Friday, June 26, 2009

Changes, Changes, and Changes

Just wanted to give an update to everyone back home.

I have found a new job and I move on Monday. I am leaving Seoul and moving to Geoje Island. It is located in the farthest southern point of South Korea on an island connected recently to the mainland by a bridge.

I have accepted a new position there teaching for an English Village. The pay is great, and I'm excited about experiencing the island life. Kay is excited too, I think. :) Haha!

Anyways, I'll be busy with this being my last weekend in Seoul so drop me an email. I leave for Geoje on Monday at 12pm. They are sending a car to move me and all of my things. It's a 5 1/2 hour car ride. But so much better than a 5 hour ferry ride. :)

I look forward to telling you all about the new job and posting new pictures of my new home.

Love to all in AZ, TN, TX, and MT (you to Rosie!)

Thanks for all the continued support.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Korea's Best Kept Secret Part Two

Day Two: Sunday

We booked our tickets on the last ferry out so that we would be able to enjoy another day at the beach. Which, of course we did! :) Again the weather was great. Very foggy though which made it very mysterious when I was on my own walking on down in the water and all of a sudden I could see no where but a few feet around me. It was such an enjoyable day.







After we hit the beach, we packed things up to head to the port to spend the afternoon having lunch and taking more pictures. Of course, as we found a place to have lunch, we also found some good beer, a deck of cards, and the guys sitting next to us gave us our first taste of soju. All in all a great end to a quick but wonderful island getaway.





Korea's Best Kept Secret Part One

Hello everyone,

So much to write about from this weekend. It was an amazing trip and I was so bummed that we had to come back home last night. I took over 150 pictures but I'm only going to post a few of them on here. If you would like to see more of them, you can check them out on my facebook page.

So, Saturday morning rolled around bright and early. I was so excited I only got two hours of sleep. We were on the subway by 6:20am. Grabbed a taxi to the domestic ferry terminal. It was amazing to see people boarding these ferries with boxes and boxes of camping supplies, fishing supplies, etc. I wish I had brought my motion sickness medicine though because the ride out to the island (1hr in length) was kinda a little too bumpy for me. Plus we stalled in the middle of the ocean for like 5 minutes. Since we had bought tickets for the express ferry it turned out that the express ferry was not an open air ferry but a closed in "bus on a boat" type of set up. Anyways, as we got closer to the island I pulled out our hotel information. We had set up for them to pick us up at the port to bring us to the hotel cause we had never been there before and we knew the hotel was not walking distance to the port. So our hotel's name is in Korean and Tina and I are looking at the paper trying to figure out how we are going to find this van when we notice what looks like numbers in the spelling. 7-21-1-1. So we get off the ferry and were looking for 7-21-1-1. It was really funny at the time. Anyways, we found them really easily. They had parked right there on the port.



So we hopped in the van and they sped off to the hotel. I guess its not the vacation season right now because when we first got to the hotel we were the only guests. Later in the day and later that evening more and more people showed up. Here is a picture of our hotel and the view from our 3rd floor room.







We quickly unpacked some things, grabbed our beach bags and headed out in search of some lunch (having not ate breakfast I was hungry!) and to head to the beach. Well, like I said before, it was not vacation season so our hotel's restaurant was closed. Kind of fustrating when your really hungry. Anyways, we decided to wander on our own to the beach and figured we would find something along the way. Sure enough we did. Here are our fabulous pictures of our first lunch on the island.







After lunch we hit the beach. It was absolutely perfect weather. The tide was so far out it was incredible. I didn't even spend anytime laying out on the beach, I just spent like 3 hours walking the beach looking for shells and walking in the water.















After heading back to the hotel for a quick nap (cough, cough, 4 hour nap), we headed back out to the beach for the sunset and to walk to the pier on the other side of the beach. Here are some amazing photos of the sunset. I also took some beautiful pictures of a Korean woman and then her with her husband and son. I think they came out amazingly!



















After hiking back up the beach we stopped in at our lunch spot from earlier in the day and ordered dinner. We thought we were ordering what the other people had been eating, but they ended up serving us rice and spicy pork. Which was good food but it was hard to stomach cause it was REALLY spicy. When I asked for some lettuce to eat with the food, the older lady brought the lettuce and some bean paste for us. We procceeded to eat the lettuce with our rice and she came over and was speaking to us in Korean. I'm pretty sure she was saying, "No, no, you don't eat it like that". Haha! The next thing I know she is taking a piece of lettuce, meat, and bean paste, wrapping it up and shoving it in my face saying "Ah, Ah". Literally, I could not take it from her hands and feed myself she made me open my mouth and she shoved it in. It was the most hilarious thing ever. The experience made up for the spicy food. Haha!



And that my friends, was the end of day one on the island.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Just a quick hello

I will do a big blog post when I get back from my weekend vacation. Heading with Tina to Deokjeokdo Island which is an island location about 70 miles from Incheon, Korea. I am so excited and its going to be a great trip. Just so everyone knows, Kay and I are doing fine. I took her to get her hair cut again and now she doesn't look like a yorky...more like a chihuahua now. Haha. I will post a pic of her new haircut later as well.

School is going well. Keeping me busy during the week. My students are noticing I'm losing weight, but what I'm really enjoying is the comments I receive from parents. Today one of my students parents came in and asked my boss if I was doing ok. She said it looked like I had lost so much weight and she worried that I was not doing well here in Korea. My boss told her I was doing fine, I was just on a diet. Hahaha! Gave me a good laugh. She whole heartedly was prepared to start bringing me homemade Korean food to make me healthy again. Hahaha!

Anyways, I'm off to the island at 6am tomorrow morning. Can't wait! Check back Sunday for pictures and another blog! Love to all in Arizona, Texas, and of course Tennessee.

Love,
Me :)