Lotus Lantern Festival/Buddha's 2554th Birthday

Ok so I know I haven't written in a bit, but I've been sort of busy...I had open class with my Social 3 class and Jerry's parents came. Last weekend there was a Lotus Lantern Festival. I uploaded pictures on picasa of that...it was pretty and there were just a TON of people. The parade on Sunday lasted about 2.5 hours!

This weekend, Ronald and I took the KTX train from Seoul Station to Busan. We spent Friday there in Busan. The first thing we did was find a jimjilbang (like Dragon Hill Spa I talked about earlier...a bath house of sorts) and take a nap. We'd stayed up all night to wait for the train. So we slept and then wandered around a bit and found the beach and then we went to Beomesa Temple. You just take the metro to the stop and when you come out, it directs you to where the buses take you up to the temple. So it was very easy getting to and from there. This was Buddha's 2554th birthday, so the temple was open 24 hours. When we got there, they were putting on a show and all the lanterns were hung. When it got dark, they lit all the lanterns. Very pretty. What was also cool was that there was a natural spring fountain they drank from...I will put up pictures of this, but we also saw this at the Seokguram Temple. But I'm getting ahead of myself...we stayed to watch the show and people kept adding little bookmark looking things to the lanterns -- each lantern had one and I assume it was some type of prayer.

After the show was over, we headed back down and they started some little fireworks. The line to wait for the bus was HUGE. The bus we did get on got stuck going down because a car was parked badly. What ended up happening was that some men came and they lifted the car and moved it a little bit towards the curb so the bus could squeeze by. After this we went to bed.

On Saturday we went to Gyeonju to see the Seokguram grotto. Something that was apparently very cool that Ronald had seen advertised. It was raining pretty hard, but we took a bus from Busan (pretty nice for 4,000!!!) and then had to take a local bus to another part of the city. I had to go to the bathroom so we got off the bus too early and used public restrooms at a museum. Then we waited about 30 min for the next bus to come and that one took us to the stopping point for the bus that takes people up to the grotto. After taking that bus, the driver told us that the next bus was at 6:20. At this point it was about 5 pm. So Ronald went back to ask about the last bus and that was synonymous with next for the driver. Anyways, we went to see the grotto and it turned out to be just one Buddha. Apparently pretty historical, with a lot of religious significance. But that was it. So we headed back to where the bus was coming -- but it was already 6:24. So basically we missed the last bus. So we started walking down the mountain in the pouring rain. What would have taken literally 2 hours to walk was cut down to about 20 minutes because a nice Korean family stopped to ask if we wanted a ride -- yes. So after this we hopped on a bus to Daegu. When we got there it wasn't raining too badly, and we took a cab to what we thought was a jimjilbang. It wasn't. So we paid a whole lot of money and the taxi driver just took us to some other one.

So we spent the night there and on Sunday we walked around a bit and went to eat at The Holy Grill, a mexican food restaurant. It was really good. Owned by Canadians. After that, it was time to head back to Busan. So we took the bus back, walked around in Busan some more, and spent our last night at a pretty nice jimjilbang. Monday morning we caught a taxi and took the train back to Seoul.

Today one of my students, Sehoon, tied himself to his chair today with his backpack strings. That knot was pretty hard to get out and he couldn't move...pretty funny.

Otherwise work is pretty monotonous. Same thing every day except for today and tomorrow...speaking and writing tests!

Speaking and writing test days are so nice. You take an hour of class to do them. Apparently they took almost the whole class period a few months ago, but they changed the exam. Now, there are four prompts: 2 speaking, 2 writing. We give them an hour, but it doesn't take that long. They hardly know the vocabulary anyways, so they can't really answer the questions.

Teacher's day is on Saturday. What a bummer...why couldn't it be on a Tuesday or Thursday? Those days are so long.

Tickets to Busan have been purchased for the weekend of the 21st. Tomorrow I have to see if I can buy the return via internet...I hope so! If they're all out, I'm screwed. Reena and Mark will be staying here...sorta funny...we're trading cities for the weekend basically. They live in Masan though, which is about an hour away from Busan. We'll be staying in Busan and I think will have a full day to see the grotto, a huge castle/temple thing hanging off a mountain. I sure hope the weather's good.

Today the AC has officially been turned on. It's hot and sticky. Yikes...what am I gonna do when summer is finally here!? I think I'll melt away.

Children's Day

Apparently you cannot upload videos to youtube if you are in Korea. Weird.

