Our last Korean Birthday

Our last moments in Korea were amazing. The week before we left we celebrated mine and Nick's birthday. It was a great last two days of work!!!

Our wonderful co-workers gave me this wonderful mug from our coffee shop. Every time we visited we would order the same thing...... hot chocolate and a waffle topped with two scoops of vanilla ice cream. It was heaven! So glad I can remember that place every time I drink from this mug.

Cakes in Korea are so different from American cakes. They are not very sweet and the icing is more of a slightly flavored thick cool whip. The cake pictured above was a coffee cake with macaroons.

My Birthday celebration was also a farewell celebration for us so we had a party. We enjoyed coke, pizza, and Suzi's famous bulgogi tteokbokki. Everything was delicious!

On Friday we celebrated Nick's Birthday. He got a bag full of snacks and a butterfly brownie.

Every picture I took of Nick, Josh was in the background making funny faces!

Thanks to all of our wonderful co-workers at CEV for making our last days so wonderful. We wish you guys the best of luck and we miss you!

Weekend With Sohee

One of our first exploratory excursions we embarked on when we arrived in Korea was a trip to Busan. We booked a cheap hotel, our first love motel, and had an eventfully long ride down to the port city. For our last excursion we thought it would be fun to go full circle and head down to the same area and see how our experiences and the connections we had made here had changed us from the newbie expats we were two years ago.

This time we met our friend and co-worker Sohee and had her show us around since Busan is her town.

Busan is such a blast because it doesn't have just one city center like Daegu, instead it has many centers all with their own unique twist.  For this visit we were in the Nampo area.

We met Sohee at the Nampo subway stop Saturday early afternoon and started our adventure with shopping. We stopped by a few stores and then stopped for a snack for the best hoddeok in all of Busan.

 Shopping....

 Sohee and I

We waited in line for about ten minutes before we could have our own hoddeok.

Here they are being cooked in  A LOT of butter. It is fried dough with cinnamon and sugar on the inside. When it is finished they cut it open and shove a variety of seeds inside. 

Worth the wait

Here is a close up picture. You can see the seeds and cinnamon and sugar. DELICIOUS! 

After the tasty treat we walked around some more. Nick bought this awesome hat.  He'd been talking about trying to get a hat with Hangol on it for a while now, but oddly enough, those are difficult to find in the regular shopping areas. What's not difficult to find are hats with the F word on them, go figure.

It says handsome man, or flower guy. LOL

He also tried on this coat!  He actually tried on many others but this one was the only one that fit him. He's not a skinny Korean man. I loved it and thought it was worth the money. Nick's first comment was that Lon (his dad) would kill him if he wore it to church. We didn't get it but we had a great time shopping.

Next stop was bottomless sushi and sashimi! Nick has never tried sashimi until today. He always thought it would taste fishy, which is an abominable flavor for him, but it doesn't. He tried Fatty Tuna first and liked it so he had another.  They had another kind of sashimi that was right up his ally that was topped with beef, a little onion, and some sort of steak sauce. Not something I was familiar with but it was delicious!

Nick had just put the sashimi in his mouth!

Group photo!

Our next stop was dessert which happened to be macaroon ice cream. You get to pick the color of your macaroon and then the flavor Ice cream you want. I chose red with cookies and cream and Nick chose blue with mint.  His was better.

 Before

After

Dessert was delicious but wasn't as exciting as the activity that followed. We went to the fish market and checked out the many kinds of everything!

 There was so much water on the floor that my socks got wet!

 Huge crabs!

 Different kinds of clams.

 This lady picked up an Octopus for us! SO COOL!!!

A clam decided to escape from his tank. We tried to pick him up but we were stopped by the ajumma because the clams were super expensive and she didn't want anything to happen to it.

Later, Sohee took us down to Songdo beach right as the sun was going down. It was beautiful. In the water they had fake whales and dolphins that looked like they were jumping.

 You can see the dolphins back there

Sohee and I at the beach

 A cool picture of me and the lights

The bridge with color changing lights

The bridge takes you to a small island (called turtle island because it looks like a turtle) with statues of turtles and this man trying to reach the mermaid. 

 mermaid killing Nick

 Sohee riding a turtle

We had a great time at the beach and in Busan. We are so grateful that Sohee took us to some of her favorite shops and restaurants and that we didn't have a repeat of the snomit incident.  I guess the only sad thing is that they removed the caped frog that used to greet us upon our arrival.  Capped Frog, you will be missed. On the other hand, we had a blast and made some memories we will never forget.

