I received a text from a friend when I woke up saying to look outside.... I was expecting there to be some snow, but not a whole lot. I looked out my window and BAM there it was: the beginning of an Iowa winter. We had a lot of snow on the ground, about 6 or 7 inches. Everything was covered in snow. It was awesome! One of my co-teachers that has been here for 4 years said that he has never seen it snow so much. Kind of exciting.
Usually when I come to school on Mondays, all the Korean teachers and all the kindergarteners are there. When I arrived today, however, Mr. Nam (one of the directors) was the only one in the buidling. I didn't get a call saying school was cancelled, but I hadn't yet checked my email for the day... I thought for sure he was going to tell me to go right back home because it was a snowday. Nope! He asked how my vacation was. I said fine. I sat down at my dest and waited for the other teachers and the kids to show up. Little by little, a few people started to show up. I taught my art class and sat down to plan the lessons for the rest of the day.
After awhile, our supervising teaching came in and told us all afternoon classes for the day were cancelled! SNOW DAY!! We only had to teach the kindy class and the rest of the afternoon we had off! Another surprise awaited me in my Kindy class today. I have a new student. His name is David. No pictures yet, but he's a pretty cute kid. He wanted to speak a lot of Korean today, but he really surprised me when he said, "Emily Teacher, ghosts live in a pumpkin patch!" I was caught a little off gaurd because the only thing I had heard David say was "I'm fine" when I asked him how he was today. I think David is going to fit in just fine with our class!
It was perfect for our first day back to school... we got to ease in to it a little. The only downside is that we might have to make up for it on the weekend. But we'll find out about that tomorrow. For now, I'm just going to enjoy the rest of my snow day!!
Here's a picture of some kids playing in the snow...
Christmas Eve was filled with shopping, a Mexican fiesta, walking around Myeongdong, and a Catholic Korean Midnight Mass. I started the day talking to all my family on skype! They had sent me some packages and after weeks of waiting, I opened them with my family(sort of) on skype. I felt like a little kid! I was so excited to get something from home!! After wishing them all a Merry Christmas, I met up with Meredith, another teacher from SLP (Chanelle), and her friend to go to COEX mall for some shopping. We didn't buy much of anything, but had the most delicious Christmas Eve dinner at On The Border for some Mexican food. After dinner, we took the subway to Myeongdong and walked around there for a bit. The cathedral is located near there, and we made our way there around 11:00 p.m. so we could find a seat in the cathedral just in case there were a lot of people. We were expecting there to be a lot of people, but what I was not expecting was a huge line that we would stand in for over an hour. We didn't get to go in to the cathedral, but we did get seats in an auditorium across the street, which is more than I can say for the line of people behind us. It was a nice service... all in Korean except for when he busted out his English skills saying, "We would like to extend a welcome to our foreign friends. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!" It was quite unexpected but awesome at the same time. Not quite the most traditional Christmas Eve, but we loved it just the same.
Tuesday Meredith and I went to the National Museum of Korea: the biggest museum in Asia. It was pretty interesting and we saw some cool things. Most of the information about the artifacts was in Korean, but there was some English so it was interesting to read about some of it. We then headed to one of the TechnoMarts so Meredith could buy herself a Christmas present. You can usually try bardering with the salespeople here because there are so many people selling the same thing. She got a new Nikon camera! Pretty exciting. We took the subway back to Guri, met with one of our Korean co-teachers, Annie, and took the subway back in to Seoul to go to a concert. Another one of our co-teachers is in a choir/orchestra and she invited us to the concert. It was fun... very interesting as it was all in Korean. It was a successful day!
Wednesday we went to Deoksugung Palace in Seoul. I have been to one palace already earlier. This one was a lot smaller, but still interesting to see. Across the street from the palace was Seoul Plaza. They had a bunch of things set up, so we decided to go check it out. Apparently Seoul is the World Design Capital for 2010, so they had several exhibits set up for that. They also had something set up telling about the Korean research team in the Antarctic. They had some interactive things to do as well as information to read about. 
Thursday night found us back in Seoul, Insadong, for the New Years Eve celebration, which was really cool! There were tons of people standing in the street with probably just as many cops surrounding the place. These cops were really taking their jobs seriously. I'm not really sure if they knew what they were doing, but everything seemed to be running very smoothly. I would say they did a great job that night! Anyway... There was a stage set up where we saw about 3 or 4 performances. One of them was a popular K-pop group, but I'm not sure which one it was. I had heard the song that they sang before, and everyone around us was pretty pumped to see them... I'm guessing they were pretty famous! The countdown kind of happened all of the sudden. We were standing there, looked up at the screen, and there were 30 seconds to midnight! Everyone around us starts the count down... in Korean! And then set (3), dul (2), hana (1)... HAPPY NEW YEAR! Balloons in the air, people shooting off fireworks in the street, and someone ringing a bell on the stage! We bought some fireworks so we could shoot some off. Probably so dangerous to have that many people setting off fireworks at the same time, but made the whole experience well worth it!
