Halloween

Halloween weekend ended up being pretty quite for me. I was planning on meeting up with some people but things kinda fell through for different reasons which I was more than ok with. It was nice to have a quite weekend. I went to Seoul Saturday and did some shopping. It was good. I needed to get some warmer clothes. My school gets pretty cold during the winter. I ended up going to a well known shopping area called Myeongdong and went to some familiar stores: Forever 21 and H&M. I also wondered through the street markets and got a few things there as well. 

I had fun taking a break and watching the Hoddeok stand. One thing I'm super impressed with about Korea and the people here is how honest they are. The men two men at the stand just put out a pink bucket for money and then had paper out for people to take the Hoddeok themselves. It was a self service Hoddeok stand. You could easily get away with not paying or short changing them.

Had to take a picture of this... Now is this really necessary? 9 steps... Come on korea! (and yes I took the stairs)

Namdaemun market

            Sunday I was being super lazy, what a shock. By the time 3 o’clock rolled around I forced myself to get out of my apartment and take a walk around town. I went over to this little mountain hike that overlooks the city to take some pictures. Later that evening I attended Sunday night dinner at Seamus and Natalie’s  - I think I’ve mentioned this before but they are the foreigners who’ve been here for 5 years now and they host Sunday night dinners at their place for all of the foreigners in town. It’s super nice of them and fun to go and get a free meal, I’m all about free food. Yesterday it was Lasagna and I missed it. Dan told me today that it was delicious, I’m so bummed I couldn’t go (I was at the late lunch with the soccer team then Dajeong came to hang out for a bit).

Leaves on the ground make me happy! 

A close up of Hongcheon. My bus stop is on the lower right corner, you can see a bunch of buses lined up.

Zoomed out. You can't really see the river because the tree's are blocking it. The river is to the right and makes a U shape through town. 

On a side note, one of my favorite classes is called Prodigy class, which I have no idea why it’s called that but I just go with it. Anyways, this class is made up of four 9yr old students; Ida, Mary, Thomas, and Abram. I love them, most days that is. They like to fight a bit too much sometimes. I teach them 5 hours a week for my afternoon classes. The teachers tease me that Mary and Ida are my only friends because they will come into the office to hang out with me while the Korean teachers are talking Korean which I can’t understand. On Halloween I taught them “trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat”. They loved it. I only teach this class the important things in life, Haha. I took a video of it but this blog doesn’t like when I try to upload it, bummer!

I have a funny story about this class. So I received a text from Kalie during class one day in early June and my phone vibrated. I ignored it but Ida told me I had to look at it, so being the good teacher that I am, I answered it. It said, “guess how many donuts I ate today. If u say more than 6 u will be wrong. If u say less than 6 u will be wrong” I started laughing so hard when I read it. The kids were intrigued and wanted to know what was so funny. I told them that Julie teacher’s friend just ate 6 donuts. Thomas then said, “Oh teacher, Julie teacher’s friends is very big!” After this incident and them all laughing about my fat friend they still bring it up to this day. When I have them make sentences with new words they learn or are working on they sometimes use “Julie teachers friend” in the sentence. It’s hilarious. I think it’s happened about 4 or 5 times. 

Thomas with his angry face... Haha. I just said that to him so he's kinda smirking! He's awesome.

Thomas and Abram

Mary and Ida

Ida's my favorite in this class. She's the best at English and helps me teach. It's awesome. She breaks up the fights, translates for me and is usually always happy. I had to get a picture of her in this sweatshirt. It's super Korean. This is how Korean's would phonetically think to spell monkey "mung ky". Between the spelling and picture of a monkey as the statue of liberty with an american flag... It's just perfect! Haha