Another crazy weekend

Sorry I haven't written in awhile. This past weekend was very exhausting, but also incredibly fun. After Korean class, some of the class and most of the teachers took a bus to Mt. Palgong just outside Daegu. We visited a Buddhist temple called Doughwa-sa with many complexes and a huge statue of a Buddha. It was very pretty especially with the fall colours and surrounding mountains. I tried to bow like the Buddhists do in front of the statue, but your butt and your head are supposed to touch the ground at the same time. My body doesn't let me do that, especially in low-rise jeans. We had a picnic under the pillars of the big temple and took a tour of the different buildings. It was a good day of learning history and getting to know the people in my class.

Big Buddha Statue

Gorgeous fall colour of the Mt. Palgong area

Me in front of a Buddhist temple.

Saturday night, I met up with some friends from class downtown. One of the girls has a Korean boyfriend, named Jason, and his friend owns a bar in another part of town. Apparently, Jason's friends were at the bar and excited to meet a bunch of foreign girls. It was really fun, although communicating was very difficult at times. We picked out English names for them, but they didn't really take to them. After lots of interesting food, like kim chi pizza with octopus and way too much soju (kind of Korean whiskey sold for about 2 dollars a bottle), we went to join the downtown scene. I made friends with this guy named Cyrus from LA. He's the first Filipino I've met in Korea. It was an instant bond. It was a very long, but very fun night.

Early Sunday morning, I had to get up and go hiking with my friend Walita and her friends. I was still feeling off from the previous night, but I knew it would be a great time. Very slowly, I dragged my haggard-looking self to Walita's side of town. We met up with 4 other girls. There were 3 Canadians, 2 Irish and 1 American in our little group. The hike was really fun. We separated into the 2 groups. I was in the straggler group, partly because my chest gets tight with the asthma and because I was still a little tired from the night before. Koreans love their hiking. The hill was packed with families and groups of old ladies just hiking along. All in all, it was a terrific time and definitely worth getting up for.

Walita from Toronto and Sabina from Ireland, my new hiking buddies.

After hiking, I had a shower, a 30 minute nap, and had to head downtown for a book club meeting at a restaurant called Italy and Italy. I didn't reach my goal of reading half the book, but other people were worse off than me. We had some good Italian food and chatted about books and life. They were a nice bunch of people. Some of the girls even invited me to a Christmas dinner they were planning. I was dead tired by the end of the meeting at ended up crashing at 10pm when I got home.

In other news, it's my first full week teaching all of Gwen's schedule. I teach between 6 to 8 classes a day. It's been going okay so far. We had a little incident last week with my little kids when little Danny punched little Stacy in the stomach when she wouldn't let him cut in line. Most of the kids are nice though and relatively well-behaved.