LOOOOOONG time.
Sorry.
We've been busy enjoying our last month(s) here in Korea, and since we are leaving in less than a week now, at this point we are packing in all of our last "Korea" experiences before we go. We have our plane tickets, and are departing Korea at 2pm next Wednesday, March 4th, and arriving in Cedar Rapids, IA at around 10pm. Unfortunately, the direct Busan -> Cedar Rapids flight was all booked, so we are going on three planes: Busan to Tokyo, Tokyo to Chicago, and then Chicago to CR.
Today was our Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony, which was minimal effort on our part, beyond getting up at 8am, but was clearly fun for all our 7-year-old students and their families. We did have to sing "I Believe I Can Fly" - which was a paedophile joke we couldn't avoid laughing about - but beyond that it was talking to excited kids and standing around looking teacherly.
So our last four days of school are afternoon elementary classes only, which is very easy since we have 4 more days of school and only 14 classes total. If only our whole year had of been so simple!
Will try and post more soon, but wanted to at least get some information up!
Peace
A&E
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Sunday, February 01, 2009
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
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
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Here it comes... our monthly update!
November, it was a good month :-)
First of all though, Halloween! We wore costumes to school; A = lion, L = mummy. We went trick-or-treating (to parents' houses) with our kindergartners, and then scared them in a Haunted House... well, it was a dark room with spooky music playing, but for 6-year-olds it was quite frightening - a few even cried and many tried to escape out the door! The rest of the day we did Halloween-themed activities, passed out candy, and generally had a laid-back school day. That night, there were Halloween parties at all the foreigner bars, and Anderson DJed at The Basement. The bar was packed, so people danced until dawn - but that wasn't the highlight by any means: Liz, going on stage on a whim due to a plethora of shoddy costumes, managed to win the top costume prize (160,000won in bar prizes - about $125 in food and alcohol) with her reasonably-authentic mummy costume! Anderson's costume, Barack Obama b-boy, wasn't quite as well received :-).
The next weekend, Liz's old coworker from The Sanctuary in Iowa City, Matt Steele, came to visit us. He's been teaching ESL in Gumi, a small-ish industrial town located around 2 hours north of Busan by train. We went out for a delicious pumpkin dinner at this appropriately-named restaurant called Pumpkins, that serves baked pumpkins stuffed with all sorts of meat, vegetables, and cheese. And they have flavored soju, which is quite delicious... We also cashed in on Liz's Halloween prize, so we had a free-to-start party for all of our friends and coworkers! Sunday we spent some time relaxing at Haeundae beach, drinking coffees and watching kite-flying Koreans.
Now, mid-month, Anderson journeyed north early Saturday morning to Ulsan, about an hour away from Busan, to play with DMZ in a soccer tournament. Twelve teams showed up, from all over Korea, making it the biggest tournament outside of Seoul for expat soccer. While DMZ did well, placing 3rd overall and winning 5 out of 6 games, Anderson's tournament was cut painfully short towards the end of the first game when he was brutally headbutted, and knocked unconscious by an opposing player. With a badly sprained ankle, and an ear cut in two places - and bleeding everywhere - a hospital trip by ambulance was necessary, although thanks to the tournament and Korean health care that was entirely free. Twenty-plus stitches later he was back on the sidelines, but even now three weeks later his ankle is still not totally healed. Thankfully the doctor did a truly fantastic job on the stitching, so now with stitches out it is virtually impossible to tell where the cuts were. A consolation prize, and a decent one at that, was the DJ Shadow show that same night in Busan. DJ Shadow was the first real international artist to come to Busan during our time here, and it was great to hear some real music for a few hours. Most of the crowd didn't really know his music, so in that aspect it wasn't the best show ever, but nonetheless it was a great change of pace from the usual musical choices.
Another week of school flew, or limped by in Anderson's case, so up next was a trip to Gumi, where Matt's from, to share a DJ gig with him at the local expat bar, The Waegook Cook. It was definitely a small-town party, but the food was great, the people were appreciative to hear new music, and overall it was a very interesting and enjoyable experience, plus it gave us insight into what life in a small town as a foreigner is like... we're glad we picked Busan! Anderson also sold (for charity) his new mix CD, selling all 20 copies that he brought and raising over 100,000won to send to BBAS Memorial School in Nepal, which was quite sweet.
All right, moving through the busy month pretty quickly!
This past weekend, Anderson hosted a party at The Basement to raise money for Nepal. Perhaps due to Thanksgiving :-(, the bar wasn't as busy as hoped, but another 150,000won was raised for BBAS, our Korean kindergarten co-teachers surprised us by showing up, and a lot of friends of ours came as well, so in most ways it was a true success. On Saturday we had a Thanksgiving-esque potluck dinner with about 10 friends, which meant we enjoyed a fantastic feast and good times all night long - including a great game of charades!
So now it's December, and to continue our series of busy weekends, our cousin Reannon (who we traveled with in India/Nepal) is coming to visit us for about 6 days en route from Japan to America. She's flying standby, so if she can get on the flight that she wants to then she'll arrive here late Friday night. It's going to be very fun to catch up, and to see her insights on Japan vs. Korea.
