What Happened to Spring?

Just last week everything still seemed really brown. The weather was terrible and we were in a rut. Now, just one week later, it is summertime. Everything is suddenly green and beautiful. It's so hot during the day, and even warm at night; no jackets needed riding home from work. It is so nice. And we have definately been taking advantage of this time. Sorry for all the couple pictures, but your just going to have to deal with them since we have no cute kids to take pictures of yet:)

Beautiful Wolmyoung

Maisan

This past Saturday we went to 'Maisan' which means something like 'Horse Mountain.' There are two mountains that look like horse's ears. The weather was beautiful and we had a great time.
There is a cave in one of the mountains with a spring inside it, Christina thought it looked too dangerous to go inside.

We passed this hill on our way to Maisan, the purple flowers are tiny, but they plant them really thick.

'Hiking' in Korea almost always means going pretty much straight up or straight down. ALL mountains are very steep, no gradual slopes, everything is very abrupt. We probably hiked only 4 miles, but all off it was up or down stairs. We are still sore, especially our calves.

This is actually a picture of a picture, we were about one week too late to see the Cherry Blossoms like this.

There were several Buddhist temples and this great Buddah statue.

We didn't get to hike to the top of one of the horse ears, the staircase was blocked off. So we hiked to the top of a smaller hill and this is what we could see.

This is one of the Temple complexes, a vey nice Korean woman took this picture for us.

If you ever wonderd if you would be able to find a bathroom in Korea, worry no more. Even if you can't read Korean or English, I'm pretty sure you could figure out the pictures.

Most of the cherry trees had lost their blossoms, but some still had a few flowers.

They do look like horse ears, we had a great day even though we didn't get to climb to the top.

Spring is here! Maybe...

'Spring has brought us such a nice surprise, popcorn popping right before our eyes!'

Spring Learning Festival

Today was a really nice day and there is this cherry blossom festival going on around the city for these next two weeks and we decided to go out on the scooter to check things out. Well over at Eunpa park there weren't many blossom quite yet, but we did come upon this annual Learning Festival and had a pretty good time. It was pretty much just all these different booths set up from business around the city teaching you some things about their trade.
This man works in Gunsan city hall and had his own private photographer following him around. He really was really nice to us and had a lot of fun watching Liji try out all of these taekwando moves in the following pictures. Afterwards he wanted to get a picture with us.
This was actually the last thing that Liji got to do at this sweet taekwando demonstration booth but the pictures are out of order.

Putting out the flame without touching the candle.

Cutting through a piece of newspaper.

Liji is now about to punch through these "bricks"

Liji taking his shot with the Bow.
There were a ton of different booths demonstrating a number of different things.
We're not really sure what they were doing the hair and make-up demonstration for.
Boiling Ramen nooddles in a cup sitting on a solar panel. We even got to eat a small cup of it.

If you're bored in Korea

Previously, (especially during the winter) quite often on a Saturday night Christina and I would find that we had absolutely nothing to do aside from watching a movie on the internet. Since that is not terribly exciting (less so since we decided that we would stop encouraging pirating by boycotting movies until they come out on video) we have tried to find other ways to keep occupied while still enjoying ourselves. We thought we had it fugured out when we discovered a really cool stationary store, but then we realized we do not have the self control to spend time looking at all of the cool stuff without buying it, so since then we have avoided the stationary store because it is too expensive for us.
One of the first things that we discovered after coming to Korea is that big stores have samples of everything, you can try out food, toys, sports equipment, hand held massagers (which by the way are very relaxing, we hope the one we bought will work in the US) beds, pens, pencils, the list could go on and on but I think that you get the point. It is actually a great marketing strategy, we never would have bought the hand held massager if we couldn't have experienced the relxed bliss of using it. In the States you have to look at the picture on the box and wonder if the product lives up to the picture and description, but in Korea, you just try out the sample.
E-Mart (I guess that would be close to what Wal-Mart is to America) is just across the street from us. We know from experience that the best time for food samples is Saturday afternoon around 4pm. They have so many samples that we go there when we are hungry instead of making dinner! But even when we go there, we still end up with almost a full evening ahead of us. So after we take care of the dinner portion of our date, we still have to find and activity.
Recently we have been going farther afield, there is another chain store, Lotte-Mart, it's like E-Mart, only bigger. There are more food samples (last Saturday I ate a slice of raw octopus tentacle, it was suprisingly mild and with a texture kind of like beef, not really chewy like I thought it would be) and other items that are not found at E-Mart.
On Saturday we were in the TV/recliner section of the store (just genius putting recliners in front of TV's on which they play the latest movies) and we saw some of those massage chairs, you know the ones that you sit in and they give you a massage. Well we sat down in two of them and pushed buttons until they started. AHHH! What bliss! A free 20 minute massage in front of the TV. Luckily for us we have no idea how to ship a recliner home, otherwise we would be out $1,600. But we do have a free date activity anytime we care to go over there.

We Lucked Out Afterall!!

A new LDS English Teacher showed up at church about 3 weeks ago and since that time we have been able to go over to his apartment and talk with him a bit about the experience that he is having so far. And I have got to tell you he has got it rough. We have had it so easy with our whole situation compared to what he’s got, and we feel so bad that we have been thinking that we may have gotten it bad by having a boss that is a little hard to deal with at times. Our apartment is about the same size as ours, but his front room has no furniture and he only has a mini fridge/freezer in his kitchen, so pretty much he can’t really do much cooking at home, and you can only barely see out his windows. I’m pretty sure I would have most definitely gone into some sort of deep depression if we had to live somewhere like he has for a year. Our apartment has pretty wallpaper and is just so much brighter and home-ier. He is getting paid less than us and he has been at work for the last few weeks from about 8am-8pm everyday and his first Saturday here because it was parent-teacher conferences; whereas we have our whole morning free and haven’t had to work any Saturdays. He isn’t supposed to start until 11 something but his boss wants him coming in early this first little while so he can observe other teachers. He has to write these long lesson plans for each class and he said his boss has been really getting onto him about making them long enough; he’s had to re-do a lot of them. She wants him to write down every single question that he is going to ask the students during class. We barely write down about 2 sentences for each class in our log book that we have every day. We are pretty worried about him, because he is getting pretty fed up with everything and he is working with about 6 other foreigner teachers who aren’t members of the church and go out to drink a lot. He’s told us how they’re always pressuring him to drink and saying that he’s going to be drinking before he leaves here. We really want to get him heavily involved in doing stuff with the members of the military branch before we leave, so he can have that support and good friends to do things with like we have had. It would be really hard to come over here single. Pretty much we are really grateful for the experience that we have had.