Cuteness Overload!

In the past two days, I think that I've experienced about as much cuteness as I have in the past couple of years combined. First of all, the WM class of '05 Korea Reunion finally happened on Saturday! It was great to see Lauren, Ruth, Ben, and Mi Young all at once (my Canadian friend Helena also made an appearance, despite not having had the privilege of attending good old WM). We went ice skating at this public outdoor rink in front of City Hall, and then hung out at Dunkin Doughnuts for a long time. I know what you're thinking- Dunkin Doughnuts? But while in the US Dunkin Doughnuts doesn't usually bring to mind the words "cleanliness" and a "classy atmosphere", it does in Korea! I'm pretty sure couples even go on dates there. These are the photos I took there of Ruth and Ben, who have both been infected by the Korean cuteness bug.

Then today I went to the kindergarten end-of-the-school-year performance, which was mandatory for all teachers at my school. The kids did all these plays, songs, and dances (in English), which was almost too cute for us to bear- one, because kindergarten plays are always cute, but even more so when it's Korean kids doing it in English. I didn't get many quality pictures because we had to sit all the way in the back, but here's one of the "5 Little Monkeys" skit, and a close one I got of one of the dances.
P.S. I tried sleeping in two different jjimjilbangs (public bathhouses/saunas) these past two nights. While I love going to the jjimjilbang, through those experiences I've learned that I'm not good at sleeping on the hard, crowded wooden floor there surrounded by talking/sleeping/snoring Koreans. I guess I still am attached to my western comforts of beds to sleep on and chairs to sit on while eating.

Middle Earth to the Middle Kingdom

Well, after hanging out with Ben, Gabe, and the hobbits last week, I took another trip, this time to China. It was my first time in the middle kingdom (China is Zhong guo in Chinese, which means middle kingdom, because China in the eyes of Chinese people is the center of the world) and I really enjoyed it. I met up with my sister who's teaching English there, and we went to a couple cities in northeast China, including Beijing.



We saw most of the sites in Beijing, although I was disappointed that the Maosoleum (that's what I call Chairman Mao's mausoleum- pretty clever, huh?) was closed. We did see Tianamen Square, the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven, and we ate Peking Duck, which was fantastic. We also went to the Great Wall near where my sister lives, and we hung out with both Chinese and Korean people, which was fun. We could communicate and get around alright, but it required that my sister and I use the full extent of our limited Asian language abilities (mostly my sister).

While China was fun and interesting, I got the impression that most Chinese people were perpetually angry about something- but then my sister explained to me that all the yelling, arm waving and angry expressions are just how Chinese people communicate. For instance, this one time we were in a taxi I thought the taxi driver was going to throw us out of his cab or start hitting us, and I was asking my sister what we did to make the driver so mad, and she said, "Oh, he's just saying that he's not sure where it is."
Not that one way is better than the other, it's just that Chinese and Koreans act differently.
Also, Chinese food is so good.

P.S. I felt compelled to share this quote and picture.
"A man who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man." -Mao Tse Tung.
There you have it.

Living it up with Gabe and Ben

So for two weekends in January I was lucky enough to be able to hang out with fellow WM alums Gabe Kauper and Bennet Baldwin (left), in Suncheon (a city where Gabe was teaching in the southern part of Korea) the first weekend and in Seoul the next. While I couldn't hang out that much in Seoul because I was leaving for China about 12 hours after Gabe arrived, we had a blast the previous weekend in Suncheon. The three of us were in norebang (karaoke) for about 2 hours, singing our hearts out, and then we went around town buying snacks and eating in convenience stores, and we ended up in the jimjilbang (bathhouse/sauna) at 2am. At the jimjilbang we hung out in the showers/baths for a while (sans clothes), then put on the little shorts and shirts and went into the big common area where they had a snack bar, internet access, a norebang, massage chairs, little caves of different temperatures to hang out in, and the main floor area where people could hang out/sleep. By that time it was about 3am, and the place was jumping! There were probably around a hundred people in there, about half of them sprawled out asleep on the floor and the other half talking, laughing, and running around. Our plan was to sleep there, but sleeping straight on a hardwood floor with nothing but a little hard pillow for your head was not as easy as we had hoped (there were a few mats/blankets we saw, but they were all taken). So I ended up trying to sleep in one of the automatic massage chairs, and Ben and Gabe roughed it on the floor. While it wasn't the best sleep we'd ever had, we still loved the jimjilbang.

The next day we went and saw this big old Buddhist temple complex near the city, and while we were taking pictures we ran into Rose, my Korean co-teacher from my school in Seoul (which was about 4.5 hours away)! We hung out with her and her photography friends who she was down there with, and then Ben and I headed back to our respective cities. This picture is of one of the temple roofs. Also, we got to meet Gabe's foreign co-teachers, who we liked to refer to as "the hobbits". They were a unique bunch.

I also managed to get Ben and Gabe to do the "Victory"/"Peace" sign in this picture, which is ubiquitous in East Asian photos. Now I am posting the picture on the internet to shame them in front of the millions of viewers who visit my site. It's alright guys, I think we've all been there.
Sorry, no pictures from jimjilbang.