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!