And so this was Christmas...

Some highlights (and bright lights) from our 2009 Seoul, Korea Christmas.

Seoul-ites do their Christmas lights a little bit differently. They prefer to cloak and entire building in lights. Below is city hall.

We spent Christmas Eve with some friends looking at Christmas lights around the city.

Here we are in line waiting to get knife noodles at a restaurant in Myeong-dong, a big shopping district.

Our Christmas lunch. Korean made wine, Cheese from Brendan's mother, and Crackers.

Korean Salvation Army bell-ringers!

Presents, stockings (filled!), advent calendars and better cheddars from Nancy.

Home made Chocolate chip cookies from my Dad and Beth.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas blog-readers!

...now we're off to Busan!

It's so nice when you have people that care enough about you to buy you gifts, pack them up, go down to the post office, wait in line and pay exorbitant fees to ship to Korea. Brendan and I aren't going to have too shabby of a Christmas from the looks of the piles of presents in both of our apartments.

Thanks parents!

Lots of content!

TGIF PEOPLE!

The one and only picture of my tree lit up. Soon after this was taken, the light bulbs starting exploding and then the tree went entirely out. Apparently 220 volts of electricity were a few too many. They do look unusually bright, don't they?

Some pictures of my after-school class. Their task this semester was to remake High School Musical. There were mixed results. In any case, they had fun speaking the English language and that's my main goal. I can't believe I'm giving the peace sign, these Koreans are rubbing off on me.

This girl is my greatest actress. She played the villainess. She's probably the only one who took it even remotely seriously. Notice the two little heads peeking through the window behind us.

Here is a video of the Seoul Lantern Festival. The images were taken a while back, but I set it to a techno version of Deck the Halls because I'm feeling Christmasy.

I recently started painting again in an effort to spend less time watching tv on my laptop or vacantly staring off into space. My first effort was pretty terrible. Second less so.

My students are taking exams all next week, so I have half days. On Monday, all of the teachers in my office and I will be going to Everland. It's supposed to be Korea's best amusement park. We shall see. If it follows the trend of the rest of this country, it will be a really crowded hack version of an American theme park.

Check out where I'm going in February. Sweeeeeeeeet!

By the way, I'm finally not sick! (Knock on Wood)

It's snowing!

My tree!

My wonderful mother sent me a tree and some presents to put under it. The lights don't work because they cant be plugged into a korean outlet and I had no ornaments or star. I remedied this by putting my stuffed Kujo at the top of the tree and decorating it with family photos.

It is rock star.

Well, we had a really good Thanksgiving on Saturday. We went to a friend of a friends apartment who is Korean-American. There was a mix of Americans, Canadians, and Koreans there including his aunts who made a bunch of Korean food to go with the American Thanksgiving food.

It was pretty good. The funniest thing was that everyone only has toaster ovens, so there were multiple tiny dishes of casseroles instead of one large one. We brought tomatoes stuffed with mozzarella cheese and drizzled with balsamic vinegar, chocolate chip cookies, and a huge jug of sangria. It was really fun. It was nice to just sit around with multiple English speakers and talk. I think everyone was afraid that there wouldn't be enough food, so we had all brought entirely too much. We also played the game catchphrase to mix it up a little. We found out towards the end of the night that it was the host, Brian's Korean Aunt's 60th birthday, so we established one of the cakes as a birthday cake and had her blow out some candles. I was really afraid when first coming to Korea that the major holidays would be sad and depressing for me. I found that you can have a "family" atmosphere wherever you go. This might have been one of my favorite Thanksgivings yet!

The next day Brendan and I went Christmas shopping around some of the big market streets. The day started out very productively until we got lost and couldn't find the last market that we were looking for. Then it ended up with two tired and slightly grumpy people eating a shrimp avocado burger at Lotteria (like Korean Burger King.)

I'm still not healthy. I have a terrible cough that causes everyone on the subway to run away from me. At least sometimes I get a little room to myself. I went back to the doctor today and got some antibiotics so hopefully that will help.

After my father mentioned the lack of people in my pictures i went back to take a look at them. I don't know how I managed to get 3 pictures without any people in them. There is usually a crush of people and absolutely no personal space here. My photos are very decieving. I always kind of laugh to myself when I'm on the subway. Just think of a hundred little black haired heads smushed together with my blonde one sticking up in the middle.

I have 21 days of vacation that I can use throughout the year, and I had been planning to use 10 or 11 when we go to the Philippines in February. The stipulation with our vacation days is that we must use them during student breaks (end of December, month of January and month of February, Month on July.) I found out of Friday that we will only have time for one week of vacation in July (5 working days) so I have to use up the rest of my vacation days in during the winter break. That amounts to 16 working days of vacation. On top of that, some of the days that I requested off were already holidays so, surprise! I now have a bunch of vacation time coming up. From December 24 to January 3, January 27 to 31, and February 13 to 28. I have no idea what to do with my time but i'm considering a ski trip, a train trip to southern Korea, a second trip to another part of The Philippines, or possibly another country. It all depends on airfare costs.