Today was Children's Day which meant that there was no school and no academies. Today, we visited the Costco on the eastern side of the city at the Sangbong metro station (line 7). The membership costs 35,000 won a year...pretty nice! So we bought tortillas, chicken, shampoo, cups, cranberry juice, hot sauce, and DR PEPPER! So exciting. Pete was in the apartment the whole day basically because he's job searching and doesn't have a computer so I said he could come over and use one of ours for free. So when we got back we took his photo and he uploaded it to wherever he'd been applying to. Then I made fajitas/burritos, though it's very sad to not have guacamole or cheese.

It was too smoggy/foggy/cloudy to go to the glass cafe on the Dongjak bridge, so maybe Saturday instead...

This past week

Thursday I had the day off because it was a school holiday. It was really nice not to have to go to work on that long day! So Wednesday night Ronald and I met up with Pete to check out Hunter bar and MTB bar.

On Thursday Ronald and I decided we would go to a spa and swim in a pool or hang out in a jacuzzi if available. First we went to the Happy Day spa, but it turned out that they had renovated the whole top floor where the pool was to a wedding ceremony center. So we left there and walked back to the metro. I bought a pair of cheap hiking shoes from the side of the road, and we were off to the next spa! I knew that Dragon Hill Spa had a common area pool because I had been there with Charis, so we headed there to the Yongsan metro stop. We hung out in the pool for a while then decided to get massages and with that came a free hour in their jacuzzi. Or so we thought. We ended up fighting the guy at the end because he had told us the wrong price, which was way more money. So we made a deal and paid a little bit more than we had wanted to.

We were going to go to Cafe Cloud on the Donjak bridge to watch the sunset, but after fighting with the guy at DHS, we missed it. So we went back home.

Friday we went out to Hongik University/Hongdae and went to a hookah bar there that Pete knew of. After that we went to another bar around there but decided to leave after that because there were a ton of foreigners there and most of the places there were clubs. Back in Cheonho we went to California bar that had black lights and after one drink decided to go back home and watch a movie. It was about 5 am at this time, so we watched part of a movie and then went to bed around 7 am.

Saturday we had planned to go to Itaewon to see if we could get Ronald a phone (he needs one with emailing capabilities) so we rolled out around 3 pm. Once we got there it turned out there was only one phone place (this had been a recommendation from a language exchange friend of his) and prepaid phones don't have internet. So we walked around for a bit before heading over to Gangnam. We were going to meet Sheena and her husband there at the metro around 8 pm, so we decided to just go there and hang out for a bit. First we went to a Paris Baguette to have a snack and sit for a while and then we went to the Book and Spa cafe again. There we had hot chocolate and then did the Dr. Fish.

After that, it was time to meet Sheena, so we met up with them and went to a bar nearby. We hung out there for about 2 hours and then they decided they should go because they needed to catch the metro back home. So we did the same thing and ended up catching the very last train of the night at 11:30 (lucky!). We were hungry since we hadn't eaten dinner, so we went to a restaurant across the street and had pizza. Then we went home. We watched another movie and fell asleep.

Sunday we went to Yongsan to buy tickets to see Ironman 2 in 4D, but it turned out Ironman 1 was in 4D or Avatar. So we bought tickets to see Avatar in another theater at 3:15. We were going to meet Charis in her neighborhood to go to a spa for a scrubdown, but she woke up pretty sick, so we had about 4 hours to kill. We bought a cable for the TV and looked around for microwaves, but they were all too expensive. Still the cheapest one we've seen was in E-Mart for 59,000 won. We decided to just go to the metro stop where the movie theater was to look around and hang out for a while. It turned out there was a huge Lotte shopping mall so we looked around for shoes for Ronald and then went to try to find the movie theater. The movie theater was in the Times Square mall. It was enormous. Very pretty architecture too. At the bottom of the mall was E-Mart, so we went there to verify the microwave price and we ended up looking at a little wooden floor table. So after the movie we went back and bought that and a couple of floor cushions to have a place to sit and chill on the floor and eat dinner, etc.

The movie was sorta strange. Your chair moved, and sometimes they would blow out flower smells or a thing would hit your feet. It was pretty hot in there, so we were always glad when a windy part was coming.

We went home after that and made mashed potatoes and omelettes for dinner and went to bed. I think I'm getting sick again, so I'm taking lots of vitamin C and I took some sudafed and advil. We shall see...

I get Wednesday off, so we will be going to Cafe Cloud!