Our first American Thanksgiving

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving and even though it's something we have never celebrated before, seen as we live in Korea and have so many American friends it seemed like a good idea to get into the spirit of things and have a full Thanksgiving dinner.

The meal was a buffet so I wasn't expecting too much but it was actually totally amazing! Some of the best food I have ever tasted in a restaurant - it tasted like a delicious home made meal.
After we finished dinner, we went for a walk around Itewon to try and get all that food to digest a little better. We saw the most amazing building next to the restaurant - which had a big Christmas tree outside. It was so bright it kind of hurt to look at it for too long!

A visit to Myeong-dong

Recently Rich and I made a trip to Myeong-dong to check out some of the sights, from all the guide books we have it seems the Myeong-dong is famous for two things - an old and beautiful church and shopping!

So first of all we checked out the church which was very busy and quite beautiful inside.


Secondly we checked out the shopping - but only very quickly - Saturday night isn't the best time to check out one of Seoul's busiest shopping area's (we should have really thought about this earlier!). But we did take a very quick vist to the famous Lotte Department Store.

Art display

Last week some of the children's art was on display around the school - I'm not sure why but it was really great to see it as some of the stuff was pretty amazing. I especially like the versions of "Starry Night" and the animal face clock.

Self making cake

Every second Tuesday I head out with a bunch of amazing girls I have met over here and go and have dinner and do something interesting.....depending upon what we can find. Last week we went to "Dan Hana Self Cake Making".

Whist you don't get to make the cake for yourself at this place - you do get to ice it and given that I haven't been able to bake since I moved to South Korea, being able to ice a cake was a pretty exciting prospect.

I chose to ice a chocolate mousse cake with grape icing - I froze it for nearly two weeks and finally ate it last weekend when we had friends over and it was still good!

English Musical Competition

Recently my school held a "English Musical Competition" and I got to be both a judge and MC for the afternoon. The grades that competed in the competition were from third to sixth and there were a pretty broad range of musicals including the Three Little Pigs, The Merchant of Venice and even the Sound of Music. A lot of my fifth grade students took part as well as a few of my third and fourth grade extracurricular students.

Another day in Seoul

Some of our American friends told us about a restaurant in Seoul that did "American style breakfast" and even though I knew it would be a LONG trek to get there I really wanted to go. So last Sunday we all headed off to Butterfingers - the train journey was maybe an hour and a half then we had to wait in line for another 45 minutes to an hour to eat (It's amazing the lengths you will go to in order to eat western food in Korea).

This is my brunch - banana and nut pancakes with blueberry jam.

After lunch we decided to do a little bit of shopping and came across one of these photo stores which seem to be very popular in Korea. Basically they have some props and a whole lot of photo booths and you can go in and have photo's taken with your friends acting a bit silly (well at least we acted a bit silly - I'm quite sure some people take it quite seriously).

We took quite a few photo's but here's one of the photo's we took - much silliness to be had. I have this sticker on my cellphone now.

Whislt in Seoul we also paid a visit to one of my favourite stores "Kinky Robot"- it sells very cool collectables. I bought another cellphone charm to add to my ever increasing collection.

Seoul Latern Festival

A couple of weekends ago, on a very cold Seoul night, Rich and I went to the Seoul lantern festival. The latern festival was much more impressive than we thought - we kinda figured it was going to be full of small Buddhist laterns instead of large scale lanterns of people, places and events!

Same same

It seems to be the romatic thing to do in Korea for couples to dress the same, quite often when we are on the subway we will see a couple with the same hoodie or jacket on - Rich has even seen a couple with a pair of identical shoes. Sometimes you see couples dressed exactly the same with totally matching outfits which is a little bit weird.

You even see window store displays advertising identical clothes for men and women so you can dress up the same when you're together - although the matching underwear displays are slightly more weird (especially the time we saw matching men and womens liliac snakeskin underwear).

Our first "hike" in Uijeongbu

A couple of weekends ago Rich and I decided to do a walk in the hills behind our house - it was a pretty amazing walk and along the way we came across some old military bunkers as well as a buddist temple - only in Korea!