October School Picnic

Thursday was our fall school picnic day. Our school went to Kangjin - about an hour away from Mokpo. The region is known for two reasons: it produces some of the finest pottery in Korea, and it was home to a very important philosopher.

There isn't much to write about. It was a gorgeous fall day and it was fun to be out of school, but I'm not super interested in celadon and not many of the posters at the philosopher's museum where bilingual so I'm not really sure why he was so famous. He did build some sort of pulley system that helped build a bridge/tower in Suwon.

I didn't take many pictures, but here are a few to show you what my day was like:

I hung out with the kindergartens for the morning and we made some mosaics out of some broken pieces of the famous green pottery in the traditional shape known from this region.

The kinder kids are so cute!

The famous pottery:

I had the great fortune of coincidentally running into the students from one of my online classes. Their school left the island for the day to do the same picnic as us. I recognized them first, surprisingly since I was the one that stood out the most among all the people at the museum! They walked right by me while others shouted and pointed at me, and I chased after them to introduce myself. This was very cool because the students live way out in rural areas, mostly on islands in the most southern part of Korea. The only interaction they have ever had with a foreigner is via Internet and I only get to see them online too so it was pretty special to run into them and be able to talk face to face instead of on the computer screen.

After the ceramics museum we did a little hiking at the former residence of the philosopher (I don't even know his name) and his little mountain was quite a nice place to do lots of reading, studying and thinking.

Getting some fresh mountain spring water after the hike up.

So although the venue wasn't super exciting it was a great day and an nice escape from the classroom :)

I'm a bad blogger ...

Months have gone by and I have not been back to update my blog ... I'm a bad blogger. Shame on me! But I've been too busy enjoying myself to spend that much time updating and adding photos. I've made a resolution to try to be back at least every other week so we'll see how that goes.

There was no entry for August because Milton and I were away the entire month. We spent a week in Seoul exploring the big city before heading to Europe for three weeks. Milton did a much better job than I did of getting back into blogging and posted pictures from our trip. I wont spend an hour retelling my version of the story, but it was an amazing trip full of great sights, amazing food, and good friends. It was enough to convince us that we MUST live in Europe at some point, but we'll make it back to Canada for a bit before that happens!

Our return to school wasn't bad. It was nice to sort of know what's going on and what's expected of us on a daily basis ... as much as we can know that is, with all the craziness that goes on here! We got in several trips to the beach in September too, as the nice summer weather was just beginning! (rainy season had ended and the unbearable humidity had ended by the beginning of Sept.)

Milton and I both took on some extra work this semester too - we are both teaching online English classes 4 days a week. It's demanding a bit more patience that I had expected. Things went pretty well last semester with just the 2 days of online teaching per week, but with 4 classes, the cancelled classes and rescheduling conflicts and the general craziness has doubled (logically)!

The big news for me in September was that I made the final payment on my student loans and I am now OSAP debt free!!! I rewarded myself with a new hobby and a new guitar! I can't do much with it yet, but I'm working on it :)

Other than that, we've just been enjoying the beautiful fall weather on weekends, sitting outside at cafes reading books and writing letters. We're working on a little trip to Seoul for next weekend to get a tour of the DMZ. I will definitely have more to write about after that and hopefully a few pictures to post too.

Hope everyone is well back home and that everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Milton and I had a stuffed, roasted chicken with some Swiss Chalet dipping sauce (sent from Canada!) and thought of all you!

I promise that there will be more posts coming soon!...