Korean Life January

So since Christmas life has been normal. Work work work and fun fun fun! So here I am with my friend Jaemin (we met at Club Italia) and we are wearing little aprons to cover our clothes while we ate DakGalbi! It is a chicken stir fry with cabbage, sweet potatoes, spicy sauce, and cheese. It is amazingly delicious, but a big mess. We put all of our coats and purses in giant plastic bags to protect them from the smell and the dirt on the ground.

Here is Laura (as always) and Jon!
Here is Stefano (Italian guy) and I making silly faces!
So, today is January 20th and for not particular reason one of my Kindergarten mom's gave me a gift. Sally is one of my favorite girls and her little brother (the cutest little boy ever) is starting the baby kindergarten in March. To prep the little kids they are coming to Kids Club in the afternoon for 80 minutes once a week. So, on Thursdays Kindergarten ends at 2:30 and Sally plays in the playroom until 4 when her Mother comes with her little brother for his class. Their mother waits in a room for a while and Sally does her homework and colors. So anyways, their Mother came and she brought these mysterious boxes for me and my co-teacher.
I opened it up and wow! Handmade all natural sugar facewash, lavender hand soaps (one shaped like flowers and the other hello kitty) and a wonderful all natural lip balm! The moms are too nice here and give gifts for no reason (especially big in this case).
It is 11:15 pm and I reallllllly need to shower before work tomorrow so I hope this blogging is enough.

MOM, sorry I am such a bad blogger, please forgive me! Enjoy my blog!

Love, Kelly

Italian Club Christmas!

So although I spent Christmas in the States (well 9pm on the 25th-new years) I was missing all of the Christmas cheer beforehand. Luckily, I go to Italian club every sunday in the bottom of a Christian school (it is a lot cooler than that sounds). I go every sunday to meet with Italian people, Koreans who speak Italians, and people who just like Italian food. We eat delicious food and talk and sometimes afterward we even go for drinks and dinner (much later haha). Well, anyways early in December I came to the club and found a blank Christmas tree and boxes of decorations and I got to decorate a tree!

Here is a picture of the Priest who is in charge of Club Italia! He was putting the decorated tree on a table to be more visible.

Here is me with my Aperitivo (pre dinner drink) in front of the beautiful tree and blow up Santa!
This is a picture of Stella (my Korean friend who speaks Italian) and Jacky (My German friend who speaks Italian)

I got a little frisky with the blow up Santa.
2 weeks later was Christmas dinner at Club Italia. It was an elaborate meal with too much food and too many people! This was my table. Most of them are Italian and we had a wonderful meal chattering and stuffing ourselves.
This was the room. Usually there are around 30 people on an average sunday for lunch, but Christmas dinner was on a Saturday evening and it was PACKED.
This is Vincenzo! The priest is in charge of the club, but Vincenzo is in charge of all of the food! Here he is at the bar! He has lived in Korea for 40 years teaching Italian at a University.
The Italian Embassy provided gifts for all of the Italian kids that RSVPed to come. They got awesome toys and 2 teenage girls got gift bags packed with The Faceshop merchandise! I wanted Santa to bring me something! : (
This was my Korea Christmas! Fun fact: Christmas is a couples holiday in Korea. Boys hate Christmas if they don't have girl friends. Christmas dates are like Valentine's day dates! I thought that was really funny, but I guess it just doesn't hold the same significance as their traditional holidays. Almost all Koreans are Christians (SO many Megachurchs!)

Well Christmas at home was fantastic! and I am back in Korea and life is good!

Peppero Day

Hello again! Yes it has been about 2.5 months….pretty bad blogging….and since I haven’t been blogging I haven’t really taken that many pictures. I am a bad bad bad blogger. So here is a wonderful picture of Laura (my coworker who lives below me) and I letting out some steam with some lovely facemasks. Kids often give gifts to the teachers and of course beauty supplies are high on the list.

So I am going to rewind back to November 11^th 2010! 11/11 is a very special day in Korea when the whole country celebrates the wonderous creation of Peppero. Peppero (Japanese people have Pocky). This is a wonderful mini sweet breadstick dipped in chocolate and packaged to eat!

So this day is celebrated mainly by couples (they get each other elaborate baskets and giant peppero) and by school children! I receive a tooooon of peppero!!! Here is a picture of my pepperro haul.

