As always a lot has occurred since our last post... now that it's officially February we only have one more month in Korea. We've seen our flight itinerary, and we will be leaving on March 4, going home via Tokyo & Chicago en route to Cedar Rapids. Obviously we're very excited, it's been almost 2.5 years since we were last in the States, though we will definitely miss our life here in Korea at the same time.

We haven't really been doing all that much of late, beyond our standard teaching routine, although we did just have a decent vacation for Lunar New Year. We got three days off, making it our second-longest holiday of the year, and generally relaxed for every moment of it. We did spend one day being in-town tourists, going to the Eulsukdo bird sanctuary on a nearby (but somewhat metropolitan - it was virtually accessible via subway) island, as well as the Jagalchi Fish Market. Though we were more than a bit cold while walking around, the bird sanctuary was very peaceful and we got to see large amounts of swans, ducks, and other water fowl. We had good timing and got to be there for feeding time, so we witnessed an avian feeding frenzy, which meant lots of heads going underwater rapidly! The fish market was pretty interesting, all sorts of crazy sea creatures were available for purchase, including the largest shrimp we'd ever seen. We also watched some ajummas (old Korean ladies) battle live octopuses, which was quite entertaining. You are able to eat anything that you buy, as there is a restaurant upstairs, so we got some delicious fresh sushi as well as a barbecued fish to share. Quite the spectacular meal, all and all.

As for the other recent holidays, Christmas was a pretty low key affair, although we did go out for a fancy buffet dinner with a bunch of our friends and coworkers. For NYE we only had one day off of work (we had to work Friday the 2nd), so other than going out to the bars we didn't really do much. We're slowly starting to pack things up around our house, though with 4 weeks to go we don't want to pack things up too quickly...

Anderson has 2 DJ gigs once we get back to the States, St. Patrick's Day and 4:20, so he is working hard to prepare for them. He'll be DJing on his laptop, using Ableton Live, so there's a lot of work to be done to make his proper American debut successful!

Hopefully write more soon, we're pretty tired after a late night out yesterday... we did see a live jazz band at one bar, which is a bit of a rarity around these parts :-).

Peace!
Anderson & Liz