If you want to download Anderson's mix CD, called One Friday Night In Busan, you can do so here: O.F.N.I.B. - enjoy!
We are currently uploading a bunch of photos to our Kodak website, you should be able to view them within the next few hours.
Hope all's well, only 3 short months until we're Stateside - and we can't wait!
We'll try to make our posts more regular as we begin wrapping up our time here in Korea, we promise!
Peace, and much love
Anderson & Liz
November, it was a good month :-)
First of all though, Halloween! We wore costumes to school; A = lion, L = mummy. We went trick-or-treating (to parents' houses) with our kindergartners, and then scared them in a Haunted House... well, it was a dark room with spooky music playing, but for 6-year-olds it was quite frightening - a few even cried and many tried to escape out the door! The rest of the day we did Halloween-themed activities, passed out candy, and generally had a laid-back school day. That night, there were Halloween parties at all the foreigner bars, and Anderson DJed at The Basement. The bar was packed, so people danced until dawn - but that wasn't the highlight by any means: Liz, going on stage on a whim due to a plethora of shoddy costumes, managed to win the top costume prize (160,000won in bar prizes - about $125 in food and alcohol) with her reasonably-authentic mummy costume! Anderson's costume, Barack Obama b-boy, wasn't quite as well received :-).
The next weekend, Liz's old coworker from The Sanctuary in Iowa City, Matt Steele, came to visit us. He's been teaching ESL in Gumi, a small-ish industrial town located around 2 hours north of Busan by train. We went out for a delicious pumpkin dinner at this appropriately-named restaurant called Pumpkins, that serves baked pumpkins stuffed with all sorts of meat, vegetables, and cheese. And they have flavored soju, which is quite delicious... We also cashed in on Liz's Halloween prize, so we had a free-to-start party for all of our friends and coworkers! Sunday we spent some time relaxing at Haeundae beach, drinking coffees and watching kite-flying Koreans.
Now, mid-month, Anderson journeyed north early Saturday morning to Ulsan, about an hour away from Busan, to play with DMZ in a soccer tournament. Twelve teams showed up, from all over Korea, making it the biggest tournament outside of Seoul for expat soccer. While DMZ did well, placing 3rd overall and winning 5 out of 6 games, Anderson's tournament was cut painfully short towards the end of the first game when he was brutally headbutted, and knocked unconscious by an opposing player. With a badly sprained ankle, and an ear cut in two places - and bleeding everywhere - a hospital trip by ambulance was necessary, although thanks to the tournament and Korean health care that was entirely free. Twenty-plus stitches later he was back on the sidelines, but even now three weeks later his ankle is still not totally healed. Thankfully the doctor did a truly fantastic job on the stitching, so now with stitches out it is virtually impossible to tell where the cuts were. A consolation prize, and a decent one at that, was the DJ Shadow show that same night in Busan. DJ Shadow was the first real international artist to come to Busan during our time here, and it was great to hear some real music for a few hours. Most of the crowd didn't really know his music, so in that aspect it wasn't the best show ever, but nonetheless it was a great change of pace from the usual musical choices.
Another week of school flew, or limped by in Anderson's case, so up next was a trip to Gumi, where Matt's from, to share a DJ gig with him at the local expat bar, The Waegook Cook. It was definitely a small-town party, but the food was great, the people were appreciative to hear new music, and overall it was a very interesting and enjoyable experience, plus it gave us insight into what life in a small town as a foreigner is like... we're glad we picked Busan! Anderson also sold (for charity) his new mix CD, selling all 20 copies that he brought and raising over 100,000won to send to BBAS Memorial School in Nepal, which was quite sweet.
All right, moving through the busy month pretty quickly!
This past weekend, Anderson hosted a party at The Basement to raise money for Nepal. Perhaps due to Thanksgiving :-(, the bar wasn't as busy as hoped, but another 150,000won was raised for BBAS, our Korean kindergarten co-teachers surprised us by showing up, and a lot of friends of ours came as well, so in most ways it was a true success. On Saturday we had a Thanksgiving-esque potluck dinner with about 10 friends, which meant we enjoyed a fantastic feast and good times all night long - including a great game of charades!
So now it's December, and to continue our series of busy weekends, our cousin Reannon (who we traveled with in India/Nepal) is coming to visit us for about 6 days en route from Japan to America. She's flying standby, so if she can get on the flight that she wants to then she'll arrive here late Friday night. It's going to be very fun to catch up, and to see her insights on Japan vs. Korea.
If you want to download Anderson's mix CD, called One Friday Night In Busan, you can do so here: O.F.N.I.B. - enjoy!
We are currently uploading a bunch of photos to our Kodak website, you should be able to view them within the next few hours.
Hope all's well, only 3 short months until we're Stateside - and we can't wait!
We'll try to make our posts more regular as we begin wrapping up our time here in Korea, we promise!
Peace, and much love
Anderson & Liz
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