Just a Quick Merry Christmas!

Hello All... or I guess hello to anyone that reads this blog. MERRY CHRISTMAS! Currently, it is December 25th where I am, 24th for all you back in the states.  I just wanted to write a quick message saying Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, miss you all!
The holiday season is just not the same here in Korea.  I am missing many things. And without these many things Christmas is not Christmas at all. First, I miss my family.  They are the people I spend every December 24-25 with. Without them, I don't really realize that it is even Christmas time.  Secondly, there is NO snow. Snow is oddly important on the holidays to this native Minnesnowtan girl. This is my first Christmas without these two essential parts of the holidays. Family and Snow for me. I don't think I ever really realize how important those two things are until I moved to Korea and am currently experiencing Christmas without these so very important things. While I am very excited for my trip to Thailand (My flight leaves in 6 hours!), I hope I can spend every holiday from now on with my family.
MISS YOU GUYS SO MUCH!

Love you all and hope you have a wonderful Christmas time... simply having. a wonderful christmas time.
in 12 hours I will be in 90 degree weather. ahhhhh - better go pack! :-)

the days run together...

I have been here in Korea for 21 weeks now. WOW. what have I even done? Time has flown, days run together, and I continue to live life in Korea. I am still happy and enjoying being here. I love the independence. As the title suggests, this will be a conglomeration of different days, events, and things I have seen/done.
I always use my photos to jog my memory of what to include in my blog posts. So as I revert back to my photos  I will walk you through my most recent adventures.
A friend from college, Colleen, whom I also studied in Spain with, is now here in Korea also teaching at a POLY school.  She is living on the southeast edge of Korea while I am living over in West Seoul.  We decided to meet up at Olympic Park, the site of the 1988 Olympics.  We walked around the park, chatted about our schools and experiences, and had dinner together.  It was nice to see a familiar face, hopefully we will meet up often.  There is much to see at Olympic Park. At the park are all of the buildings where the events took place, such as a swimming pool, velodrome, fencing arena, etc.  The park is also very well kept, lots of trees and green grasses.  It's a nice place to go and exercise, relax, and get out of the hustle and bustle of the city of Seoul.  There was also a museum containing artifacts from previous Olympics.
Here are some pictures from this day.

The Peace Gate at the entrance of the Park

The torch.... still lit. :)

The pretty trees, leaves changed to red. 

One of the many sculptures in the park...

And other sculpture...

Colleen and I using the famous Korean work out equipment

(refer to a previous post for more about the workout equip)

The Lake in the Park.. in the distance you can see the ring of the flags. 

Colleen and I outside of the museum

the tiger-looking animal is the mascot of the 1988 Olympics

November 11 is a semi-holiday here in Korea. It is called Pepero Day. The two 1's in November 11 look like Pepero so the Pepero company decided to create a holiday where they can sell sh**loads of pepero! Brilliant idea if you ask me. You are supposed to give Pepero to people you care about.  Of course, as a teacher, I received more Pepero than I knew what to do with. It is December 5th and I still have some from November 11. So, NOW you are asking WHAT in the world is Pepero? 

Good question. 

They are chocolate covered, pretzel like sticks. But not pretzel, more like bread sticks. Something that is hard to explain.  Here is a picture. 

Not my picture but this is what they look like... and those Korean characters say Ppeppero. :)

BUT here is a picture from Pepero.  This is my desk at school covered in the pepero I received

There is my desk. And yes that loooong stick is pepero!

Here is a cute message attached to one of the boxes of Pepero. These pepero were coffee flavored. Delicious.

Thanksgiving! 

While we celebrated Halloween at school, we didn't really recognized Thanksgiving so much.  I worked on Thanksgiving Day, awesome. NOT. oh well. I told the kids all day, today is a holiday for Ms. Ilkka. And they were wondering why I was even at school on a holiday. So on Thanksgiving Day, the kids had a Thanksgiving inspired lunch and we made Indian headdresses in the afternoon. I explained Thanksgiving to them in simple terms and showed them pictures of the typical foods we eat as well as some Macy's Day parade clips.  They loved it. 

My co-workers and I celebrated Thanksgiving on that Saturday instead of Thursday.  We went to the DMZ (I know, great way to celebrate the holiday) and then we had a delicious full Thanksgiving meal at my co-worker's apartment.  We got REAL American food! SO amazing. Thank God for living close to the army base. We had everything from turkey, ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberries, veggies, to pumpkin pie. We still have leftovers in our fridge at work.  Definitely made Thanksgiving feel real.
I will expand more on the DMZ in another post. 

Halloween - Korean Style.

