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.