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.