Greetings from 2009!

2008 has officially departed from us here in Korea, and it's been quite an adventure so far. We just got back from the New Year's celebration at city hall here in Daejeon, and it was quite an event. They ring in the new year in a very literal sense...In the courtyard of City Hall, just beside where they had the stage set up, was a traditional-style building with a 20-FOOT BELL inside that they actually ring when the clock strikes midnight (and then several times afterward). Oh, and did I mention that there were THOUSANDS of people gathered around the area for the party and subsequent fireworks display. We arrived just 5 minutes before midnight, so we didn't get to see much of what was happening onstage, but we were positioned in VERY close vicinity to the fireworks site, which was AWESOME....except for the fact that the remnants of the exploded packages rained down on us as we attempted to take pictures. I'll post some pictures as soon as we get a chance to sort through the shots from the night...we took several hundred that need sorting.

Anyway, I just wanted to pass along a good old Happy New Year to everyone from us, and we pray that your 2009 holds as much adventure as ours promises to (just in your own special way).

Christmas in Korea

We've just finished our first Korean Christmas, and it's been quite the day! Since we didn't really have the option of being able to spend time with our family this year (something about being halfway around the world :P), we decided to do something a little different. As I mentioned before, Christmas pretty much amounts to a shopping holiday here, so rather than sit around all day for family to wake up, we went out exploring the town some more and getting more familiar with our city.

The first stop of the day was Art Espresso, a beautiful little coffee shop owned by Linda, the receptionist at our school. On the walk up from the subway station, I took a moment to try my hand at panoramic photography (and by hand is how I did it, as we don't yet have a tripod). You can check out the image here. When we got there, Shan ordered a green tea latte (which she says is better than anything Second Cup could even dream of making), and I (the non-coffee drinker) had a hot chocolate, which just happened also to be delicious. After a little while, Linda came in (we told her we were coming yesterday and she said she'd be there in the afternoon-we just beat her there!) and the three of us hung out together for awhile, just chatting and sharing muffins. Then Linda graciously gave us a ride back to the subway station (because she figured it was way to far to walk (twice) and she wasn't sure which bus went back down to where we wanted to be).

Next, we tested out some research I had done in my attempts to find a guitar in the city. The word was that one of the major chain stores in Korea called Home Plus had a music section in some of their locations, so we went to check out our local Home Plus store. Unfortunately, we had no success in finding guitars, but we did manage to find Pizza Hut and Skin Food (which is a Korean brand of body products not terribly unlike what you can find at the Body Shop in Canada, only way better, or so I'm told).

The third and final stop on our journey brought us to our local Costco, where we went through the fun of signing up for a membership and then exploring two full floors of pure awesomeness. We didn't actually buy anything today; we just wanted to get our membership and see just what it was like inside a foreign Costco. (For the record, it's got to be one of the easiest stores we've come across to navigate; Costco's standard layout is apparently a worldwide standard, and all of the signage was in Korean and English.)

Then came time to head back home to attempt our own homemade 삼겹살 (samgyeopsal). We had picked up the supplies the night before at the grocery store, and bought all the sauces, but we bought 갈비 (galbi) instead for meat. 삼겹살 is thick strips of pork while 갈비 is thin strips of beef ribs. We figured it would be a great experiment, as we wanted to see how easy it would be to make it at home. It turns out that there's a reason why they put the grill in the middle of the table when you go to restaurants that serve it - running back and forth to the stove with the meat is a little bit tedious :P. Also, just having the lettuce and sauces isn't quite the same as having all of the other fixings to go with it that you get at the restaurant either. Now, it was still delicious and quite filling, but I think we'll go out to a restaurant the next time we get a hankering for 삼겹살.

Not long after we finished eating and getting our pictures from the day put on Facebook, the phone started to ring, and we spent the next several hours talking to the various family and friends who called, and we're still not through everyone we want to talk to! But now it's gotten terribly late, and it's about time to head on to bed.

So many zeroes!

Currency conversion is a funny thing. You see so many zeroes on the money in your pocket and it makes you feel quite rich. But then you do the math, and you realize that you've gotta cross a few of those zeroes off in order to get a semblance of how much you actually have. Either way, though, it's a great thing to know that we now both have steady jobs and regular paychecks, and life is great! Add to that the fact that we are now in possession of a working computer again, and it can't really get much better than this....well, I suppose if we weren't half a world away from our friends and family it'd be even better, but then we wouldn't be in Korea, either. But really, though, since we have our Canadian phone and now that we have a computer again, home feels a whole lot closer again.

