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.