I hope this blog post finds you all well! We're both doing great here. This week we had some interesting stuff happen.
Tuesday was my birthday and, I must say, it's the first time I've felt really homesick since I've been here but Jesse made it really nice for me. I worked until 8:30 that night but then Jesse took me out for dinner at our favourite restaurant here - VIPS - which is an American chain I'd never heard of but that has a buffet of pasta, pizza, caesar salad, fajitas, and a million more delicious things. Then he had bought me a bunch of clothes that I wanted and had them delivered here so it was a very nice birthday.
Speaking of birthdays, every 2 months at my school, they have a big birthday celebration for all the students that had birthdays in the past 2 months. It happened to be this Friday and was an interesting and hilarious experience. I had 4 students in my main class who had birthdays and they all came to school in their traditional Korean outfits (so cute). I took a video of my students at break time all running around like mad and some of them in their birthday costumes.
Julia, Cindy, Aaron, and Thomas in their traditional birthday costumes.
In this video, my kids are running around on their break and some of them are talking to me. Pretty cute.
The actual 'birthday party' seemed more like a glorified photo op for the parents than an actual party. All the kids who didn't have birthdays sat on the floor and then, one by one, the foreign teacher for each birthday student would take their hand and walk them down the aisle through all the kids while the students sang 'Happy Birthday' for every one of them. Once every student had been walked through and sung to, they sat on chairs behind this massive table spread with tons of delicious food: pizza, cake, cookies, doughnuts, kimbap (Korean sushi-ish thing), fruit, etc. Then, each one got to blow out a candle and have a picture taken. Then, each one held a wrapped gift and card and took several photos with their foreign teacher. And that was the whole birthday party. The food wasn't touched and no party was involved.
Speaking of photo ops, I found my school's website that has photos of all the foreign teachers, which you can check out if you want: http://eccybm.com/KGV7/homepage/pageview/pageview.asp?CateCode=INTRO20#
This weekend was pretty low key. Today we got up early and went in to Itaewon (the foreign district) and went to the Rocky Mountain Tavern (the Canadian bar) to watch the Phoenix-Detroit game. It was neat to watch the NHL game and eat nachos. For a while we forgot we were even in Korea because the bar was full of foreigners and all the wait staff spoke English.
After that, we went down to Yeouido Park to meet Jesse's friend from school (the guy who he had a drink with that night after he went to the noraebong - Lee Sung Ho) at the cherry blossom festival. We met him and he introduced us to a bunch of his friends. We sat on the lawn of the National Assembly Building (I assume this is something like our Parliament Hill) while they ate a picnic - we were too stuffed with nachos to eat. Two of Lee Sung Ho's friends were super nice. One lived in Calgary for a year going to school and snowboarding and one lived in London for a year and is now one of the people who puts Korean subtitles on all the English TV shows and movies here. We sat and chatted with them for a few hours and it was neat to finally be hanging out with Koreans here - we've been mostly hanging out with foreigners so far - and, finally, we had a bit of a nice day and it was beautiful in the sun.
Me on the lawn of the National Assembly Building.
We left them after awhile to check out the cherry blossom festival that was happening this weekend. Cherry blossoms are huge in Korea and they plant cherry blossom trees everywhere and they are absolutely beautiful when they bloom. The streets were packed with people taking pictures with the flowers and going for walks and the street was lined with trees. It was really nice.
Street lined with cherry blossoms
Cherry Blossom tree
Then we just came home and relaxed. And that brings us to now. So, not too much exciting news this week. My school's supposed to FINALLY get a new foreign teacher this week from England (if he can ever get here with all the flights being grounded there), which is good because we're losing two more teachers at the end of the month.
Anyway, that's it for this week. Miss you all!
Ali