I actually got a lot more than is pictured but I gave it away during the day. My biggest peppero gift was from Daniel in my Kindergarten. I was incredibly surprised because he doesn’t usually bring me small gifts and his mother (although incredibly nice) doesn’t seem like the type to spend 20 dollars on a peppero gift basket! It was a wonderful surprise.

So that’s it for Peppero day!

Goodbye for the moment!

Farm Field Trip

Hello once again! So on Friday November 5th we had a really really good fieldtrip! This was the first field trip that was actually kind of cool and not just a photo op.

Here is my class after we got off the bus from a 40 minutes ride. Everyone is a little fuzzy. The weather was really weird and spooky. It was foggy and chilly.

For our fieldtrip we went to a farm near the border to North Korea. The first thing we did was pick sweet potatoes! We gave all the 5 and 6 year olds sharp hoe like diggers and we let them loose to dig up sweet potatoes in the dung/dirt.

Here is Sally in her really pretty pink coat kneeling in the mud digging up potatoes. She got the most of anyone in our class!
Here is Daniel doing the famous Korean squat and trying to smile for my picture.
Here are Leo and Jack searching intently for more potatoes. Even the littlest rootish potatoes made them super duper happy!
Here is Jack with a good one!
Ha Won is good at smiling for my pictures!
After we picked sweet potatoes we drove a bit further and let our kids run around the forest gathering Chestnuts! It was so nice getting a little bit of fresh air and exercise!

After that we stopped at a small park and played in the leaves and ate a nice snack, and then we headed back to school for lunch and relaxation before afternoon classes!!!

Well that was wonderful and now I will also talk about this weekend!

Halloween

Ok post 2 tonight! Halloween!!!!

So for Halloween my school required all of the teachers to dress up. I decided to be Kim Bap which is basically Korean Sushi. KimBap does not usually have raw fish. I was standard KimBap which is cucumber, egg, carrot, fermented radish, and ham. All rolled in a roll of rice covered in seaweed.

KimBap comes in tonnnnnns of flavors. My personal favorite is Tuna Kimbap (not raw tuna, like canned tuna). There is also Kimchi Kimbap and Salad Kimbap! Plus a million more.

So anyways, Halloween isn't very big in Korea, but you can still buy some standard costumes. KimBap was not one of the standard choices so I spent wayyyyy too much time crafting my kimbap costume.

Here is Laura in my bed crafting her costume. My bed looks like a craft box exploded.

Laura was creating a Jellyfish costume out of an umbrella. Yeah pretty sweet!
This was my crafting area/desk/kitchen table/ only surface in my apartment. I made quite a mess and used a looooot of hot glue.
Here is the finished result on Halloween day at school!!!!!!! The Korean Moms and all the Korean people who saw it when I went out LOVED my costume and took pictures with me. I also had read seaweed in my hair and chopsticks in my bun! hahahah
Here is Daniel, The magician, and his Mom at the parade in front of HomePlus (kind of like target).
This is Jack with his Mom! He was a Power Ranger. His Mom is one of the nicest Moms in my class!
This is Sally bo Bally! She was a pretty pretty princess!
This is Grace and her Grandmother! She was a lovely Pumpkin Witch!
This is Shawn and his Mom. He was a magician. He was obviously more interested in his candy than the picture!
This is Jenny with our new student Ha Won! She was Princess Belle!
This is Leo and he was a freaking adorable pumpkin. He is pretty naughty and quite pervert!
The next night was the real halloween celebration. Kelly and Heidi (teachers from my school) had a fun party with Jello Shots! This is my friend Tom dressed as Sailor Venus (from the anime show Sailor Moon)
The Koreans went CRAZY for his costume. When we went out later that night he had to pose for around 100 photos!
Here is Devon as Sailor Mars and I missed taking a picture of Sailor Jupiter! They made such cool costumes!
Kelly was Andy Samberg from the digital short on SNL about a Boombox. She made her sweet boombox!
This is Ashley from my school as Marilyn Monroe of course.
Halloween turned out to be very fun and I was really happy with how my costume turned out. I now own a really time consuming Kimbap costume. I have no idea what to do with it! hahahahah

Ok well Halloween was last weekend and now I will post about this week!

