We Got Presents!

Yesterday while at work, a huge package came from my family! Hooray! We have our first Christmas presents!!!! ...in November, haha. We are excited for Christmas to arrive so we can open them all! We are so lucky to have such wonderful family members who send us presents even though we are far away. Nick's family is also sending a package to us soon, we can't wait for that one to come too! We are going to be getting a small tree (think desktop worthy) for our apartment and I will probably bring home hand crafted decorations for the apartment. My kindergarten kids are already in full swing with Christmas art projects and practicing Christmas carols. Each class has to learn a Christmas song to perform for our "pageant" on the 24th. My class is singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus". They have a whole dance routine and we are going to be making Santa hats with mistletoe on top. Nick's prekinders are singing "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth". Other classes are singing "Frosty", "Up On The Rooftop", "Rudolph" and more. Needless to say, it will be adorable when we get them all together to perform.

Today is our only day off this week, but at least we are finally done with Saturday classes! It is raining. We slept in, had a delicious lunch of curry katsu and sushi, and then did our grocery shopping for the week. We have been eating a TON of vegetables lately, so we picked up lots of fresh carrots, lettuce, eggplant, squash, zucchini, broccoli, peppers, and more. I made meatball and broccoli soup for dinner (I've been practicing making soups from scratch in preparation for the cold winter nights) and we bough a sliced baguette from Paris Baguette, the local bakery chain. It was pretty good, full of lots of the above veggies, haha. Now we are going to watch a movie and wish that tomorrow wouldn't come so quickly. At least now we get to fully appreciate our weekends!

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Today is Thanksgiving, and all of our families and friends are sitting at home, enjoying their 4 day weekends and a gigantic feast...turkey, stuffing, gravy, vegetables, pies...mmm how good that all sounds.

Today is Thanksgiving, and Nick and I spent it teaching a full day's worth of classes. Tomorrow we also have classes, as well as Saturday. No holiday for us. No turkey either...it's not something we can buy easily here. Even if we could buy a turkey, we have no oven to cook it in.

But really, it's okay. While we miss everyone back home (and we REALLY miss the time off from work) we have so much to be thankful for. We have had a blast these past four (yes, really FOUR already!) months and we are looking forward to the rest of our adventure in Asia. We have great, loving families back home who are in our thoughts and hearts (and luckily we get to keep in touch with them fairly easily via the Internet and Skype) and we have made a nice home for us here in Korea.

Since I couldn't make turkey I made baked chicken with garlic and I did my best to make gravy (hooray for milk and dried chicken stock and lots of spices!). We ate it with loads of veggies and homemade mashed potatoes. It was a nice, slightly nontraditional Thanksgiving dinner, but as close to tradition as we could get.


We hope everyone is having a wonderful day and that everyone is as lucky to be as happy as we are! Happy Thanksgiving and love to all!

A Play Day

Today my kindergarten kiddies put on their plays. They were given the topic and together we came up with scripts. They made fun masks (as you can see!) and memorized their lines. Each month they have to write a speech or do a play to practice their memorizing and speaking skills. They had a lot of fun today pretending to be animals escaping from the zoo. :)


After our plays we had an art class where we worked on warm and cool colors. The kids have been learning about abstract art lately and we did colorful swirly lines. I did the project with them, it was too much fun to pass up, haha. I stuck my finished piece under my desk's protective glass covering.


This is going to be a long week, even though it is only Monday night we are already tired. Just one day off is NOT enough of a weekend. Thankfully we only have this coming Saturday's classes left and then we get our weekends back.

A Great Sunday

Since we only had Sunday off this week (boo 66 hour work weeks) we decided to make the most of it. We got up this morning and went to the Dragon Hill Spa in Yongsan, near the electronics market. It is a famous Korean spa in Seoul. For only 12,000 won (or $10.30) you pay for entry into all of the spas, saunas, steam rooms and pools. I decided to indulge, and for an extra $50 I got a wet salt scrub, aromatherapy body scrub, a one hour long full body oil massage, cold cream mask, cucumber mask, shampoo and deep conditioning for my hair. It was pretty nice, I must admit, even though the masseuse took pleasure in beating my muscles into a pulp. My skin is silky soft and smooth and my face feels great. My hair felt pretty good today too, I was very satisfied. It was nice to feel so pampered and it was even better to know that what would have cost me hundreds of dollars in the States was completely affordable in Korea. Nick enjoyed the steam rooms, the hot and cold baths, and the sauna - we both spent a relaxing few hours at Dragon Hill and plan on going back in the future.

