Juny in Incheon

The last chance we had together, Juny and I had decided to go to the ocean for the day. The morning of, it was raining!! Oh no! We had to change our plans...so we met instead in Insadong. When we got there, it had stopped raining. There was a really beautiful restaurant made of wood that we went to. In the center, there was a garden surrounded by glass. We had chicken and soups and many other side dishes. It was really good, and surprisingly tasted a bit like American food!

We looked around at the shops, and stopped by one selling name stamps. He brought me inside and showed me a stone stamp with my name on it. He'd gotten it earlier! Wow, what a nice surprise! It was so sweet.

Lemon popbingsu was for lunch. It was a cute place with short, comfortable chairs and many books. We opened one, and it had signatures from all the different people who'd visited there earlier. There was one that showed names with numbers. Asking Juny what it meant, he explained it was a "matchmaking" technique. You count the number of strokes it takes to make your name, and add them up along with the names of the other person. The number indicates how close you guys are to being compatible. It sounds similar to something we do in America, so I begged him to show me, so we did our names. It only came out to 31%...Haha!

On the subway, he asked me to choose where I wanted to go next: the ocean or the zoo. How can you ask me to choose between 2 of my favorite things??!! ^^ So we went to the ocean. After 2 wrong turns and almost 2 hours later, we arrived in Incheon. There's a really neat island with a huge Chinatown. We didn't have time to visit there, but we went to the pier. There we saw a crowd of people feeding birds. While I was watching the people, he walked away and I followed. He told me I didn't need to follow him everywhere, so I stayed. Haha! Well, I didn't want to be lost in Incheon!

He came back a few seconds later with the bag of chips he had planned to surprise me with to feed the seagulls. They loved them...and so did we! It was actually really scary feeding the birds, but it was fun. They would swoop down and grab the chips from our hands. Juny tried to make the birds get it from his mouth, but it didn't work too well ^^ We found a firework store, so even though it was the middle of the day, we bought roman candles and shot them out over the ocean. What a beautiful day together! 40 minutes after arriving, we had to head back. I had a meeting with another friend that night, but it was a day I'll never forget, and worth every minute on the subway!

Jamie and Grace

Here are a few pics from meeting with friends the last week i was in Korea. The first ones are of
Grace and I at dinner. We had a really good meal of rice the guy stir fried in front of us. It was so funny, because when he was stirring the rice, he would fling pieces of it out of the tray accidentally, and it kept flying at us and in our waters! Yet he didn't seem to notice anything was out of the ordinary.
The next pictures are of Jamie and her family and I at lunch. They've been such a great family to me. They drove us out about 30 minutes north of Seoul and we went to a restaurant that the Olympic speed skater from Korea apparently enjoys. The restaurant is famous for its dishes made of acorns. Now, I've had many acorn jelly tofu things, and they're not bad, but it was really fun to try acorn noodles, acorn pancakes, etc. The food was delicious as advertised, but mostly I just enjoyed spending time with Jamie's family. As a going away present, they gave me a thermos for tea! A few months ago, Jamie and I were shopping, and while looking around, I asked if she'd heard of anything in Korea that would have a place to drink and hold tea in a cup. She didn't know, and had told her parents without my knowing it. For the next few weeks they'd searched for one, and finally come up with one downtown. What a nice present! One I imagine I'll be using a lot ^^

Summer School Last

My summer school class was a great group of students, all new, mostly from KBU. Although, I was honored to have 3 girls from other universities who'd heard about the program here. In 3 weeks, we went through an entire 3 months worth of materials. It was fun trying to think of activities for each 3 hour class together every day. We played the "telephone" game to learn about gossip, we watched "Supersize Me" to learn about diet and exercise, and we went to McDonalds to throw all that info out the window! Here's pics from our last day together.
Game time! Pictionary...