A Busy Day

Good Morning,

Chris had a hard day yesterday. But I think he will feel better today because he went to bed at 9:00 pm and it is 6 am and he is still asleep. I did not hear him get up in the middle of the night. I think this might be our first full night of sleep without help from meds.

Please pray for both of us. We said last night if would could get through today the rest of this journey will be easy. We are both sick and today is the beginning of our classes. We will still be working on our lesson plans this morning because we did not have time to finish them yesterday. We had to move most of our stuff and were not feeling well and the lesson plans were very complicated. Some of the teaches have been very helpful with this planning process. I have about 9 classes on M-W-F and most require different lesson plans and each class has about 3 books. This should be easier once we get the hang of it.

We look forward to moving into our new home tonight (we moved most of our bags there last night). This means that today we need to get a Korean bank account so that we can buy simple things like pillows, towels, TP, etc, without having to carry large amounts of money on us.

I do not know when we will be able to send another update. Right now there is a computer in our motel room. I have not found the adapter for my laptop yet and it might be a few days before we are able to get Internet service.

We are excited about working with the children today. We have already met many of them. I will be teaching two first time English classes. This morning I am going to make some puppets and download some fun songs.

Yesterday we discovered jouk. It is soup/porridge made from rice. It was very good. Koreans eat this when they are not feeling well. One of our co-teachers, Joan directed us to the jouk shop yesterday. Chris had a mushroom jouk and I had a chicken one. I guess chicken soup makes you feel better no matter what you call it : )

Korea's transportation system is very well thought out. They have subways that run I think every 15 minutes but the buses run more often then the subways. In many streets the left lane is dedicated just to buses. I also like that when you want the cross the busy streets you can walk down into the subway and come back up on the other side of the street. This seems much safer to me. You walk down two flights of stairs to get to the bottom of the subway, but on they way up there is a very long escalator. It is on a sensor and only moves when someone is on it. (Good way to save energy).

It was cold yesterday. We had lots of rain and then it started to snow. This was neat to watch from the 10th floor of our motel room. We could see the big flakes clearly from way up here. They melted before they hit the ground.

I now know that I will not starve while we are in Korea. The other day we found Philadelphia Cream Cheese and what we thought were bagels. Well the cheese was correct but they were not real bagels. Yesterday morning I went to Dunkin Donuts and they had fresh, hot, real bagels. Bagels and cream cheese was my favorite breakfast in the states. Yum! The best part is that it is right next to the school.

Have a good day,

Jennifer