I hope everyone is doing well, and thanks to all the veterans who have served the country...sorry, I missed it by a day I think. So, to anyone who reads this and has helped to keep the world a safer and better place...thank you.
I am doing well...just enjoyed a nice Pepero Day yesterday. In Korea November 11th is Pepero Day...pepero are little snack sticks covered with chocolate. They are skinny and look kind of like a piece of dry spaghetti, so since 11.11 looks like 4 sticks, they celebrate by giving pepero to each other. It's mostly a newer holiday, and usually just celebrated by kids, or people involved with kids like teachers. Usually the teachers give them to the kids and vice versa...I got quite a few yesterday, so I didn't even have to eat supper! :) It's funny, some of the older people hate Pepero Day, they say it was just made up by the company that makes pepero to increase sales. I usually have the comeback of "sort of like Valentine's Day?" and that catches people off guard! HA! Or Halloween...anyway, I think if kids want to give snacks back and forth...what the heck old people, let 'em! Some schools are so against it that they won't let the kids bring them to school...a little extreme I think. So, anyway, now you have the run down on pepero! If you care to be even more enlightened, feel free to check out this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepero
HA!
Well, things are going well at the school...so for my usual readers who have requested some info one the school, we are doing well. We have just over 35 kids...it's been holding steady, we exploded the first month and it's been just a gradual climb the last month plus. A few here and there. A lot of Koreans are terrified of H1N1, and so I think that has kept some people from joining academies...Dana seems to think that after the new year that things will get busier. Apparently there are quite a few people talking about our school and have had some nice things to say. We are branching out a little more too...which has been nice. The first little bit, all of our students were from the apartments right next to the school...unfortunantly we are still too small to have a bus and so we've had to rely on most of the kids walking. Well, we've had a few higher level kids who live about 3 or 4 miles from the school, and their parents just drive them to and from school. That's really nice, because that's quite uncommon here. Usually most schools have a bus and they make the rounds and pick the kids up for English, piano, math, taekwondo, etc. So, I'm hopeful if we can ever afford a bus that we can get some more kids, maybe a little further from the school. I think it's been huge having a foreigner (me) working full time, as I've said before, Asan is kind of a smaller area, so most of the schools either have no foreign teacher, or if they do have one, they come by once a week, which isn't really that helpful. So, Dana and I are still the only teachers at this point, we're hoping someday to have enough students to warrant hiring another Korea and/or foreign teacher. We had a fun Halloween party, and the kids really liked it. Halloween isn't celebrated in Korea, well...I take that back, until recently some of the English schools have started celebrating them with the kids, and so at EMart you can see a few Halloween costumes, decorations, etc. but if the kids went door-to-door trying to get candy, I don't think they would score much! HA! So, the kids had a fun time doing that, we allowed them to invite 2 friends if they wanted, and we played some games, carved a pumpkin and did some trick or treating. So...that's pretty much the update. We still just have one adult student, he's really cool, about the same age as me and I teach him M/W/F. I actually enjoy teaching adults much more than kids...so hopefully some day we can get some more adult students, it's just hard with a lot of people's schedule.
This past weekend, Sam and I went to Mt. Kyerangsan so take some pictures of the leaves, it was really beautiful. For those of you who follow my blog, my trips with Sam usually involve just getting in his car and going somewhere. Sometimes if I think ahead I will draw a little map on a piece of scratch paper in my pants or something...but even that's rare. So, this time I did make a crude little map and so I was ready to roll. We left out and headed to the mountain. I had the road numbers down, well when we got to the city about 20 miles from the mountain, there were signs saying to exit to go to the mountain. I was a little surprised, and so Sam exited. It was well marked, and so I figured it would be easy to just follow the signs (the signs here for things like that are usually brown, and the regular road signs are green). So, we got off, there were three or four big signs...then we got to a major intersection and wham...no more signs. We just guessed and drove for about 20 minutes and realized we were going totally the wrong direction. So, Sam suggested just getting back on the highway and going the way I had marked. I concured and that's what we did. So, we were back and cruising along...as we were getting close...we noticed that the exit we were supposed to take was completely gone, and they were doing road construction! HA! Apparently that's why they had the signs to exit earlier. So, we were close to Daejeon at this time. Daejeon is a really big city, so Sam suggested just finding a bookstore and (novel idea here) buying a map! HA! :) So, that's what we did...so now he has a nice sturdy map...it cost around $30, but he said that will help us avoid any future problems traveling. So, my blogs might not be quite as interesting in the future...we'll see!
Anyway...we got the map, found an alternate route and made it to the mountain. The leaves were beautiful and I was glad we got some pictures that day...there was a big storm that night, with a lot of rain and wind, and I think most of the leaves were about gone the next day...so I hope you enjoy the pictures!
