Day 384: Friends and Our Last Term

It's almost December and we have entered our 5th and final term at our school, which is kind of a weird thought. Last week was the last week of work for 2 of our co-workers who started at the same time we did, so now we are the most experienced teachers at our branch (including our manager). The teaching aspect of our jobs keeps getting easier, as for some of the classes we will be teaching the same material for the 3rd time.

Even though we know what we're doing, we found out yesterday that we have to go to a conference in Changwon (an hour away) next Wednesday. I guess every foreign English teacher in Korea has to go to this conference in one of several locations, so all the teachers in our province will be there. We have to be at our school at 8am to drive there, and then we'll get back just in time for classes. To me, the worst thing is that they don't tell us what the purpose of the conference is. It's one of those cultural things that I still haven't gotten used to and don't like one bit. The higher-ups say you do it, so do it and don't ask questions. I guess we'll find out eventually, but we even asked our manager why they had the conference and she told us she doesn't know, that they didn't include that information.

On a much nicer note, we had friends visit us last week! Our friends Josh Ferguson and Ethan Anderson have been traveling the world since September and came down to Geoje to visit us during their stay in Korea. They stayed at our apartment from a Friday through Thanksgiving morning. Over the weekend, we took them to Busan and did some of our favorite things there, and on Sunday we went down to the national park in the south of Geoje to do some nature stuff. We dragged them on a couple of runs and hikes too, before enjoying what served as Thanksgiving dinner with them (chicken, mashed potatoes, squash, and cream soup as gravy) before they headed to Seoul for a few days. Here are some pictures:

Beomeosa, our favorite Korean temple

Wandering through the shops of Book Alley

Sarah found a piece of fishing line and a hook and tried to catch stuff with it. Josh found this very exciting.

Ethan wanted us to frame him

It was a little sunny for selfies

Ethan at the summit of Guksabong, one of our favorite mountains

Josh's favorite purchase in Korea: Obama socks for 1,000 won (less than a dollar)

Thanksgiving! (I promise there was more than one plate of food)

We're starting to look forward to the end of our time here, and we have countdowns started to the end of our time in Korea (90 days) and to getting back to the US (121 days). I'm not sure if we've mentioned it in the blog before, but we're going to spend March traveling to Tanzania, the Netherlands (via a long layover in Cairo to see the Great Pyramids!), and Iceland, which is also technically a long layover between Amsterdam and Buffalo. We've already booked pretty much everything and we're trying to balance being excited for that (and getting home) with focusing on the present (partially because we know the time will go faster if we don't look too far ahead). We also are both finished with grad school applications, which have deadlines tomorrow, so hopefully we'll be getting some information on what next year will look like in the next few months! But for now, we just need to keep taking it one day at a time.

One year!

It's officially been one year since we arrived in Korea last November. In honor of the anniversary, a really good weekend, and the fact that we just haven't blogged in a really long time, here you go: a post.

As life became more routine for us here, the blogging routine just about disappeared. We do the same thing everyday, pretty much, and no one really wants to read about that. Wake up. Run. Go to school. Sleep. Again. Work is great, actually. The kids are wonderful, I'm going to miss them terribly when we leave, and by now we have done all the lessons at least once, so planning is minimal. We had a speech contest this past Friday, which was a lot of fun. They were really nervous. It was adorable.

We've also been running a lot lately. Another reason that blogs have been minimal. A good chunk of our morning is taken up by running, stretching, EATING. In August, we decided to motivate ourselves by signing up for a race, which happened to be this past weekend.

On Saturday morning, we got on a bus from Geoje to Tongyeong, the nearest city to us on the mainland, and from there to a wonderful city called Suncheon.

Not long after we stepped off the bus in Suncheon, we must have looked like confused foreigners, so, who else but the Jehovah's Witnesses to the rescue! The first witness, friendly and as helpful as can be, helped me to figure out the bus schedule so that we wouldn't miss our bus out on Sunday night. About two minutes later, we were approached by two more middle-aged women, who told us that we definitely needed to talk to our future children about safe-sex at an early age, and then offered us a ride to the next place we were headed. They were so friendly and easy to talk to.

They dropped us off at the Suncheon Bay National Gardens, an extremely beautiful place where the International Garden Expo was held a few years back. It was kind of like Meijer Gardens on steroids. I'll just show you a few pictures.

Me after the marathon...

Lots of art built right into the paths. 

My favorite part was this huge courtyard of bonsai trees. This one was about 600 years old. 

The gardens were wonderful, but huge! It would have taken the whole day to see them all, and we had only arrived about 2 hours before closing. We headed to our hotel and then went to find some pasta. 

The next morning, we went to breakfast at our hotel and realized that the national team from Seychelles was also staying at our hotel, we talked to them a bit at breakfast, and it was just nice talking other runners for the first time in a long time. Steven got all nerdy and tried for the rest of the day to learn as much about Seychelles as he possibly could. 

