Han Guk Mal Mulayo

I am utterly heartbroken.

My Johns might not come back from Canada/America.

My girls are moving up to a class that might be too difficult for them because of numbers.
This all starts next week, and I am worried/anxious/angry about all of this. Tough break, I guess.

Hopefully I can whip these new kids into shape. Their little brains have been programmed to brag, gloat, and toot their horns to how smart they are, usually at others' expense.
Ugh...I knew Pisces was too good to be true.

What a nice break to go on outings with my babies.
This is my last week as Pisces teacher; my boys are studying abroad (yes, even though they are technically 6) and my girls are being dispersed. I will be the new Aries teacher.

Anyhow.

Can't think of a better way to spend a hot day at the end of June than by walking around and going in and out of greenhouses.

There were a lot of cool things though.

Stacks of rocks.

Korean totem pole.

Lotus! A real one this time!

Lots of waterlilies.

Little guys.

Silkworm!

Greenery in one of the greenhouses.

Lilies.

Thank you, macro function on my camera!

Pretty stuff.

Everybody goes to the river to exercise, socialize, and alcoholize.
Good times.

Well, folks, I am officially 24 years old now. My birthday is over in all parts of the world, and yet....it seems to be the celebration that never ends.

Lo, though I am far from family and friends in Indiana, I have adopted new ones in Korea that are hell-bent on making sure that the birthday does not go unnoticed. And actually, that it doesn't last for fewer than 4 days.

First: the work birthday

My Pisces babies and I.

Jennifer's mom brought in a cake to share with the class.

Jennifer had two pieces.

Not a good idea.

Then, that night we had "Hobo Birthday" down by the Tancheon River. Tired of Carne Station (all you can eat and drink for $25), I decided I wanted a beer and pizza picnic by the river.

L-R: Robyn, Sarah and her folks, the Grants, Matt, Jen, Courtney, Rose, me, Sarah.

These were the festivities, including Korean high school students.

Cake #2: Baskin Robbins ice cream. Delicious.

Moving along to Saturday...

Chantal was unfortunately injured and couldn't make it out for Saturday night, so she bought me lunch at Wazwan #2, or Taj Palace. So delicious.

Last year, my birthday was themed "Sex Terrorists." In keeping with the spirit of themes, we went as "Failed Beauty Pageant Contestants." Ridiculous.

L-R: Mr. Sunnyvale Trailer Park (Mikey), Kyla, Miss Failed Sex Change (me), Mr. Mormon Pimp (Henry), and Miss Teen STD (Rebecca).

This particular celebration lasted until 6am.

Fast forward to Monday night with Sung Won and Hae Rim, former co-workers of mine. A bottle of Riesling, free champagne, and cake # 3.

How could this have been a better birthday? Well...that pony I've always wanted, and perhaps Javier Bardem. But other than that, it was great! So thanks to all who made sure that it was one for the books!

PS - I finally booked my flight to Taiwan for July vacation. Woohoo!

I went to take a picture of the beer in a bag on the side of the paving truck, and this delightful ajassi got in at the last moment.

To their credit, the street was paved in about 3 days.

Some pictures from my very first hike in Korea, climbing the treacherous Dobongsan ('san' means mountain).
These are borrowed from my friend, Sarah, who is now back in Canada.

This is Seoul from the top of Dobongsan.

One weekend, Sarah (again!) arranged for some of us to go hiking in the Dobong mountains, which are just north of Seoul. You can see them from the subway and they look pretty intimidating, but since we were all supposedly beginners, I didn't think that we would be climbing all the way to the top.

Boy, was I wrong. We all met at the subway station. It was Sarah, her Korean friend Sharon, Sharon's friend Kae Min, two guides (I didn't learn one of their names, but we called him "Mountain goat man" because he was literally leaping from rock to rock with no fear and no slipping...the other one told us to call him "Opa" which here means older brother, or boyfriend), and our friend that we met at Musangsa, Courtney, and her friend Mickey.

We were supposed to go from 8am to 12pm, and we were all thinking oh it will be a nice walk in the park (literally), on straight grounds and the fact that I didn't have hiking shoes and wore my crappy Nikes would be perfectly fine. WRONG! It started off easily enough, we were going at quite an incline and all huffing and panting and sweating, thinking that it would level off soon enough. Wrong again. Turns out we were going all the way to the top of the mountain, with stops in between to rest our beginner bones (and muscles, and joints, etc.). We had a nice break at one of the Buddhist temples up there and refilled our water bottles in a really clear and clean pond.

So then we kept going. At this point, Seoul was looking farther and farther away. It really is pretty huge. The view was rather incredible but we had to keep moving. Just when you thought you had completed the hardest part, you look ahead and see nothing but smooth rocks, usually at a 45-90 degree incline or decline and you have to try to either climb up them or scale down them using nothing but your wits and shakey legs. At every pass, I kept thinking, is he kidding me?, but then we would do it and get past it and it would be nothing but a memory and a sore spot on your body.