After our wonderful experience at the spa we were starving and went to Itaewon to try an Arabian buffet that had been recommended to us by our friend and coworker - the same coworker who told us about the spa, the all-you-can-eat tuna buffet, and other fantastic restaurants we have tried - and we were most happy once again with his recommendation. We gorged on all-you-can-eat cucmber salad, delicious hummus and babaganoosh, falafel, lentil soup, moussaka and lamb with mushrooms and potatoes. Plus many more things, haha. The restaurant finished our late lunch off with full tea service. The red tea was fantastic and perfect on a cold day like today.


Fully satisfied and feeling good, we ventured out onto the streets to complete our Christmas shopping. We perused countless shops in Itaewon and then later Insadong and managed to get everything we needed/wanted for everybody! We will be mailing our packages on Tuesday, we are so excited for our families to get their gifts. I'm not going to spill on what we got everyone but we spent a lot of time and thought getting together fun, unique presents for everyone. I spoke with my parents this morning and they let me know packages are coming our way, too. We are excited to receive packages! It will take a few weeks for all the packages to get to their final destinations, but we are pretty confident that everything will arrive in its proper place by December 25th. It should be a good Christmas!

This week will thankfully be our last 6 day work week. Tomorrow should be fun for me as my kindergarten kiddies will be performing plays that they have been working on for the past month. They've made cute masks and everything for their theme - "The Day the Animals Escaped from the Zoo". We'll have two plays to present, I am excited to see them do their best. Nick is only looking forward to having this week done and getting our weekends back, hahaha.

Happy Halloween...on November 14th!

Today was our first Saturday at work. At least we had a Halloween party to make up for it!


The bulk of our day was spent making children cry and giving them candy. Our prekinder and kindergarten classes came to school dressed in all sorts of adorable costumes. We did not have regular classes at ALL. Instead we made giant vampire dolls, mummified our kids, ran around and scared them in monster masks, went trick or treating classroom to classroom, played Halloween games, had a costume contest and made them cry again in our playroom haunted house. IT WAS SO MUCH FUN.


Two of the teachers dressed in scary costumes. One of the teachers was a scary skeleton with a creepy mask. The other dressed up like the spooky mannequin we have had sitting in the lobby for weeks. It was VERY funny watching the kids sit down next to the "dummy"...and then having it yell and reach for them. It was amusing watching the kiddies' reactions. Some did not care at all, and were very happy to pose for photos. Others, however...cried and cried and cried and cried. Nick's prekinder girls especially had a hard time overcoming their fear and spent most of the day huddled either in the corner or in Nick's arms as they cried in terror.



There are too many pictures to load - we took over three hundred pictures today. We picked our top one hundred and put them on our facebook if you are able to view them there, and if not we are also loading them to our shutterfly account. We were completely enamored by all of our children in their costumes. It was also so much fun getting to just play with the kids instead of trying to make them settle down and learn.




I'm going to let the photos do the rest of the talking, words cannot describe most of our happiness from this day.

Happy Pepero Day!

Holy Chocolate Cookie Sticks!


Today is Pepero Day in Korea. Apparently 11/11 is a lucky day. And the Koreans celebrate this lucky day by giving Pepero cookies to each other. Well, technically the boys are supposed to give the girls Pepero cookies. But in school ALL the children brought Pepero cookies.


Pepero cookies are like Pocky cookies. They are long thin biscuit cookies that have been dipped in chocolate. Some have almonds or hazelnut or macedamia bits mixed into the chocolate. Some are small, some are big, and some are GIGANTIC.


Nick and I got a lot of Pepero cookies. A TON. We have enough Pepero cookies to eat until 2010. By the end of the day I was giving away Pepero cookie boxes that I had been given because I simply had too many to fit into my giant black purse. Nick left school with his pockets stuffed full of boxes of cookies.


Happy Pepero Day!

