Happy Chuseok!

Hey everyone!

I am currently enjoying my four day weekend. It's that time of year again, time for Chuseok, which is basically Korean Thanksgiving. All the families travel to the house of the grandparents and eat and celebrate and stuff. All of this information I have received from my students, so I could be completely wrong. After having my students as me several times if I am going home for the holidays, I figured I should make a trip somewhere. This somewhere happened to be Seoul. So Jade, Stacey, Ed, Abby, and I headed out on the KTX on Saturday morning to head into the city.

Prior to this time, I had thought I had seen "fast" before. Like cars that speed, or the amount of time it can take for my students to find a loophole in a rule I have just put into the classroom, but I was wrong. The KTX is by far the fastest thing I have seen. It can get from Seoul to Busan (the southern tip of Korea) in about 2 1/2 hours. Woah. We had a 50 km trip and it took 40 minutes. With stops. I liked it. After getting off in Seoul, we headed to Itaewon, where there are Westerners aplenty. The hotel we were staying at only had two rooms left and ironically enough they were a deluxe room and a suite. Jade, Stacey, and I took the suite, which was $100, but really only 30 because there were three of us. The room was quite nice, with a jacuzzi, and a nice flat screen t.v. It was one of the nicest places I have been in.

After a quick bite of Mexican food, we went shopping. There were tons of shops with Western sizes, which are impossible to find in Cheonan. It was also quite a thrill to see shoes that I could fit into as well. I didn't buy much and it should surprise no one that I spent the most money at the book store. We chilled out in the room, and watched a movie, then we ate some awesome Indian food, that was all you can eat for 10 bucks. The five of us met up with friends and parted ways to see the nightlife in the town. It was really interesting to see bars that made Koreans pay but allowed foreigners to get in for free, in fact I was highly suspicious of these places. Everyone had a great time.

The next day we headed to a pub after checkout and ate some wonderful Irish food and met up with friends again. We were all tuckered out after that so we caught the 6:00 train back home and by 7:30, I was lounging on my couch and exhausted from my time there. I am only sad that I didn't have time to see more touristy things, but with the time I am going to be here and the ease of getting to Seoul, I have no doubts that I will get to see everything. Hope everything is well for all of you!

So I realize that the longer I am out here (1 month!) the more spread apart these posts are. I am deeply apologetic for this. Things have been going well. I am getting into the swing of things here. Being foreign has allowed me to be able to mundane things that somehow become interesting. For example: maintaining my house. I don't have a stove here (something that makes me miss cooking a lot). Every 2 months a woman comes around with her magic wand to make sure there are no gas leaks near my gas range. She came in all of her methane glory last week. I usually sleep until 8:30-9 because I don't have to go to work until 1:30 and so I was chilling in bed when I heard a ring. I don't know about you, but I am hardly presentable at such an hour (this hour being anytime before 8:30-9) who should it be but gas lady. I ran to the door, and was greeting by a wonderful smile and a black baton with a meter at the end of it. She came in, checked what she needed and then said "Sign Here" which I did. End of story, see you in two months...or so I thought.

That night I was deciding that I needed to get to bed earlier and was dozing off after a nice read. I was just about asleep when I get a ring at my door. If it had been 6 o'clock in the evening I wouldn't have been surprised. Then I remembered that it was Korea and people here work on Saturday. Here was gas lady again. When she saw me (I am the only foreigner in the building) she threw up her hands and took mine and yelled "SORRY". I smiled and told her not to worry (although she didn't know English so I hope she understood) and then she proceeded to open my door again to tell me "Sorry'' about 6 more times. This woman was repentant. I will be waiting with wine and cheese next time she comes for a visit.

Fashion here is great too. All the kids are wearing t-shirts with English writing on them, which confuses me because I have to imagine they have no idea what it means. That happens in the United States too, and I guess isn't too weird because people get those stupid Chinese symbols on themselves all the time, only to find out later they have just tattooed the word "idiot" on themselves. There is something different about it here. It feels like a joke that only a few people get. It's not just on clothes here, too. It's everywhere. On pencil cases, in resturaunts. Here are some of my favorites:

-On a t-shirt that my student was wearing:
"HappyBear. I feel happy when I eat a him."

-On a student's pencil case:
"So Cute Mushrooms Brothers: We give thanks for another beautiful day from God, and a look from a flirtatious stranger."

-On another pencil case (they are big here):
"Booby: flowers in the field are so lovely"

Another great work is in a chain of restaurants called DaSarang, which serves chicken and pizza, and that's all. They have a manifesto of sorts on their wall. It's a very posh looking place that has nice booths and low lighting and in stainless steel lettering on a marble wall are about 20 lines of writing. I can't remember them all but somewhere on the wall were the following words:

"We hopes to be number too in the industry of phreshness, declaring fairity among world among the phreshness....Europe and counting the tolerance of equality"

And this ladies and gentlemen, are in establishments across the country. I love Korean.