As Christmas day gets closer, we're trying to figure out just what we want to do with our day off on Thursday. This is going to make for a very new holiday for us, as we get ready to spend our first Christmas completely on our own. The interesting thing about Christmas here is that it's not as big of a holiday in Korea as it is in other parts of the world, so while it is a national holiday, it's pretty much like a shopping holiday in the States - all of the stores are open, and it's just government institutions and schools that are closed. The fact that it's a national holiday at all is testament to the large Christian population in Korea - there's almost literally a church on every street corner here in our part of Daejeon.

The other exciting thing coming up is our winter intensive courses. Starting in the new year, we'll be going into overtime as we run a month of extra-long days. We keep our regular classes, but we add morning classes for any students whose parents sign them up. It'll be really tiring, but really great to be able to have some of our kids every day for the month (especially some of the ones that need a little extra help). It does mean that January will be a very long month, but it'll be very much worth it for the chance to give some of these kids the extra help that they need (and the overtime pay doesn't hurt, either :P). The two ladies in this picture are definitely not part of the group that need extra help - they happen to be two of the smartest students in our school. These are the kind of students that make teaching a pleasure.

I also got a chance to place my very first geocache here in Korea, too. I put the cache together before the computer died, but I had to put its placement on hold until I figured out just how easy the PC방* was to use. Once I learned that, I got the cache into the wild and posted it...and it was first found within two days of being posted. I was quite excited to see my first cache found, and I can't wait to get some more caches placed in town, as the caching is pretty slim here in Daejeon. There's lots elsewhere in Korea - I just have to get to them. (*PC room - essentially an internet cafe, except they're used almost exclusively for gaming...and I'm the 'almost')

All in all, at the moment, life is going swimmingly. We've made it through our first month in Korea, and we've pretty much fallen in love with everything. We came to Korea planning to stay for two years, so that, if we didn't like it here, one year wouldn't seem so long. But, from our experience so far, it definitely doesn't seem unreasonable that signing on for a second year might be a real possibility. So, to all of you out there who are thinking about coming over, please feel free to contact us, and we'll do our best to answer any questions you might have.

Time, Tests and Technology

It's been quite some time since my last post, so I thought I should give a small update.

The last few weeks have been quite hectic. Our brand new computer (which we bought because our old computer died before we left) up and quit on us, and it was not a very happy night at our house that fateful Friday night. As a result, we've been without direct internet access for the last few weeks, but every so often I've been sneaking off to a PC방 near our place to check emails, Facebook and Twitter, but we do SO miss the convenience of having a computer in our apartment.

The fortunate side of this situation is that because our little lappy is still brand new, it's under warranty, which is great....except we have to get it to Tokyo to get it fixed. We'll get it done soon, hopefully, I just want to get our data off of it before I send it (because in setting it up originally, I forgot to do a backup schedule for it...silly me). We'll hopefully be computer-ified again in about a week or so, so our regular updates should be back on schedule soon.

Anyways, on to more exciting news.

As Christmas time approaches, so does test time for our kids, and while I feel a little bad about giving them all tests right before Christmas (since they just got through a huge round of tests at school already), I trust most of them will do well anyway, since they're all so awesome.

Also, after a little confusion and lots of wandering, we found a lovely English church in town, where we've connected with some of the other English teachers in the city (and even found out that two of them are practically our neighbours!). Shannon got a phone number, and we made plans to get together on Friday night, and to our surprise, not only did we get to hang out with the girls Shannon had been talking to, but it also turned out to be a huge gathering of a full dozen of us at a cute little spot right here in Noeun. Two of the folks who came out were actually from Halifax, and two more are still in their first month, like us, so it was quite exciting!

This weekend, we were able to find our way back to church quite easily, now that we've 'mastered' the bus system (which is supposed to be changing very soon - lucky us!), and it only took us an hour to get there by subway and bus. The pastor is a great guy, and everyone's really friendly, so it's quite possible that we'll make this church our home for our stay in Korea. You can check out the website for the church at http://www.welcometodaejeon.org/cic/.

All in all, though, life is fantastic here. Our school is great, the kids are AWESOME (and hilarious!), the city's getting easier to navigate, we've started making friends, and we've even started learning Korean from the receptionist at our school! I think I've said this a dozen times already, but if you or someone you know is thinking of teaching English in Korea, I absolutely recommend it!

Looking back, I guess this wasn't exactly a small update, but I guess that's okay :)