Happy Birthday to me! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to everyone in Koreaaaaaa…… Happy Birthday to Yoooooouuu!
You are probably thinking “Wait WHAT?!?!?! I thought you were 24 years old….and weren’t you born in August?!” You’re right! I am 24 years old anywhere else in the world, but in Korea I turned 26 today. Happy Birthday to me!!
In Korea, When you are born you are automatically one year old, when the new year comes around you get a year older. My explanation was vague, I know, but that is because someone I know has already made a great video to explain it. Why tell it twice?
Here is the video! A link to his YouTube is posted below.
This was actually three weeks ago but I’ve been too lazy to post and I’d been waiting for some photos from a friend. Which, I never got… Ahem… You know who you are!
So, the ladies and I went to go bike the Han river. It was a beautiful day but oh so very, very cold! It was the coldest day yet this year! Not only was it cold but it was very windy too. Burrr! We met up at the subway station and walked down to where the bike rental was set up. We weren’t 100% sure where it was so we were walking for a while. Once we found it and paid for an hour rental we choose our bikes. The bikes reminded me of bikes from the 50’s, that were painted with a bunch of different colors. I chose a green one (someone else did too) and the other colors chosen were pink, blue, and orange. Once we got our bikes we started our ride. The ride was very pretty. The Han is gorgeous and the park surrounding it is very well planned out. The ride was a little shorter than I wanted but we only paid for one hour so we had to take the bikes back….. But even if it was short, we were almost frozen solid by the end of our ride.
After biking the Han river, we went and got coffee to warm up at a cute little cafe right on the river. After that we went and got dinner and Baskin Robins for dessert. We felt like we deserved it!
None of us were quite ready to go home yet so we went to 노레방 pronounced ‘Norebang’ which is essentially a bunch of private rooms set up for Karaoke. I had never done this before so I was TERRIFIED! Who really wants to go sing in front of people when you know you can’t sing a single tune? They assured me that it would be a blast, and wouldn’t be scary at all because you were only singing with people you knew. It ended up being a lot more fun that I expected!
Above, is a photo of the hallway to all the rooms, pretty classy looking isn’t it! Below, are photos of us ladies singing our hearts out to some songs.
All in all, the day was a complete success! Everything that I did that day was something that I would love to do again and again, each of these things are highly recommended if you come to Seoul!
Many of you know that I LOVE Salsa dancing… I started going in February of 2011 and have gone just about every weekend since. I started going dancing in Kalamazoo, MI at a little place called Papa Pete’s and Blue Dolphin. If it wasn’t for the friendly staff and the awesome regulars I likely would never have found out that I have a passion for Salsa dancing. I was sad when I left Kalamazoo after I graduated and missed dancing on the weekends when I was living in Manistee for two months while gathering my documents so that I could come to South Korea to teach. Imagine my excitement when I found out that there was a very lively and active community of Salsa dancers on this half of the world!
It only took me two weeks to find a place that I fell in love with. It is a small club called Macando. It is in Hongdea, which is about an hour away from where my apartment is in Seoul. The club is small and some would consider it cramped with no room to dance between the hours of midnight and 3am, but I wasn’t worried about that. I was sure that I would make a lot of new friends that way and now I know all of the regulars that go there. One of my favorite people that I’ve meet there is a Korean guy named Brandon. He is really nice and speaks fairly good English (makes it easy for me). He is a really good dancer and he’s even a salsa instructor in the evenings. One night he brought some work friends from Malaysia with him who didn’t know how to dance. I decided to try to help he teach them the basic moves to the four different dances (Salsa, Merengue, Bachata, and Cha Cha) they eventually gave up and resorted to watching us. Little did I know they decided to video us dancing…
This one is a video of me dancing Merengue with Brandon. I’m doing fairly well, I screwed up a few times once I realized they were making a video!
Also, Here is a video of me dancing Salsa(NY style). This one is also with my friend Brandon. I’m actually doing REALLY bad, but to someone who has never danced Salsa it might look good! haha
I saw this video and thought it would be fun to share a bit of my daily life 🙂
btw… i didn’t make the video 🙂 Click here to see the YouTube channel it came from. I don’t know if it is the original or not, but it is the best I could so for citing my sources.
