Holidays in Korea

This past week has flown by once again, but not without draining a lot of energy from me. It was a very tiring week with the preschool and middle school students, but I made it surprisingly. Let's see where do I even start with this past week. Well, our hagwon went to a Christmas party at a hotel where we met about 10 other English Schools. There was great food, good company, and entertainment of which we took part in. We {our schools} competed against one another. E.C.C. sang and danced....yeah, it was interesting :) I directed our 'choir' and about 12 of us danced to Mary Mary's "Shackles". yay ;) It was fun. We placed 3rd which was good given the fact that the mic didn't work for part of the choir portion, and we forgot about 5 seconds of the dance...hmmm.

This is a pic of Joanne teacher, one of the lovely Korean teachers I work with, and myself at the dinner party on Saturday. Good times.

For Christmas Eve and Day I ended up going snowboarding in Phoenix Park (same place I went last weekend). This time though I went with a program called Adventure in Korea. They set up trips throughout the year for foreigners who want to go out see what's out here. Hiking/snowboarding/fishing/camping trips

Anyways, I went boarding Sunday afternoon which was great! The place was crowded on Sunday-all day, which was weird seeing that it was Christmas Eve and all, but Christmas in Korea isn't really that big of a deal. Some of the people I met went to a concert that night on the slopes and saw some fireworks. Pretty good show if I may say so myself :)

The band we heard was called 'copy machine' and this is a pic of the girls i went with and the band. yup.. the Koreans looking like true Koreans...:) love it.

After that we took off and hit up some bowling because what else do you do on Christmas Eve? :) I believe my score stayed in the double digits :) yay for bowling.These are my Room 307 youth hostel roommates. good people.

It was also great to have the hostel right on the slopes. I think people stayed on them until about 2 in the morning. Hard Core.

I decided to snowboard on Christmas morning which turned out to be the most painful (literally) Christmas I've ever had. Yay! Okay, so it started off as a great morning; the slopes were empty, there wasn't any music blaring from the speakers, it was just me and nature, the way I like it.

Well, soon after that moment of tranquility I was rudely awakened by truly becoming one with nature. I was doing a run and was practicing my turn and had my back to the downside of the slope when I fell backward and totally flipped/rolled/tumbled whatever you want to call it, and landed extremely hard on my ars. It left a nice bruise. oi. Anyways, I continued for another 3 hours. Gotta learn from your mistakes and push through the rough times regardless of how painful they may be. (or something like that). Here's a pic of Danny, Kevin, and I Christmas morning on the slopes.

Well, this week is only a 3 day work week which is nice. I think I'll take this weekend away from the slopes though...

Hopefully I'll be contacting Holt soon in regards to starting the research for my parents.

I'm also going to be starting language courses somewhere in Jan. Either at a school or church or something. I realize though I need to get that together asap. I'm sick of not being able to communicate. oi. okay, I should get rollin'. Hopefully this weekend I'll get together a link that has more of my pics from Korea on it. Okay, Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and I with you all a great New Year. Crazy how time flies by...