October Field Trip

Hello! I am a bad blogger as usual so I am going to make up for it. This is the first of 3 posts I will be doing tonight....but you will probably read it last hahaha.

So in October we went on one of our "wonderful" field trips. We went to this park that had no grass or areas for little kids to play with. It was literally a photo op and it was not that great of a time sadly! So here are all the photos we had to take to show how much fun we had to the parents!!!!!

These are my babies, but Grace was sick so I only had 5.
Leo, Sally, Shawn, Jack and Daniel!

Sally being the little doll she always is!
Me and my babies!!!!
Jack getting manhandled by Daniel!
Trooping around the park : )
Snack time on the sidewalk. My class and Red class!
The final photo op! The red leaves were too good to resist. You can tell the kids love this!

I am not the biggest fan of my school's field trips. Korea is all about presentation and image. We have the kids pose and take lots of pictures and they don't get enough time to just run around and be kids.

October went quickly and I was very busy at work. My class is really improving and at the end of October I got a new student!!!! Ha Won is her name and she is very smart!

Chuseok!

Hi! So the last week I was lucky enough to get a break from school. Tuesday ,Wednesday, and Thursday were the Korean Thanksgiving. On the Friday before the holiday week we had a big celebration in honor of the thanksgiving. All of the teachers (Korean and Foreign) had to wear Hanbok. Hanbok are the traditional Korean Dresses and Outfits worn by women and Men for holidays such as Chuseok (Thanksgiving) and the lunar new year. I thought the hanbok looked comfortable and airy. Boy was a I wrong! The material (some form of silkish fabric) did not breath at all. It was like we were in hot tents. We had to wear them all day while we did different activities. The kids did too!!!!!

Here is me with 2 of my coteachers, Katie and Jenny. Here is Jenny with our class. Here is me with our class.

The kids did arts and crafts in their fancy hanboks and then we made Songpyeon in their fancy clothes. Songpyeon are rice flour balls that have beans in the middle and are a traditional food of this holiday. So we made these for a while and then the school thought it would be a great idea for all of the kindergarteners to go to the park down the street to play traditional Chuseok games in their best clothes.

Hahaha ridiculous. They played tug a war and a game kind of like hackysack in the sand around the park while wearing extremely expensive silk outfits! We were also in our Hanbok in the hot hot hot sun and on the dirty playground. Ridiculous.

Sally immediately stripped off the sleeves/ties of her hanbok as did all of the kids in our class. It was soooo hot and I cranked up the air and turned down the temperature as far as I could so the kids would stay dressed.
Jenny and Yellow Class
My Munchkins
Us being silly. You can admire how beautiful I look in my baggy fancy hanbok.

Anyways during the actual festival I had time off from school. The First day (Tuesday) I stayed home allllll dya because it was torrential rainfall from 5am until 10pm. It made tons of apartments flood along with restaurants.

The next day our street was on the news because it was some of the worst flooding in all of Seoul. Two of the foreigner teachers had basement apartments that flooded (not ruined but pretty bad). Never been happier to be on the 3^rd floor. 3 days later and they were still draining the basement of the big apartment building nearby.

The Second day of Chuseok I went and visited some of the touristy areas. Seoul was pretty dead but the touristy areas had some traffic.

These aren't actually my kids, but instead some of the kids that I saw the day I wandered around the touristy areas. hahah

Thursday, the weather was amazing and I went to this park not too far from my house (by subway). I LOVED IT. It was the best day of break. I walked through the park admiring the awesome fountains and public art. Later two friends met up with me and we biked all along the han river. This park went all along the han river for kilometers and kilometers. It was amazing. We returned the bikes an watched the little kids play in the fountains (they were made for this) and we watched this two year old boy for a while who was soooo cute. Afterwards when they walked by his mom told him to give us kisses and he came and kissed my cheek. It was so precious.

Here is the park on the river looking over the city!!!

Super cool water stairs.
Devon and Thom posing by the Fisherman statue!
Me posing on my bike! Yes, that is right, I biked for 2 hours!

Well anyways the break was nice and tomorrow I have the last free day until school starts up again! One last picture. I feel like I never left Milwaukee! Miller time!

Happy Chuseok !