The Exciting Week of June 14

This week has been very good. I am starting to feel much more comfortable with the kids at school and with teaching in general. The kids seem to have caught on to my teaching style and what I’m trying to communicate to them. They seem to be learning much more. It is fun. I will try and get pictures up of them soon. I have taken the camera to work but get too busy when I am there and forget to take pictures.
Liji and I have been having so much fun. Every day we’ve had a new adventure. Last Sunday we went to the Gunsan Korean Ward and then we went with the missionaries over to the Branch on the Air Base. The ward at the base is very small. There were only 7 others besides us and that includes the missionaries. We were told there is about 3 other men that are military who are just on leave for a few weeks. It was good to be able to understand the talks and lessons. We decided that we are going to go to both wards. The missionaries are also going to help us with our Korean every Sunday morning at 9, just before the Gunsan ward. That should help us a lot with our pronunciation.
Monday’s we’ve decided to set aside as our apartment cleaning and laundry day. So that’s what we did on Monday.
Tuesday through Friday we mostly went out each morning on our bikes with nothing really planned and usually ended up finding some pretty cool places. We found a fish market that Liji was pretty excited about. We also did a lot of exploring on the mountains around our complex. There are walking trails on most all of them that we have found. On Friday night at about 10:30 we heard a bunch of sirens outside and Liji looked out the window to find a house across the street from us in a roaring fire. It was crazy. We’re not sure if anyone lived there or not.
Wednesday our boss took us out to lunch along with all of the other teachers we work with. We went to this Italian restaurant that was a little different from the kind of Italian we are used to but it was very good. When you eat here you just have big dishes in the middle of the table that everyone eats off of. Kind of different, but it is definitely much more personable. If I wasn’t comfortable with someone before, after eating with them I definitely am.
Today we went to this huge marketplace that we found as we were on our way home from exploring yesterday. When we left it looked like it might rain so we took our rain jackets but we were definitely not prepared for the storm that came. Looking around in the market was fine because there was a roof overhead. They had a lot of clothes, fabric, bedding, drapery, shoes, and food there. I don’t know if I will ever adjust to the putrid smell of dried fish. They seem to have fish just out drying everywhere and it just smells so so bad of rotting meet. It’s really hard looking around at buying stuff without speaking Korean because they are very aggressive sellers even in the grocery stores. If you stop to look at something for longer than 5 seconds they’re following you and shoving everything at you. They seem so upset when I seem interested in something and then don’t end up buying it. We tried to shop long enough to wait out the storm that was going on outside but finally decided that we were just gonna have to get soaked. So we tried to get all of our stuff under our rain jackets we brought and headed home on our bikes. Needless to say we were drenched in less than a minute. We had a lot of fun and at least it was warm rain. It was actually kind of refreshing.
Tonight the Gunsan ward had a branch activity at a place here they call, The Singing Room, basically Karaoke. They said that it is a tradition here in Korea. It was so much fun to experience and lucky for us they did have a lot of songs we could sing in English. The ward members are just so welcoming to us. I have not had that much fun in a long time. There were about 10 of us in this room with a big screen for the wards and video to appear on. They had microphones and the sound system was so good. This was way better than Karaoke in America. At the end of your singing you get scored on how well you did. Then they gave out awards at the end. Like first second and third prizes. I was awarded the “Most Popular of the night” award. Man, I’m good, haha, yea right. I’ll post some videos so you can see what it’s like. I was thinking how much Mandy, Marshall, Serena, Deborah and many others from our family would have loved doing something like this. Maybe one of you could start up a business like this.