Sweet and Spicy Meatballs

We do not have an oven. We have a stove-top and we recently acquired a toaster oven, but we do not have an oven (or a microwave for that matter). Therefore I am usually unable to make anything baked. No lasagna, no chicken parmesan, no meatloaf. But tonight I decided to get creative with our toaster oven. If I couldn't make meatloaf I could make meatballs.


I made us meatballs with a sweet and spicy tomato based sauce (it was nice to make a sauce from scratch again, I feel like it is totally worth the work) and we ate them with steamed squash, steamed zucchini, steamed broccoli and fried potatoes with onion and garlic. It was really good. I think I am going to use the toaster oven to "bake" more things. :)

Our last weekend for the month of November...

...and it rained so we pretty much stayed indoors.


Saturday we ran some errands, doing a quick run through the electronics market and Itaewon for Nick. At the train station in Yongsan there were some beautiful and colorful dalias that made us think of the Conservatory of Flowers back home. We tried to get Nick's computer fixed at the only Apple-authorized store in Seoul (located in Yongsan) but of course the service bar was closed. That was fun... Nick was less than pleased. In Itaewon Nick was able to get a nice Virginia Tech windbreaker from Jimmy, our go-to guy that we met through our friend and fellow teacher. Jimmy sells a number of very high quality football jerseys. They are the stitched kind, and have all the appropriate holographic NFL tags and etc...but where they would be sold for $100 or more in the states, Jimmy sells them to us for $20-30. Nick is Jimmy's "long time friend" (as Jimmy calls him haha) and Jimmy sold Nick the windbreaker for only 25,000 won, which is right around $20.



Sunday we went to Costco and fought the massive crowds of people to get some meat, cheese and also a large delicious pizza that we will be able to cook in our toaster oven, one slice at a time. It will be nice to be able to have pizza as a snack or a meal if we ever desire. The pizza here can often leave us wishing for real pizza...and while Costco pizza isn't the best, it doesn't have corn, onions or mayo on it so it's more reminiscent of pizza from home than Korean pizza is.

For dinner I made a spicy brown chicken curry loaded with vegetables - steamed broccoli and zucchini, sauteed onions, garlic, peppers, squash and carrots...it was goood if I do say so myself. The curry was not too spicy but had a good kick to it. Our friend Meredith came over while I cooked and she stayed for dinner. I have been sharing some of my recipes with her lately and showing her how to make cooking at home more fun, tasty and interesting. She happily left full and with several hand written recipes for her to try. :)

And so our quiet weekend is coming to an end. May our overworked existence begin...

Fall is fully here

Since returning from Osaka we have noticed the complete change of the seasons from summer to fall. The weather has chilled dramatically; we have brought out our jackets and scarves. The trees have burst into brilliant yellows, burnt oranges and deep reds. The beautifully colored leaves have begun to drop to the ground and the wind blows the leaves into brightly colored columns as we walk to school. We kick leaves aside as we walk down the sidewalks to get to the grocery store. Leaves leaves leaves...everywhere. It's nice to experience the change in season, we each have not had such an experience in some time.


The school week started with more tests for the students which means more grading for us. There has been much hustle at school trying to make up for the missed days. We will begin Saturday make up classes next week on November 14th. The rest of November we will have 6 day work weeks to make up for the days missed last week. At least we won't be losing any pay due to the school's closure...but we will be losing our weekends and that is a little sad. We won't be able to adventure as much.

Since it is cooler and we had such a wonderful (but expensive) trip last week in Japan we have been eating in and plan on cooking at home all this week. Not that either of us are really complaining about that, I make sure we eat well, haha. Lots of fresh vegetables are being harvested right now and we have enjoyed all the squashes and greens. We eat six to eight different types of veggies a night, and we couldn't be happier! I've been making lots of curries and I'm looking forward to winter stews and soups. We have yet to try the Korean pork spine and potato stew, but we've been told by friends here that it's amazing, and if it is as good as the spare rib soup we will be delighted.

We hope that the next month doesn't exhaust us too thoroughly and that we are still able to have some fun, but it seems as though busy times are ahead. Here are some pictures of our leaf-filled park and our street and even our work building (the one of the left, you can see the POLY sign on the 7th floor).