2 Months in Korea

I can hardly believe it! Two months in Korea. The time, for the most part, does fly although the nights are a little long. It's pretty bad when you have to go for an hour long bus ride to another city to feel like you have something to do. Oh, well, I love downtown Gwangju where I was last night. I went in to get my nails done - ah, yes, vanity of vanities. I know! Man, did I get soaked too. 105,000 WON. That's about $120. I figure I have noting else to spend my money on and my nails are important to me. They are very behind the times here in artificial nails. They did a process called nail sculpture - very laborious and time consuming - to the tune of 2.5 hours. YIKES!!! I was tearing my hair out. I have a hard enough time sitting for 2.5 hours let alone sitting in front of 3 girls who only speak Korean. They are really sweet and I had two of them working on my nails. Very interesting experience. Next time a fill will only be 25,000 WON which is more like it. That is if I understood her correctly!!

The 13th Annual KOTESOL conference has come and gone and I won't be back to Seoul for a while probably. I met some great foreigners and wonderful Korean university students there. I was one of the Guest Services Team managers responsible for the student volunteers. It will be great to put on my resume. Great opportunity for networking.

2 of the people I met are a woman from Australia and a man from Welland, ON. They are going to come down to the "south" to visit Sheilagh and me sometime in the near future. They teach together at one of the universities in Seoul.

Last week I was taken out for lunch 2 days in a row - once by my co-teachers at the Middle School who said they really appreciate my teaching their kids and once by 2 of the science teachers and the VP. The one science teacher speaks very good English so she did the translating for the VP and the other teacher. The teachers are all so worried that I don't eat enough!! Oh, brother, I keep saying "take a closer look, I'm certainly not starving!!" However, the food is a real problem. Almost everything they serve at the school cafeterias is spicy and I JUST DON'T DO SPICY!! It's either spicy and /or seafood - neither of which is good for me!! I will survive. I will include some more pictures.

Hope all is well with you and yours.