Our hotel was a 5 minute walk from the start, so we didn't have to leave until just before the start of the race, which was wonderful. It made the whole thing a lot less stressful. So many people were so friendly to us. I met so many kind Koreans and a guy from New Zealand. Steven won the 10k, and then spent most of the time waiting for me to finish hanging out with the Seychelles team.

Steven with the #1 runner from Seychelles

For me, the marathon was really nice for 20 miles, then the last 6 were terrible. The race was beautiful, mostly on quiet country roads. It was pretty lonely and I was by myself for most of the race, but I prefer that to crowds any day. The groups of high school girls at the aid stations made me feel like a celebrity, they were wonderful. I ended up running 3:10, which was about 10 minutes off my goal, all lost in the last 6 miles of the race. Ugh. But I got fifth place and a 15 minute pr, so can't complain about that!

                                             

After the race, we ended up walking miles more (ughhhh) to try and find this thing called the Sky Cube. It was definitely worth the walk, though. The sky cube is an unmanned train that takes passengers out over the wetlands on this raised track. You can see all the wetlands and mountains that you wouldn't be able to see from the ground. It drops you off in the middle of this really neat reedy area with tons of hiking trails/boardwalks. We walked for  a while and took some pictures. On the way back, we met another super friendly Korean couple who wanted to take our picture. I got to use some Korean, so I was pretty happy. 

You can see the little "train" cars right above the reeds. 

I just really liked this house.

We made our way back to the bus station and got some of the last tickets on the last bus! Whew! And then went to look for some food. On a Sunday night, though, it seemed like every restaurant was closed, so we went to Lotteria (basically Asian Burger King) and got some quality post-marathon food. 

                                      

After our long absence from blogging, we can't make any promises about future posts, but we'll try to do better than we have the last 6 months or so (yay low standards!). Our friends Josh and Ethan are visiting next week, and the week after that we start our last 3-month term at our jobs, so hopefully we'll have things to write about.

Day 154: Cherry Blossoms and History

The past two weekends we've been pretty busy exploring our host country. Two weekends ago we went with a group of friends to Gyeongju, the capital of the Shilla dynasty, which ruled Korea from the city from around 50 BC to the 900s AD. It was a history-filled day, which made me (Steven) really happy. First we saw the tombs of many Shilla kings--they buried kings (and other really important people) in a wooden vault, which they then covered with stones and then earth. The result is impressive mounds, some of which are over 30 meters high and 200 meters around.

All of the buildings in the historic part of Gyeongju are built in the traditional Korean (Chinese) style--even Starbucks!

This is the oldest astronomical observatory in East Asia--built in the 600s

After that we saw an old fortress where they were currently doing archaeological work, and then went just outside of the city to Bulguksa, one of the most famous temples in Korea. It was perched on a mountainside like most temples here are, and was quite beautiful (but incredibly touristy).

The wall of the fortress

This was the refrigerator!

Bulguksa

Sarah was happy about the history, but happier about the flowers. :)

After Bulguksa, we drove farther up the mountain to Seokgoram Grotto, which was possibly the highlight of the day. The grotto was near the top of the mountain and was a room basically dug into the mountainside. Inside was a gigantic statue of Buddha with lots of intricate carvings on the inner walls. Pictures of the inside were forbidden, so we only have pictures of the outside, but the whole thing was quite impressive in its architecture.

This is the view from the parking lot (it was a half-mile hike to the grotto). It was super hazy that day, which was a bummer.

We also ate a delicious traditional Korean-style lunch!

This past weekend we did some adventuring slightly closer to home. On Saturday we went with two friends to Jinhae, where they have a cherry blossom festival. The trees were really beautiful and we enjoyed the morning wandering around a new place, looking at beautiful flowers and eating festival food (which in this case was roasted pig and ice cream).

In the afternoon our friends headed back to Geoje and we took a bus to Busan. That afternoon we went to Gamcheon Culture Villiage. It started as a refugee camp during the Korean war and continued to be more or less a slum until the government poured a ton of money into it in 2009 to turn it into a tourist attraction. Why is it a tourist attraction? Colors!

We stayed overnight and in the morning took the subway north of the city to go to Beomeosa, another temple. We've been to a lot of them here in Korea, and sometimes they start to seem the same: same style, same colors, all set on a mountainside, and mostly tourist-filled. But Beomeosa stood out. Even though there were a ton of people there, it seemed more authentic. Part of that was that there were actually people worshiping in the buildings. While some of the people I am sure aren't any more dedicated to their religion than nominal Catholics who happen to pray if they visit Notre Dame, there were also some monks performing a ceremony of some sort. And the buildings and scenery were absolutely beautiful.

The lanterns are only up temporarily for the Buddha's birthday, which is sometime in May.

There was a museum full of artifacts from the temple. This was a printing block, completely hand-carved.

This is the same block with what it helped produce.

We spent the rest of the morning hiking on the mountain that Beomeosa is on, and it was nice to be away from the city and crowds of people, especially on a beautiful day like the one we had.

North Gate of the Geumjeongsan Fortress 

A few bonus pictures from some of our runs here on Geoje!