When we reached the first summit (yes, that's right, I reached a "SUMMIT!"), we were pretty proud of ourselves, thinking cool, we reached the absolute top, now let's go down. But then you'd look up and see more of these summits and Opa would tell us that we had about 3 more hours to go. So we just kept going. We met some really colorful characters on the way. One old Korean man with crazy socks was trying to take our picture and kept talking to us in English and giving us this hilarious laugh and making everyone on the summit shut up and look at us. He was very nice and very funny.

So we're leaping from rock to rock, sliding down others, and quite a few times we literally climbed a rock at a 90 degree angle. No joke. They had metal wires set up as ropes, so mostly we were using our arms and powers of estimation to find the next foothold.

...there was more, but these were just the highlights. Ah, yes. 2005. I remember it well.

Baby Buddha slippers being sold at the Buddha's Birthday parade in Jongno.

...say THAT five times fast.

Sometimes I forget I'm in Asia.

No, really. I've grown so accustomed to being around and working with foreigners, having access to imported foreign foods (can we say cheese?), and being able to get around Korea with only a basic knowledge of Hangul and the Korean language, that I begin to overlook the fact that I am a minority, that this country's history is about eleventy billion times longer than America's, and that Buddhism is actually widely practiced.

Last night, my obliviousness to Asian culture was thankfully denied at the Buddha's Birthday celebration in Jongno. Jongno-Gu is full of really cool attractions, like Gyeongbukgung, Insadong (my favorite!), and Jogyesa. There was lotus-making, a street festival and to top it off, a big 2.5 hour parade down the main drag.

Then I remembered: hey! I'm in Korea!
Note: you are about to see lots of lotus flowers. The lotus flower is a very auspicious symbol in Buddhism. According to several sources, it is a symbol for purity of the soul, resurrection in a material world. The layman description is here.

People

Making lotus flowers. From children to the elderly, everybody was crowded around to make some.

Traditional dancers in the parade.

Lotus ladies.

Traditional soldier. Or I suppose.

Buddhist monks....

More monks...

Hanbok ladies.

Children in the parade.

Children carrying lotuses.

More lotuses.

Dancer with....lotuses!

Neo-traditional hanbok.

Lots of lanterns.

To be continued with floats...

There were some really cool floats in the parade as well.

Skiers for Buddha!

Um...Transformers for Buddha...?

Giant running dragon.

My camera hates me, so when I tried to take a picture of the fire-breathing dragon, I missed it and got smoke.

This is NOT a Nazi symbol...

I'm not sure if this Buddha is flipping the bird, but it sure looks like it.

Happy Buddha's Birthday, everyone!

View from Isaac's new apartment in Dunchon-Dong.

Last Thursday, we took the kiddies on an outing to "Alice Park" in Yangjae, close to Seoul.

In addition to seeing sights as John K. passed out on the bus less than 5 minutes before we left, a disgruntled ajassi (read: middle-aged Korean man) cutting off the bus then stopping to yell at our driver, and kids stuffing food in their mouths as if there were no tomorrow, we saw all kinds of stuff that shocked the kids, amazed them, left their jaws on the ground.

Oh look! (Actually, I have no idea what they were looking at. Another group of students, possibly, as the park was full of them.)

A nicely wooded area, full of grass. This is generally uncommon in the Seoul area.

These were giant apples that were hollowed out and full of seats and puzzles on the wall. There were several of them.

A giant Cheshire Cat on top of a house that was too full for us to enter. Objects in the picture look much smaller than they are.

The caterpillar smoking his hookah.

The card men. John and Jennifer are both amazed by the giant wooden hands, and who wouldn't be? They were mostly chipped and broken. Note the fact that they have the same expression, meaning they are yelling the same nonsense to me at the same time. Day in the life of Lyndsey teacher.

The giant top hat house. In the foreground is John, so you can really see how big it is.

The little forest area. There were silver balls hanging from the man-made canopy. There were vines everywhere. It was actually pretty cool.

It makes me happy to see Korea encouraging its children to have fun, to be creative, and to have an imagination. Unfortunately, like everything else in Korea, it was crowded and people are pushy.

Nonetheless, a good time was had by all.

Typical Korea: kimchi pots and barbed wire.

This is the hallway of Worwick, where I work.

It is seriously the nicest looking school I've worked at. Clean, colorful, spacious.

Lovely.

Kudos to Claire teacher, now in India, who made these life-size mosaics of the 7-year-old students...

Along the Tancheon River, Bundang.

Buddha's Birthday lanterns in Bundang.