I am finally getting around to updating my blog. Busy, busy times here in Korea. With Halloween, Thanksgiving, and planning for the Christmas concert at work, oh and report cards of course, and exploring Seoul on the weekends, my free time is quite small. But, here I sit on a very cold, Saturday morning eating Goldfish (just found then yesterday here in Korea), watching the flurries (yay! but of course it won't stay, only long enough to make the street slippery), finally updating this blog.
So, Halloween. Yeah. We celebrated it at school and it was way more elaborate than I ever thought a Korean school would get. The decorations for Halloween went up on October 1.  These decorations included spider webs, a haunted cave, dry ice.. .like I said more celebration than ever expected. And for those of you that know me well, you know that Halloween is probably my least favorite holiday, besides Valentine's day when you are single of course, but I do not enjoy buying a costume that is ridiculously priced so I can wear it for 1 night.  I DO enjoy the candy. :-) However, after I saw the decorations and preparations the school was going through to set up for Halloween, I sucked it up and went out and bought a costume.  It turned out to be much better than I had planned.  I found a cute bee costume at a Halloween shop, one of the few in Korea.  When I went to pick it out, the store was packed with foreigners trying to find costumes for the wonderful holiday.
At school, all the teachers had a different station they were in charge of and the kids rotated to each station to do the activities.  I did Halloween Bingo. There was also pumpkin carving, making masks, scary stories, and many more. It was a fun day getting to see all the other kindergarteners that I don't teach. Most of the kids were in costume too so it was also fun to see all the different costumes they had. MANY MANY Spidermen and princesses.  I would say those were the 2 most popular. I wore my costume all day, even for the older kids. They all yelled after me, "Hello, Ms. Beeeeee!" and I would proceed to chase them making a lovely buzzzzzzing. :)
For a little after school fun, a group of us went to a Halloween party of a bunch of teachers. Then we headed to Itaewon, the city by the military base where we wouldn't get the typical stares from Koreans because the whole town was in costume. It was fun to see people celebrating Halloween in another country.
Overall, Halloween was more fun than I projected. Shocking.

AND pretty sure this bee costume is rewearable. yesss.

My Kinder class - the Chestnuts! only 7 came, I do have 12 students though

The Princesses and Me. :-)

I know you aren't supposed to have favorites but here is mine, Sunny!

GROUP PIC! My class plus my Korean Teacher in front of the pumpkin/ other decos

Matt, my co worker and partner teacher. we share the Chestnut class.

He was a swimmer, obviously.

A couple more cuties

Rachel, a 2nd grader, wore a full bear costume.. she is a peanut too so it was adorable!

After work fun! My spiderman! :-) on our way to the Halloween party

The bee and grapes! Cindy, a co worker and myself..

A couple kids we saw on our way to the party.  they wanted a picture with us, I think more with Spiderman but Mike told me to take one with them

Had to include this one, here is Matt and Mike teaching Koreans a few dance moves, including Mike's signature knee switching move. HAA love it!

Same-same just a bit later

I am talking about Fall in Korea. It is similar (or same-same in korean english) to our fall in MN however it seems to just occur later. We were enjoying nice 70 degree weather up until Halloween. It has now taken a sharp dip down to the low 30s.  It's COOOOOLD. I have to remind myself that I am from MN and that I can handle this.

Anyway, I went hiking with a couple friends the weekend before at Bukhansan National Park which happens to be in Seoul, north edge. The leaves were all changing, beautiful colors, and there was a cool view at the peak of the city of Seoul. It is the second tallest mountain in Seoul.  Compared to the hike I did in Seoraksan earlier in July (see pics below),  this hike was easy.  It was only a couple hours in comparison to the 12 hour hike to the top at Seoraksan. However, the scene at the peak was very different than the other climb.  I am not sure if I emphasized enough in my previous hiking post that Koreans LOVE hiking.  I am not sure why it is such a favorite pasttime but the mountain is always littered with Koreans in their high tech hiking gear like dri fit clothing which I am convinced keeps them sweat free, making me feel completely rediculous in my sweats and running shoes.  Often they let me know they think I am ridiculous by laughing, snickering, or just plain staring.  Whatever. I can still climb! Anyway, my point is that the peak was covered with these Korean hikers and the peak itself was extremely rocky and small.  Mike came along but stopped climbing quite early in the hike.  He is scared of heights and after reaching the top I know that he couldn't have made it without wetting himself. It was ACTUALLY pretty scary... first you pulled yourself up with a rope using a metal railing for support that was nailed to the side of this steep rock.  Once you were at the top, you were joining a large group of people, pushing by each other to get up and down and all around.  The top was all rock, no flat area to stand and with everyone pushing it got quite scary.  But there was a wonderful view of the city and the beautiful foilage that was red, orange, yellow, and green still!
Here are some pictures to enjoy.

is it... The Ilkka's backyard???

If you look closely, you can see 2 people on the mountain through the leaves... this is a very popular mountain to do free climbing on, pretty much meaning rock climbing with the bungees, carabiners, ALL.

There's Mike, Matt's behind him bending over, and Ray a bit farther down the hill. It was a hard climb. Worked up quite a sweat!

THE TOP!

The Korean hikers at the top of the mountain

There is Seoul down there.. look closely!

The beautiful leaves and their fall colors.

