And Every Minute Colder

Time is flying by as it's the last full week of November. How fast the minutes fly away. and every minute colder! We're going to see Les Mis in December so I'm stoked. 

The weeks have been hectic lately and it's hard to keep up. This is the first day I've had to chill in a long time, it feels like, and it wasn't even that chill. Man, everything is so packed! 

Last Monday I took a break from my usual Monday activities of doing nothing to hang out with Namho. We got samgyeopsal (pork belly) and went to a cat cafe, and it was awesome. Here are a million pictures of cats. 

Me, in my natural habitat

Namho bonding with the babyyyy

I love this cat

who eventually came on his lap.

Look at his little stumpy legs!

I got one! He was on me for like an hour.

<3

He kept falling asleep sitting like this.

So cute.

I really needed some cat time. It's been cold and rainy a lot here, and my students have been difficult, so it was a nice way to relax.

Tuesday was normal. I can't remember anything of note.

Wednesday after work it was raining again, but Namho and I met to go to the Seoul Lantern Festival. I had gone to the festival in Jinju last year, which is more famous and big, but I wanted to go again. It was cold and rainy but it did not disappoint!

Jongymyo Shrine, which I visited with Tina and Ronnie 

There were some pretty lit up bridges so we took some photos together.

This goof

It was really hard to work with the lighting.

Namho kept insisting on pictures of me despite the lighting.

He was like "WOW YOU LOOK SO BEAUTIFUL" then showed me this picture. -_-

Walking along the stream

Pics with lanterns

Hearts

Pic-ception

The American one was Mt. Rushmore. I asked Namho if he knew what that was and he was like "No."

We got chimaek (chicken and beer) and went on our way home.

On Thursday I switched my classes around since my favorite 6th grade class had earned enough points in their homeroom to have a cooking day. When their homeroom teacher told them if they had it first period they would miss English, they reportedly all yelled NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO and demanded a different solution like switching periods. As a result, I had them after lunch, which is usually a disastrous time to teach classes but was fine since they are amazing perfect angel 6th graders, unlike my other classes.

Since English was the class where they got the last point, they brought us food.

They made sandwiches

And rolls, and rice mixed with different things. It was awesome. 

My 6th graders are a bit difficult, but this one class is my favorite of all the classes I teach. They're really funny and try to speak English to me no matter what. They're very innocent' It almost balances out my average class and my terrible class. Almost.

On Friday I had Korean class and I had to stop for the book, so Tina and I bummed around the bookstore and found this gem:

Totally avoiding copyright infringement  

"Oedipus the King" with the pronunciation "Oh-Ee-Dee-Poo-Seu" which I found funny since they tried to account for all the letters in the name, but the word isn't from English so it's a bit difficult 

After Korean class I met up with Namho for some hot cocoa and went home.

Saturday I went to Tina's and managed to be on the 7612 alone! In my area the bus is less crowded but once it gets to Hongdae it picks up.

I live for this

Yeah, empty bus! 

We met up with Lauren in the afternoon and saw the last Hunger Games movie: Mockingjay Part II. I am not a fan of the way Mockingjay ends, and the way the movies were split made it hard to care about the characters. I still found it pretty entertaining, though. 

After, we got some pasta and wine, and some cake. It's always nice to see Lauren. After relaxing and dissecting the movie, we went home. Normally I would go with Tina, but I had a special event the next day.

I got to go to my first Korean wedding!

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.................... Wait.

It would have been more exciting if I had actually known the people. It was for the principal's son. My principal wrote the invitation greeting in English to me. Normally I am not expected to go to these things, but since she made the effort I was roped in.

I wore normal clothes as if I was teaching. The ceremony started at 2, so I met So Jung and got there at 1:30.