Letters of Love

Sometimes students write us letters out of the blue and give them to us along with a special treat on Friday. Sometimes they write us a letter in the post office instead of writing their mom or dad. Whatever the reason for the letters, we love them all. We are going to miss all of our students so much. It is nice to know that we have changed lives, even if it was only one week of it, they definitely changed ours.

Please note that if you have a hard time seeing the letters, click on them and you will get a bigger version. If you are looking at this through email go to our blog to see the larger pictures.

In case you can't read this the top heart says, Don't forget me, Cindy, Ha Yea-jeong. The bottom heart says, You are so beautiful, You look nine

 Nick gave Peter Twizzlers because he was the only Korean that liked them.

 We both had the privilege to teach Emma, she is such a smart and gifted student.

Our classroom management plan was giving students stickers. Depending on the number of stickers determines how much candy you get. 20 stickers is the max!

When I look at this picture I can see all of the students in my mind. My rule was if they spoke Korean I would take away points. I guess he thought I took more points from the boys than the girls, he was really upset about it.

If Nick and I are teaching English camp in the same week, we usually come together for a couple of activities. Our students get to know both of us and I'm pretty sure they all love Nick more :)

 Ju Yeol is a student Nick and I both taught in Cyber School and we love him so much!

I think we both taught Crystal many times because she was a loyal student to CEV. During vacation she would attend here and during the evening for evening class. She is super sweet!

 This letter just cracks me up so much... I guess it is Google translate in all it's glory... well a centipede!

It is always great to know that students get excited and have fun during class time.

I have a small nose!!! YESSSSSSSS

I hope you can see this because this is a drawing of Nick and his classroom style! He truly inspired some students! He has a natural teaching ability.

Please notice the music notes next to Nick! He loves coming up with random songs!

Starbucks (Young-Dae)Has been Nick's Cyber school student for two years. I had the fun opportunity to have him in my class and he wanted to write Nick a letter. He loved us both so much that he wishes we stay a couple for a long time! Super sweet!

Love this picture....

And this picture just hits my funny bone!

We have so many more but I only picked our favorites. I hope you had fun reading them. I'm sure through the next couple of months these letters are what will get us through.

Three Weeks Left

Nick and I are trying not to concentrate on the fact that we have about three weeks left in Korea. Our schedule is super busy. This weekend we are going to the Seoul LDS Temple for the last time. The following weekend we are going to Busan for the last time. We aren't sure if our last weekend will be spent cleaning or in Daegu.

We have made some really good memories with some really special friends that we will never forget.

Some recent memories include eating boneless chicken feet for the first time. We walked the five minutes to eat at Nice Chicken for the last time. We wanted to try the boneless chicken because we thought we saw it on the menu the last time we ate there. Turns out that the last word after boneless was 발 (feet) we didn't catch that part, and we ended up with a nice plate of spicy boneless chicken feet. I think the owner was a little mad that we didn't eat em'.

The Feet

Our miscalculation here was all Nick's fault, so we determined that he had to pay the ultimate price and eat one.  Nick kept procrastinating his fate so 'Manda just popped one into his mouth. This picture makes me laugh so hard.

Look Google finds it funny too and made a gif out of it.. I could watch it forever!

Another fun memory that I will never forget is that Christina came to visit me this month and she brought with her Heather and the Talbot munchkins, Aiden, Lily, and Reagan. We went to a beautiful pond in Changnyeong and walked around before we went to the street market and then back to school.

 Isn't it a gorgeous view?!

I'm so grateful for Christina!

At school I gave them a tour and right before they left Richard asked them to stay and meet the students who had just arrived. The students cheered as the three children entered the room and crowded around them. They pinched their cheeks and touched their arms and heads. It was adorable! I have never seen anything like it before.  The kids were super awesome even while being thronged like little celebrities.  Heather wrote all about it, you can check out her blog post about the experience HERE.

 Suzi gave them some souvenirs. They will never forget CEV!

The kids with Sohee!

We have also eaten our fair share in Korean BBQ

 Look at all of those side dishes!! YUM!

 The Beef!

 Cooking the beef!

We obviously don't cook it the right way because she came and took over!

And we went bowling for the first time in Korea

Time seems to be flying! I'm so glad that I still have time to blog about all of our adventures! I hope you guys enjoy reading this blog as much as I enjoyed writing it.  That's not to say there isn't more to come!