The scary top, and the railing you hold on to for dear life.

ME @ the TOP--->

I'm a teachaaaaaaa WOW. how did that happen?

Yep. That's right, I am actually a real teacher. Crazy huh?  Didn't think it would ever happen?  Yeah well me either.  But here I am.  4 months in. 1/3 finished with my contract. Time flies. I decided to make a posting about my kids and other random school pics/events.  First the kids had their school pictures, which involves about 12 pictures, some in costumes (princesses outfits with props - don't ask me!), some in their very formal school uniforms, some in hogwart-like robes, and of course a group photo. Here are some pictures I managed to capture from this event.

Here they are! My class in their sharp unis

Jina, Joshua, Emily, Thomas... all the girls love Joshua!

Here are some randoms that I have taken during my time here.  There are a couple dance party pictures, a couple caught in the moment reading, and a nice one of some of my whiteboard artwork, pretty beautiful if you ask me. :-) Enjoy.  this post is dedicated to kid pictures.

The Sexual Violence Cow... an odd presentation our kindergarteners attended with this cow man using puppets to explain sexual violence. couldn't say much more. it was all in Korean.

Some favs. Daniel and Sunny SO cute!

A Pistachio class dance party and YES of course in their uniforms which they were about 3 times in a year.  Such special outfits required a bit of fun.

Yep here is my whiteboard artwork.  You might need to click on this one to see it up close. I am usually the WORST whiteboard artist but I was quite proud of this masterpiece.  It diagraphs how crayons are made.

More cuties! :-) LOVE them.

IT'S THAI TIME!

Too excited not to blog about this before all other recent and not so recent events... I just booked a flight to Thailand today for Christmas, leaving the 25th returned the 2nd.  I am very excited - planning to see the grand palace, take a tuk tuk ride, ride elephants through the jungle, snorkel, relax, and get a tan. Can't wait. time for a countdown... considering my next day off of work is December 25th. Yep. Christmas Day. Saweeet. I am planning on going to Bangkok for a couple days and then to fly to Phuket (the beach) for some more fun. Here is a picture of a beach in Phuket... and if it looks familiar it's because it's a famous poster! Woo.

Yes. this IS where Emily will be spending her Christmas.

Don't be too jealous... join me.

Well... it's been a while.

First off, I will apologize for my absence of blogging for far too long. Many things have happened since I last posted and I'm sure this will be a long update. 

How about I start off with the wonderful visit with my padre... the lovely Mr. Ilkka stopped by and hung out for a while as part of his 3 country business trip.  It was definitely one of the best weeks so far.  I enjoyed showing him a piece of my life here in Seoul. We met for dinner a couple times and then got to spend a full day together on Saturday.  We started the day off at my hole in the wall apartment.  Dad got a chance to see my living conditions and the surrounding area.  We then took off for Insadong, a very traditional area of Seoul.  In Insadong is the only Starbucks coffee sign in the entire world that is not in English.   There are many vendors lining the streets selling their goods.  There were also many foreigners roaming the streets just like my dad and me.  We had a nice Korean lunch, walked by the Cheonggyecheon Stream which is a creek that is lower than street level that flows through the city.  It is a little bit of much needed peacefulness among the craziness that is Seoul. After we ventured over to the Korean War Museum. There we met up with Mike and enjoyed the museum which had both an indoor and outdoor display of artifacts.  Many planes, guns, uniforms, videos, etc.  It was just fun to spend time with Dad. Top finish off our great day together, we went to my usual restaurant on my block, the one I have talked about before where I get gift certificates for my frequent business and most workers recognize me.  We had samgypsal (pork BBQ) - delicious! And of course when we checked out, we were given another gift certificate! :-) Following dinner was my favorite part of the night.  I took Dad and Mike to the noraebang for their first experience with the magic of a singing room.  We had such a blast there singing together. Great way to end the night. It was so special that Dad could spend some time with me.  I hope he comes again!  And brings Mom this time :-) right Mom?

Thanks for a fun week Dad!

Dad and I in my sweet apartment.  Timer pic!

At the Fountain in Gwanghwamun

Still at the Fountain Area - Beautiful Flower bed, supposedly there are the same number of flowers planted here as days that Seoul has been the capital of Korea

At the stream - self vacay of course!

That says Starbucks in Korean. Try to read it... I dare ya.

A close up of a wind toy that a vendor was selling on the street in Insadong

We are all Dorks. Here is Dad the Dork. Dad with his best friend.

Emily the Dork. YES the leaves ARE larger in Korea.

Now Mike the Dork. (at the war museum)

War Museum... statue outside

Dad and Mike inside a transporter/tank

Dad in front of the famous war memorial statues.

My turn with the statues!

Inside the museum, just working on my gun skills. ( i was horrible, dad was great!)

Dad enjoying the BBQ... chopstick PRO.

And of course following dinner was the memorable noraebang experience...Dad probably enjoying some Nirvana.