Last Saturday Caroline and I went hiking. This is a Korean past time and we thought we would give it a shot. Koreans get all decked out in their hiking outfits, with hiking boots, special bookbags, hiking sticks and more. Caroline and I are lacking in the hiking gear department so we left the house in a t-shirt, athletic shorts and tennis shoes. Guess what? This was perfect, so we will not be investing in any hiking gear while we are here! Anyways, hiking was sooooo much fun! The mountain we hiked was practically in our back yard. It's awesome! We walked out of our apartment complex and maybe for 5 minutes before reaching the mountain. We climbed about 50 million steps to get from the bottom of the mountain to more of the top... ok, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little. It was probably only 150 steps but it felt like a ton and they were quite steep that even this gave us a workout. Once we got to the top of the steps we reached a bridge. We followed a trail for a long time one way before we realized we were starting to go back down the mountain, so we turned around and began our hike back the other way. We hiked for quite awhile, stopping twice along the way to play on some exercise equipment. It was so much fun because they have these twisty things, pull-up bars, this rolly thingie and other fun stuff to play on. We finally reached the top of the mountain which had a great view. We could see part of the city and several mountains. We continued to hike for awhile before turning around and heading home. We had such a great time while getting a workout that we have both decided that we are going to start hiking regularly. In fact, we have set a goal to hike some mornings before school. I'll let you know if this ends up happening and how long that lasts. hehe
That night, our head foreign teacher, Ian, decided we should all get together and meet the new foreign teachers who are going to be the other 2 Kindergarten teachers. On a side note, this is kinda scary because there are only 4 foreign kinder teachers and Caroline and I are the other two. We have only been teaching like a month now so it is going to be strangey to not be the rookies anymore but instead the people the two new people turn to in order to get help and ask questions... AHH!!! Anyways, so they had just gotten to Korean like a day and a half earlier and Ian knew they would be bored and not know what to do, so he arranged for everyone to meet them at dinner. Only thing is, they were supposed to be in quarantine just in case they had swine flu so we were to have no contact with them. Oops. So if asked we were going to pretend we just happened to meet them at the restaurant because they just happened to be there for dinner too. Anyways, so the restaurant was the same one we were taken to by our school's manager the day after getting here. We have been there a couple times now and each time it gets less and less spicy! yippee!!
On Sunday, we went to church for the first time. It was ok. The pastor was super creepy in the way that he talked and prayed. It seemed like he was being possessed and was either going to cry or explode every time he talked. I didn't like this. Neither did Caroline so we might try somewhere new next weekend. Not to mention, the service was really small and I just didn't like it overall and there are other places to go so hopefully we will figure something out. Anyways, so after church we finally went downtown during the day (we have only ever been at night to go to the bars with the other foreign teachers) and just walked around for awhile. Neither one of us did too much shopping but we each got a couple of small things like puppets for our classes, and I got the cutest pair of socks with a boy and a girl talking on one of those cans with the string in between them phones. We had lots of fun window shopping and it ended up being a good weekend.
I will update you on this past week and weekend tomorrow because there is so much to write and this has already been a long post.
Love you all and miss you more!!
Thanks for keeping this updated, whit, I really enjoy reading it! :) Glad you are having so much fun!!
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