into Seoul again (well again for me) and went to this Irish pub. The birthday boy's friend owned the pub and had just opened it so we had a private room with lots of free food. We met some new people including a really nice couple, Ryan and Katie, who had been in Korea for a few months and didn't know that many people based on being the only teachers at their school. We hit it off and made plans to do some stuff in the future. Normally, we just kind of like pub food, but being somewhere where you don't eat it much just makes the times you do eat it so much better.
Sunday, we went to a double feature at the movies. "Let Me In" and "The Social Network" both really good. It was a good weekend as we did some stuff we hadn't done before, which had been becoming rare lately.
This weekend had a few more new things for us to experience. First though, we did an American Thanksgiving dinner with our American friends at VIPS, our go-to buffet restaurant in Uijeongbu. They don't have turkey, but there's lots of other Western food which is probably the best you can do down here for a Thanksgiving imitation.
Saturday was a day we'd been looking forward to for awhile: the hockey game. Now no one would think they have hockey in Korea and well... they kind of don't. There's an Asia Hockey League between Japan, South Korea and China comprised of 7 teams. South Korea has 2 of those 7 and neither of them are in Seoul, so hockey is still under the radar in this country. We went to Anyang which is South of Seoul and a 90 min ride on the subway for us. The arena is small and only seats roughly 1200 fans and 20% of those are probably foreigners. We went with 2 of our friends from Ali's work plus Ryan and Katie, the couple we met the week before. It was actually a pretty fun game with Anyang Halla (don't know what Halla is supposed to mean) losing to the Japanese team, Oji Eagles, 3-2 in overtime. Of course the skill level wasn't up to the same standard as the NHL but it wasn't bad. It was a pretty competitive game throughout. Both teams have a few Foreign players as well so you can still boo someone knowing that they probably understood you.
Work is still the same. I have 13 weeks left and 3 of those are vacation weeks, so that should be fun. Christmas is just around the corner so we bought a Christmas tree. Nothing too big. The weather is around -4 as a low and +8 as a high so pretty close to back home.
The not-so-big tree.
Well that's all for now. Bye!
