Spicy Samosas and Surplus Shoes

Hi Everyone!

How’s it going? Not much is going on here. Jesse has been really busy this week planning his summer English camps. Elementary school ends mid-July but many of the kids still come to school as usual and attend ‘camp’, which is basically just school. My kindergarten kids only get a week off in the summer and all my elementary students will still keep attending school. They don’t get much of a holiday.

Anyway, this week it was one of my friend’s birthdays so we all went to an Indian restaurant downtown, which I didn’t know about but which is awesome! So excited that we found another great place to go to. After that some of the girls and I went to see Eclipse – the new Twilight movie. It was lots of fun but poor Jesse was stuck home working.

This weekend Jesse and I tried to save some money because we’ve settled on our itinerary for Japan and it will probably be pretty expensive. On Friday night we went to that Indian place again because Jesse missed it and I was craving the samosas again and then we just walked around downtown and headed home.

Saturday we got up and decided to go ice skating again since Jesse had gone with the other public school teachers last time and I had missed it. It was lots of fun despite the skates being horribly dull. For some reason all the little Korean girls on the ice seemed to literally latch on to me and I spent a good part of the time just dragging a chain of a million screeching girls around the ice and answering the only questions they could ask in English like, ‘What is your favorite season?’ and ‘What is your hobby?’ It was pretty cute.

After that, we consulted our Korean travel guidebook and looked at the list of ’25 things to do while you’re in Korea’. One of the things we hadn’t done yet was go to Dondaemun Market, a huge market right on our subway line. We decided to check it out and ended up having a lot of fun. Dongdaemun is a huge area of the city that used to be the East Gate of the city of Seoul. Dongdaemun actually means ‘East Gate’ and the beautiful ancient gate is still there.

Here is what the East Gate looks like.

Now there are sprawling stalls selling everything you could want in every direction as well as several malls so you can wander indoors and out for hours. It’s open 24 hours a day and has all kinds of crazy foods and products. We each bought some cheap shoes and clothes and strolled by the river. It was a fun day and now we can check that off our list of things we want to do while we’re here.


These are some of the shoe vendors at Dongdaemun Market.


Here are some of the food counters.

Sunday Jesse had tons of work to do so he did that and I cleaned up and ran errands – nothing exciting.

Next weekend we will be going to MudFest – a massive festival in the South where you basically play in all different kinds of mud all weekend. I don’t totally understand what it’s all about but it’s supposed to be amazing.
Anyway, we miss you and we’ll update you next weekend!

Love,
Ali and Jesse

Skating and Spaniards

So we started the rainy season here in Korea on July 1st. The month of July gets about 40% of the annual rainfall so we were expecting to see rain almost every day. It poured on July 2nd but nothing since then so maybe it will just hit us hard later. Before you consider us lucky, however, we have been in extreme heat almost every day. The temperature is in the low 30's but the humidity is pretty bad here. Worst of all, August is considered the hot month.

This week was busy at work for me because I had an open class - my second this semester. However, this time it wasn't parents watching me but teachers from other schools. Overall, I think it went okay, but these things are always a bit phony since everyone puts in an extra effort and goes all out when they know they're being evaluated.

This weekend was a bit laid back for us as we had no real big plans. Thursday, Ali and I both had our respective gender nights with girls night being spent by the river eating pizza and boy's night in a shabu shabu restaurant. On Friday we stayed in and just watched the World Cup. With Korea out of it, obviously world cup fever is gone, but there's still interest in the tournament.

On Saturday, Ali and I went separate ways; I had a get-together at an ice rink with the same group of foreign teachers I climbed a mountain with last month, and Ali went to a barbecue for two people from ECC that will be leaving in a few days. The skating was interesting as I hadn't skated since I was maybe 10 years old. The rink was crowded with kids as they were just getting out of school. (Kids in Korea go to school every other Saturday). There were even some adult speed skaters doing laps pretty fast. Despite my inexperience and the congestion, I'm happy to say that I did not fall once. I only skated for 45 minutes though because I had to leave early to go meet Ali for an opera. More on that later.





Ali had a good time at the farewell BBQ for a Calgary couple that works at ECC. It was a really hot day and amazingly not raining so everyone went onto the roof of the apartment. There was a BBQ with a variety of foods - an okay way to spend an afternoon.

That night, Ali, I and three friends went to see the popular opera "Carmen" in Seoul. One of the friends is a trained opera singer so she was eager to get people to go with her. Ali and I are glad that we saw it so that we can say we've seen an opera. But as for the actual experience. Well... we were a group of English people watching an opera set in Spain and spoken in French by a Korean cast. So I feel like a lot was lost in translation. We were both new to the opera scene so we didn't know what to expect. Alida, the trained opera singer, has seen many, and said that this was the best production she'd seen. If that's the best that opera gets, I don't think we'll be repeating the experience anytime soon. Ali, whose French is better than mine, missed a lot of what was being said due to the opera accents. There were subtitles but of course those were in Korean.

Us waiting outside the opera


The Seoul Arts Centre

Sunday was a relaxing day. We stayed at home during the afternoon and booked our flight to Japan. We will be spending 5 nights in the country starting at the end of July. We're excited about the trip since we've heard so many great things about Japan. The plan is to go from Kyoto to Tokyo. Later that evening we went to the movies and a restaurant in downtown Uijeongbu.

Overall, it was a relaxing weekend and we'll probably have a few more of those in order to save money that we're going to be spending in the most expensive city in the world.

We'll update again next weekend.