The journey: Holidays in Korea

There's truly is no place like home for the Holidays. Korean Hagwons (and maybe Korean's in general) like to make their teachers work every day possible. That includes Christmas as well as New Years Eve. Thankfully though, the bus drivers wanted to have Christmas night at home with their family (or with soju) therefore our boss moved our regular evening classes to the morning. You can see where the teachers end up in the heirarchy. Hmm.. Anyways, amazingly enough I did have a good share of students show up. I have to say though on behalf of my boss, she did order in a turkey dinner, stuffing, bread, and pumpkin pie for dessert from the Army base.
For Christmas Enda and I went to a Thai restaurant in Hongdae with some friends. Not the home made potatoes and bread that I'm used to, but it works. Following that, we stopped off at Paris Baguette and picked up a couple Christmas cakes and Christmas hats. (No pictures with me now, but I'll get them hopefully soon). Finally we headed to a friends' place and hung out for the night. Good times. Good people.

For New years Eve Enda and I took off to VIPS. An all you can eat place.. ahhh...sooo good....mmm.. then we headed to City Hall for the countdown and made our way to a concert. See picture below...Enda with the desserts.

The picture below is of a Korean couple wearing...that's right, green cow hats on their head. Supposedly this is the cool thing to do. Enda and I didn't get that memo of which I'm rather thankful.

Enda and I also made a journey to the Horse Racecourse this past weekend! Good times. After we figured out how to read the scores and buy our cards we went crazy! You can actually bet 100 won if you want (that's like .10 cents) Amazing. Anyways, I always start off good and end off bad. You would think that I would learn from it, but no. I don't. The Koreans are also very quiet when it comes to horseracing. The place has 5 floors but each floor is dead quiet with hundreds of Koreans walking around placing their bets. Only when the horses are coming around turn 4 do the Koreans start to make some ruckus. Even then it seemed unified. The picture below is of Koreans squatting. That's how they roll. No chairs, just your own legs... :)