so, i have been quite a busy little girl. i haven't updated in a whole month, but don't fret. i am still alive. luckily south korea is not at war with the north yet. but there is a chance the two teams will play in the world cup apparently! so that could be interesting. . .

since we spoke last, I have:

-seen 2 american movies over here, in korea (Iron Man 2 and Robin Hood)

-celebrated that I will be a godmother to Tamara's little GIRL!!!!!

-visited Seoul for the paper lantern festival and a DJ festival event the night before

-spent a 3 day weekend on Jindo Island

-celebrated Buddha's Birthday on said island

-given out yet another round of report cards

- 3 more field trips

-celebrated 2 months in Korea

-went to another baseball game

-and maybe I went out a few nights for some good old fashioned nights on the town

kids playing around on Sikjansin mountain after going hiking (a field trip, yes). it was pretty awesome. we obviously didn't go up high enough for any serious sight seeing but it was still a great field trip.

some friends and i out at a new place called "Yellow Taxi". it's a western bar. . . if you couldn't tell by the name. they have live music. gahhhhhh . . . . i'm drooling over the thought of live music back home. the bands here are like the cover bands' rejects. seriously, the other night we saw a band here and half of their set list were songs from Rockband.

the KTX, Korea Train Express. I can get to Seoul in 50 minutes on this baby. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

my first sight upon arriving in Seoul. that is the side of a building made into a screen. The next day it was just a plain building. Asians and their technology. gotta love it.

a guy DJing at the DJ festival encore. I didn't tell him that I was a DJ once. . . I didn't want to make everyone look bad ya know?

some women in traditional korean wear at the Paper Lantern Buddhist Festival. there was a big walking parade with Buddhists from all over the world. it was pretty interesting to see so many places represented. i guess this festival is kind of a big deal.

the paper lantern i made. . . . by hand. yeah, i'm pretty much a full blooded korean now. i know their secrets. we actually didn't get to keep these. supposedly, they used them later in the big parade they had. we never saw them though. maybe they were embarrassed because ours were clearly made by beginners. . .

we toured one of the ancient palaces. it was pretty overwhelming. it looked like i was walking through a video game, if that makes any sense. it was just unreal. i was getting sick so i was exhausted at this point. i'd like to have seen it when i wasn't so worn out though. there are tons of places like this to see though. so i'm not worried about it.

fast forward: the following weekend. the three day weekend we went to Jindo Island. We took the KTX to Mokpo on thursday night and stayed there. Mokpo is a port city on the southwest coast of S. Korea. It seemed like a cool enough place the little time we spent there. This was the nighttime view from our window. (i was excited that i figured out how to take a nighttime landscape picture on my camera)

and here is a daytime view. that's some water to the left of middle. i don't know technically what water it is, but it's definitely not Lake Pontchatrain.

the next morning, we took a bus for an hour ride to Jindo Island, across a lot of small bridges and one apparently large bridge. ths first place we went was to one of the beaches. this is the beach where you can see the "Miracles of Moses" (explanation here). Basically, the tide gets so low that the it looks like the sea parts and a road is exposed (it's really just a sandbar).

That is the island the road leads to. Obviously we weren't there during the festival or this would have been covered with people.

yea, the tide was a little to high for road walking that day. there were spots where you could see how incredibly shallow it was. these are the steps that lead down to the road. it's kind of scary looking but they don't really go down super far. like i said, it's shallow.

we headed to the beach for some good old fashioned western sun tanning. Women don't really wear swimsuits to the beach. the guys will all have their shirts off, but the women stay covered. really, they don't want to be tan. many women want to be as white as possible. they even put bleach in their lotions and makeup as a "whitener". it's kind of strange. so we come across these goons trying to put up a makeshift beach umbrella using two regular smaller umbrellas . . . the operation was not a success.

just a random house Jindo. this is what many of the houses look like here though. No dryers means everyone hangs their laundry. they look poor, but actually if someone has a house here, they are usually very rich. most people live in apartments, especially in the cities.

this was the garden of a church we walked by. i thought it was strangely beautiful. if it weren't for the bugs crawling all over me, i'd love to have a picnic covered up to my knees in flowers.

alright, my computer is about to run out of battery. (i broke my outlet plug converter, so i can't charge my computer.) but i will update when i can with more pictures. this is a busy busy busy month coming up, so hopefully i can stay on top of blogging. i miss everyone a lot. but i'm having a great time here so far. just as long as there's no war right. you work on the oil, i'll work on keeping peace.