you can dance if you want to.

hello, my friends. 

the k-love has been restored this weekend.  :)

it was our last day of early schedule because we are now heading into february. it was a really good day. the one talking class i teach is with a girl who speaks quite a lot of english and we had a good chat about the zodiac. we are both cancers so we talked a lot about similarities and differences. she seemed to really enjoy talking about her family and their different qualities. i wasn’t sure if the lesson was going to work but we had a fun time. my next lesson was with nari. i’ve had her in class for a few months now. she’s actually really impressing me with how much more she’s communicating. we did ‘would you rather’ questions and she was seriously cracking me up with the stuff she was saying. she mostly tells me about how she likes to exercise, can’t ride a bike, and hates children. i love it. these two girls are my favorite students and i’m so lucky that i get to see them all the time. 


after work, i hopped on the subway to siji. i had some donkas with lia and jen. i think what’s important about this word is that the korean word for sh** is ddong. donkas is pronounced ddongass. hilarious. despite my 8 year old boy’s opinion on this word, it is very delicious. lol. seriously, i know i’m ridiculous but you have to admit that it’s funny.

saturday morning, we headed to korean class… on time. my god. this never happens. NEVER. i mean, they moved class to 10:30 on saturday mornings. i know it doesn’t seem that early but almost all of the foreign teachers are used to getting up later because we work second shift. so, you can imagine how well this works out for a ymca korean class. back to the point – actually on time. korean class is going a lot better now. at first, things were a little slow and i was feeling my brain eat away at itself. however, the teachers picked up the pace and now we’re moving along. we got to play a game in class which was really fun. the teachers would write a sentence on the board with one person facing away from the board. the people who were seated had to act out or speak in korean to get the person to say the sentence. it was kind of a mixture of taboo and charades. listen, our korean isn’t that good yet… we need a lot of help. at the end of class, we convinced the teachers that they needed to come out with us. after much discussion of plans and pushing the date back 3 times, we finally decided that the big date will be on 20 february. don’t worry, i predict a good blog about this. the class is going to learn a korean song so that we can sing it at the norae bang. oh man. haha.

i’m tired of writing right now. i will post the end of this blog very soon. now, i will either watch mulholland dr., study korean, or read.

i hope everyone is well. miss you all!!

face.

why do you ring the bell 33 times?

first things first,


CONGRATULATIONS to ed and katie!!!! they are married and i am happy. i love you guys!

enough marriage chat, back to korea. 

for new year’s eve, we went downtown to party in the new year. i wore a dress but this was foolish to do because i have never been so cold in my whole life. (this is obviously an exaggeration, considering i am from erie, pa… i think you guys who are there know what i’m talking about). however, it really was cold. i thought i might die.

anyways, we all met up at the bar and then walked over to the park for new year’s festivities. like busan, it was like the koreans came out of the woodwork. where do all these people come from? i mean, really, where are you all hiding? it’s a mystery. so, we got to the park about 3 minutes before the countdown to prevent our extremities from turning into ice blocks. of course, we were the only foreigners surrounded by koreans. haha. we did the countdown and we were all hugging and kissing each other… but, none of the koreans were. haha. once again, foreign freaks. lol. but then! the koreans joined in on the hugging fun. the people around us were hugging us and kissing our cheeks and yelling, “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” of course, this got us more looks from more koreans but we didn’t care because we were all having a good start. 

on new year’s, the koreans ring a bell 33 times to honor men that fell in the korean/japanese war. i don’t have a lot of details about this because most of the people i know don’t speak enough english to tell me or are too young to know exactly why this is done. anyways, the bell was ringing forever so we decided to head back inside out of the tundra when all of a sudden… there were fireworks! omg. i love fireworks. so, we stood on the street and watched the fireworks. mainly, i watched the fireworks and jumped around like a fool because frostbite was starting to set in. we all know how much i dislike gangrene. ha.

on to…

the BIG snow!

i woke up last monday to some kind of nightmare. snow. everyone has been telling me, “don’t worry. it doesn’t snow in daegu,” or, “even if it does snow, it only happens for like 5 minutes.” 5 minutes my ass. apparently, this is the most snow that daegu has seen in like 80 years. are you kidding? i mean, this is no erie, but still. what? is the rule: if one person from erie enters south korea, we must have a massive snow? the snow was actually beautiful but the next day… ice city. it seems like the koreans of daegu really didn’t know how to handle the snow because they aren’t used to it. however, i was confused because i feel like things have to freeze sometimes, so why wouldn’t salt or sand be readily available? well, i guess it doesn’t matter anymore because it is finally gone. yay! sorry, my erie friends.

i’m tired of writing now. hopefully, it will not take me 8 months to write another blog entry and i will be up on the times.

in conclusion, another picture of adorable kids.

once, again, i love you guys.

face.

christmas: part 2 in a short series.

ok, it’s time to suck it up and write a blog. i am terrible at updating this! ah!

so, we left off with part 1 of christmas…

the first day, we went up to bulguksa temple. it was absolutely beautiful. it might have been serene had there not been people wandering all over the place. haha. despite the winter weather, the walk up to the main temple was lovely. there was a pond on the left that was starting to freeze up and a small waterfall on the right. it was really cool because the water had frozen over top of the rocks.

at the top, we wandered around inside the temple. each building had a different bodhisattva or buddha sitting inside. we went into one where people were praying to these massive statues. all over the ceiling, pink and green balls hung with prayers dangling off of them. i think that the balls were supposed to look like lotus flowers but i’m not exactly sure.

i got yelled at for trying to take a picture of one of the statues and paintings. however, i just backed up to the korean guy behind me and took pictures with him. i figured if they weren’t going to yell at him, they couldn’t yell at me. haha. this was my favorite. i seriously have no idea how many hands are even in that picture. this is the ‘bodhisattva of perfect compassion’. he is very popular among common people because of his willingness to help those who suffer. apparently, the original shrine was built in 751 A.D. pretty impressive.

after the temple, we took a bus up to the top of the mountain where there was an enormous shrine with this guy in it:

it was seriously so amazing. i can’t remember the significance of this besides the fact that it is very old. it was very impressive. i will do more research so that i can remember exactly what i saw. lol. sorry, it was a little while ago. 

the next day, we saw an excavated tomb. i was a little unimpressed by the whole thing. i’m not sure how you make an excavated tomb uninteresting? i guess because they removed most of the stuff to put it into the museum down the road. so, anyways, we went in this tomb and saw a million other of these hills sitting around everywhere.

across the street, we saw: two forests, a fortress, an ice house, an astronomy tower (i might be making that up), and some people wheelie-ing on some ice. we went into the museum, which was pretty cool. there were things that were so old it was unbelievable. i mean, we’re talking 3rd century stuff here. amazing.

during the museum tour, we started getting super tired. i feel like i saw so much while i was in gyeongju for just two days. it was very exhausting. so, we just took the bus home around 5:00 that day to get back to daegu.

that was christmas. it was fun but didn’t really seem like christmas. christmas is not as commercialized here as it is in western countries, especially the u.s. it was nice though because it made me not feel as homesick.

next entry: soon.

next entry: new year’s eve and daegu’s infamous snow.

miss you all!!

lacey facey.