We went to greet the principal and give our monetary gift. Weirdly, they were opening the envelopes and writing down the money amount as soon as you gave it, which was weird (even to the Koreans. So Jung assured me repeatedly that that was weird.) and everyone laughed because I wrote my name in Korean which takes a million years longer than everyone else (my family and first name combined is 8 syllables where most Korean names have 3... my first name alone is 5...) and you can tell I'm not Korean either way.

Afterwords, we saw the bride briefly - just saw, she was recording a message to her husband in a glass room we could look into. 

I asked a million questions and got to tell a lot of the differences. Like so:

They took their wedding pics already, with many different dresses. They bride and groom decide on the dress together. Some Wedding halls rent out dresses. Regardless of where they get it, most Korean brides rent dresses. 

It was pretty!

Then we went to eat.

Seriously. I saw exactly 0% of the ceremony. We just went to the buffet and everyone stuffed their faces for an hour since we had to give a monetary gift so why not.

My coworkers got to witness some normal occurrences in my life, such as people I don't know saying/shouting "HELLO" at me and women coming and touching my hair and saying "oh so pretty!" without me knowing them or without asking me to do so. So that was fun to let them see some of my life. Ha....

My second plate was all the best. Orange chicken, Pizza, duck with my favorite honey mustard sauce (seriously, Korean HM sauce is amazing), fried sweet potatoe, and kimchi mandu. I was so stuffed.

 There were like 4 other weddings happening at the same time, so it was kind of crazy. Everyone agrees that it's weird we all had to be there. Weddings here are like a whole family affair. I personally don't want all of my mom's staff at my wedding, but there we all were at the principal's son's wedding. The ceremony is more intimate and for immediate family and friends. Still, it felt odd to be at a wedding, which I consider quite personal, with a ton of people no one knew and my coworkers, and I met neither the bride nor groom, and I saw none of the actual wedding. We even had to hunt and find the head teachers and give proper greetings. So much here is about obligation and whatever even if you have no desire or need to do so.

Either way, it was an experience.


I managed to make it to dance class like 45 minutes late, and I really should have just skipped haha. I had prepared not at all, so I listened to EXO's Love Me Right on the way. It helped none percent.


I came in at about 30 seconds and we only learned like 30 seconds more of the song. It was really hard! It's so fast and the beats are hard to hear. I also am not a super fan of the song. I think it drags and has a lot of mismatched parts.

Anyway, here is the MV, where they famously used American football jerseys and wore Yankees hats, had an "Alice in Wonderland" theme, had a song called "Love Me Right" featuring a group of 9 guys and no girls, and VERY FAMOUSLY claimed that Tao (a Chinese member who had had an open letter from his father begging SM to let his son leave the group go back to China and heal from some terrible injuries) was "in America recovering and would not be a part of the repackage" right before Tao fucking dropped an album in China and sued SM.

And the insane dance practice:

Our attempts:

As you can see, we did not love it right. I am also not in the videos much as I did not learn half of the dance haha. Still, it was fun.

Here is Call Me Baby, which Love Me Right is a repackage (the add like one new song and repackage the same album to sell more....) of and which still features Tao as a member. 

I didn't like Call Me Baby much at first, but I like it a lot now and much more than LMR.

We had another practice after for the event in December, Dance Joa's 10th anniversary.

Pau had the coolest headband.

Tina and I got to show off our Korean, other Koreans told us how surprised they were by our class (We're really loud and supportive and don't care if we do poorly at the dance... when we split into A and B teams we cheer, not criticize, always smile and have energy, etc...), we drank and ate and had fun.

Then it was back to reality on Monday. My students were terrible today. They're learning days of the week and months of the year, which is a lot different and difficult for them to learn. Sigh.

I got surprised with needing my English camp plan by Wednesday so Lord knows how I'll pull that off. Whatever. 

I also went to costco to get pumpkin pie, as this week is thanksgiving yayyyy!!! I'm sure some of my frustration and irritation comes from the fact that I miss home a lot this time of the year, so I hope I can power through. 

Stay warm, everyone! And eat lots of turkey for me!