To bring you up to speed:

All weekend, I had a house guest.  At the academic high school, there are two teacher's assistants who have just graduated from high school in England and are spending their gap year in Korea for eight months before they start their university studies.  Their names are Maria and June.  They live in the dorms with some of the girls.  Once a month, the dorms close and everyone either goes home or finds alternate plans for the weekend.  June is Korean and her family lives in the south part of South Korea in Busan.  Maria is from Switzerland.  She needed a place to crash for the weekend, and I welcomed her into my apartment.  It was fun to have someone around for a couple of days!

Friday night, we went out for dinner at a place in Gwangju that reminded me a little of Applebees or restaurants like that...something for everybody.  We shared a couple of dishes and hit up Baskin Robbins for some ice cream to eat while we walked around downtown.  It was a super chill night.  We both saw several of our students out and about, so it was fun to see them outside of school, even if they are terribly shy and won't talk to us aside from passionately saying hello.

Saturday, Maria went to Everland, which is a big amusement park here and I ventured to Seoul to meet Diane and Qiaoqiao at Insadong, which is a shopping district famous for traditional Korean gifts.  I ended up waiting about half an hour for Diane and Qiaoqiao to arrive because of difficulties boarding a train, and I got in some top notch people watching!  There were several foreign tourists around this neighborhood, so it was fun to sit back and watch them negotiate the streets of Seoul (not that I'm much more than a tourist at this point, but they're still fun to watch!)  There was also a man sitting on the sidewalk, peeling and selling small bags of garlic for 1,000 won.  There is always something to look at here!  Once we met up, we had an amazing lunch at a cozy little bistro off of a side street in Insadong and walked around all afternoon.  When we were through with Insadong, we ventured to Hongdae (an eclectic university neighborhood) in search of the Hello Kitty Cafe.  After a long, long walk, and a stop for frozen yogurt, we found the place, though we were too full from our yogurt binge to partake.  We'll go back another time.  That night, we went to the International Fireworks Festival on the Han River.  We were supposed to meet more friends from orientation outside one of the subway exits at 6:30 in order to be able to grab a decent seat for the 7:30 start time.  We were done at Hongdae really early, so we decided to head over to the festival early and walk around.  We arrived at 4:30 and were greeted by more people than I have ever laid eyes on in my entire life.  Literally.  By the time the fireworks started, there were literally one million people (as far as the eye could see in ALL directions!) at this festival.  As the fireworks started, the Koreans around us were ooo-ing and ahh-ing with marvel at the fireworks exploding in the sky.  The 4th of July must have jaded me on fireworks because these fireworks were equal to the caliber of the Mechanicsville fireworks display each year -which are impressive for Mechanicsville's size...I can't say the same for Seoul, especially with an event name like International Fireworks Festival!  While the fireworks left much to be desired, the people watching was, again, top notch!  In Korea, it is popular for couples to dress alike.  I'm not talking merely coordinating their outfits.  I'm talking wearing the same exact outfit, or at the very least, the same shirt.  It was tough not to stare at the plethora of couples in attendance.  Our group was not excited by the idea of fighting a million people to get through one of two subway exits to hop a train home, so we left after the first 10 or 15 minutes.  What should have taken us maybe 10 minutes to board a train ended up taking close to half an hour because of the hoards of people both arriving to and departing from the festival.  It was mass chaos and if I never go to another event with that number of people again, I will be just fine.

Sunday, Maria and I met a fellow teacher in Gwangju, Kasandra, for lunch at an Italian restaurant.  The food was pretty good for what it was...  I'm really starting to realize the spin other countries put on imported food.  I ordered a pizza at this place, knowing full well that the pizza would be different than what I am used to.  And, don't worry, it was.  The flavor was quite good (mushroom and pesto!) and eating cheese for the first time in weeks was fun, but the crust of the pizza was a tortilla shell!  So, essentially, I ate an open face quesadilla.  It was good, but I think I'll stick to places that don't specialize in foreign food unless they are owned and operated by foreigners and proven to be legit...

Monday was back to grind stone.  It was so hard to get up on Monday morning, knowing I had a full week of teaching ahead of me after three weeks of no teaching or partial weeks!  The girls brought me back though.  Here are a couple of pictures of some of my students from Friday:

One of my third year classes

Some first years gals who stayed for a little while after class

Here are a couple of cute stories from the past couple of days:

Last Friday, I played games all day rather than start a new lesson.  I played a game called Run and Write where I would give two teams a word and one person from each teach had to run across the room to the whiteboard and write a long (and correct!) sentence using the word.  One of the words I gave them was Noelle.  One of the students wrote "Noelle is our English teacher.  We love her because she is very kindful and pretty.  If I was a boy, I would want to marry her."  (I don't know why she wrote more than one sentence...sucking up, I guess...)

On Mondays, I go grocery shopping and usually eat duk boki at E-Mart.  I was eating yesterday and reading a book when a bold student ran (literally) to my table, sat down (SUPER rare) and said, "Teacher, why you eat alone?  (Mischievous pause, followed by an even more mischievous glow in her eye) You not have friend?!"  She started laughing hysterically at her clever question.

There is a girl in one of my favorite classes that has really short hair (same style as me, but longer).  Her English isn't great but she always asks me questions to get me to talk to her.  She also shamelessly waves at me from afar each time she sees me.  We're pals.  Today, I think she asked me if I would cut her hair.

During my last class, I awarded a piece of candy to the team that one the exercise.  I like to switch up the prizes I give so they don't know what is coming to them.  Sometimes, I'll give everyone in the class candy, but give the winners two pieces.  Sometimes I'll do high fives and sometimes I only give the winners candy.  Today, for my first year classes, it was a winning-team-only-candy-day.  After class was over, one of the teams that didn't win candy stuck around for a little while.  As they were leaving, they approached me, and in unison, chanted, "Trick or Treat!"  I laughed, told them they did a good job and said I'd see them tomorrow.  They left.  Not a minute later, there was a knock at my door.  I opened it and there they were with their hands out and big smiles on their faces, saying, "Trick or Treat, Teacher!"  I told them they were clever and laughed.  As they were about to walk away, I gave in and let them have a piece of candy.  What can I say?  I'm a softy and I like to reward the clever twerps.

Here's a picture I pilfered from Diane that was taken at Namsan Tower last Tuesday.  Around the observatory, the windows say which cities around the world are in that direction and how many kilometers away they are...  I think we were about 10,525 km away from Chicago...or something like that.

For the next several weeks, it is business as usual.  Teaching full weeks (so weird!) and probably exploring Seoul on the weekends.  This Friday is Lily Festival at school, which means that the entire day is spent in the Kyung-Hwa Bowl (an outdoor grass terraced stadium) watching each of the students perform various talents.  We don't teach at all and there will be 3,000 people (students and teachers) gathered!  Should be pretty cool!  All of the foreigners (read: anyone fluent in English or good at singing) are singing a song during the offering portion of the accompanying church service.  Details to come!