Chuseok was a big holiday here, but from our standpoint it wasn't super huge. For Koreans it is like Christmas and Thanksgiving rolled into one; but for us it was a nice, extra-long weekend off from work:-)

After Chuseok, we got to work extra hard because one of our foreign teachers went to China and had to be quarantined (standard policy in Korea for ANY traveling out of the country) for a week. That was particularly rough for me since I got a respiratory infection during the break, and I had to come back and teach extra classes.

I got to teach the 4 year olds again, and that was an experience, as always:-) I love teaching those kids, but it was particularly rough as 4-year olds don't seem to EVER be quiet; and my voice was trying to disappear altogether.

I think the most eventful day will sum it up pretty well. Two of the boys started fighting, over what I have NO CLUE, so I exiled them as punishment (temporary). Then, less than 3 minutes later one of the kids suddenly said "sorry teacher." I look over and his neighbor was clutching his eye. The first child had accidently poked the other in the eye. Happily, there was no serious injury. This first child (the poker) was also the one who cut the back 4-7 pages of his workbook in half. FUN! :-)

In my regular classes, my kinders have had an accidental issue with throwing things out the window. It has happened twice in one week, but has never happened before. First it was another student's workbook and then later a student's eraser (which are prime items of coolness to kindergarteners!). I made the responsible student go with one of the desk teachers to go get them; which definitely made it a not-so-fun trip. If I hadn't seen it myself, I would have assumed it WAS intentional, but having seen it, there is no way these kids (or myself for that matter) could have intentionally arranged things the way they worked out.

Work has been hot lately. Something in the Korean code of conduct seems to demand the air conditioners cannot be used after mid-September, regardless of the actual temperature. I don't get it, and it makes me grouchy.

I am still getting over my lovely respiratory infection (two weeks so far), but at least it isn't so bad. I am drinking coffee again, which I had not had for almost a week, and am no longer hiding from dairy products:-) But I am still not 100%, and am going to the doctors (for the 4th time!) tomorrow.


JENN:

Today Chris and I went to Itaewon. It is a tourist trap, but most people speak English and it is the only place that we have found clothes that are large enough for us to wear. We decided to go because a coworker told us about a used English book store and an international market. I also wanted to find some long sleve undershirts since it is starting to get cold.
We decided to take the subway to get there, it takes about 2 hours. But we had books so the time went by fast. We found the international market. We were not impressed. We have found that most “International” markets buy most of the “American” food at Costco and sells it for inflated prices. We are very thankful that we have a Costco card. We did find Cream of Mushroom soup and Jello. I found the campbells canned cream of Mushroom soup and two types of the powered kind. I am hoping that the powered ones taste good because they are a lot cheaper.
As we walked around we were marveling at all the different restaurants we could stop at Japanese, Thai, Indian, Korean BBQ. There were so many options to choose from. We made a decision when we passed by a hamburger shop that had hamburgers with patties that were the at least an inch think (this is not an exaggeration). It was a very good lunch.
Then we ventured on to the used English book store. Talk about heaven. We both bought three books and had fun looking at all of the variety. I think we will be visiting that store again. Then we stopped for some yummy New Zealand Ice Cream. We had Cookies and Cream and Chocolate Ecstasy. Who couldn’t resist a name like that.
We crossed the street and headed back to the subway. At this point we were in the location where we visited the last time we were in Itaewon . About 5 men approached Chris and offered to make him a suit. We found the store where I had bought clothes for a decent price during summer. I found two long sleave shirts that I could wear under most of my other clothes. I got one black and one white . Then we headed home. It was a very successful trip and we acquired and visited every place that we had planned to visit. We got home around 6:30 pm and we are both very tired.

I was sitting in my classroom one day and an air raid siren started to go off. This always concerns me and no one will tell me why it goes off. Chris and I have decided that if there was every an emergency we would follow the running Koreans. Well this time no one was running so I continued to teach my class. I noticed that most of the cars had disappeared off the busy main street. Then a police car came buy and made all of the busses move away. The street looked really empty. Then, ONE black car with two flags on the front passed by. Then about a minute later the air raid siren went off again and like clockwork all of the people and cars returned. It was strange because when the official car drove past there were no other cars or police men or anything accompanying it.