Today is Pepero Day!!! YAY! Pepero day is I guess similar to Valentines day and sweetest day…. and any other ‘lovers’ type holiday, only this time you give them a box, or several boxes of Pepero. It’s essentially just another manufactured holiday but it’s fun to celebrate them sometimes! This time though, it was SUPER Pepero day because of the date, 11/11/11… the marketing compaign was all about the fact that the 11’s must represent Pepero sticks.
Here is a video that some people I know made about it, it will make you laugh 🙂
So as promised I told you that I would post about my new Language partner and the Seoul Lantern Festival!
My new Language partners’ name is Hans… well that’s not really his name but that is what he goes by so we will just call him that! A language partner is a person who wants to learn or practice your language and in exchange they teach your theirs. I thought this would be a great way to learn more Korean! How I met hans was though an ad online (by him) looking for a Language partner. Which to most of you sounds pretty sketchy in the first place… I felt that way too about it until I read his little blurb… The ONLY reason why I even bothered to E-mail him in the first place was because he said that he had lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan for a year when he was younger…. For those of you who know me, you know that is only about an hour from where I grew up! I was very excited to read that. So, I e-mailed him and we chatted for a little while just to make sure that the other person was legit and not some scam or scary, crazy person. After about two weeks we finally decided to meet up. I was a little bit nervous but once I actually met him and found out what a nice guy he is I was fine. We decided to do something outdoors, so we walked around the Seoul Dream Forest for a while. It was pretty but I would have enjoyed it more if all the leaves weren’t gone already. We had been walking around the dream forest for about two hours and we felt comfortable enough around each other to keep hanging out for the rest of the day. After the dream forest we went to the Dongdaemun markets, which is basically a HUGE area filled with small shops selling anything from winter hats and bathing suits, toys, craft supplies, and home building materials. Anything you could think of, you would find it there. After that we went to dinner, we had a Korean Barbeque and of course shared some Soju YUM! After dinner, we went to the Seoul Lantern festival….
The Lantern Festival was AMAZING! There were so many lanterns and they were all HUGE! We even got to make our own lantern! Instead of writing much about it I added a slideshow!
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I’m also awesome enough that I made a video to go with it…..or well I tried to!
I’m still no pro at videos, it is a bit jumpy in places… I edited a lot of it out… I’m learning okay! Arg…. Also, the sound isn’t pretty so my suggestion is to turn the sound off! There is one part near the end where ones of the lanterns plays music…. but otherwise…. turn it off, it is all just people talking :-S
My awesome hakwon decided to have a Halloween activity day! I was very much excited for this considering it is one of the best western holidays (my opinion). We decided to do it on the Wednesday before Halloween. There were approximately 50 kids involved and about 12 teachers. They had several fun games to play(pin the nose on the pumpkin, headless race, and a haunted spelling race), face painting (my job), costumes, and of course lots of candy!
Instead of posting a bunch of photos, I put it in a slide show for you 🙂 Enjoy!
So I’ve been doing many things in the last few weeks. One of these things was go to a Korean wedding! A co-worker was getting married and she invited everyone from the school.
I went with the other foreign teachers from my school. From the left: Joey, Doug, Julio, Ellie (The girl I replaced), and Gabriel. Honorable mention goes to Josephine, she showed up 10 minutes after this photo, you will see a photo of her in the ‘Halloween at the Hakwon,’ post that will be up soon!
The invitation that I got was very traditional looking so I was expecting a traditional Korean wedding. What I actually went to, was very much modern.
The wedding took place in a tall 15 story building, which was meant for only weddings! There were probably 20 weddings going on in that building the same day as the one I went to. The wedding itself had almost a fashion show type setup. It was decked out to be very fancy and formal. There were chandeliers, massive amounts of flowers, and a glittery starlight backdrop at the front stage. There was a raised catwalk aisle which the bride and groom walked down together at both the beginning and the end of the ceremony. On either side of the stage were many round tables with black tablecloths and covered chairs. This is where the family sitting and watching. Since Koreans tend to invite everyone they know, it was pretty packed! Friends and co-workers stood in the back of the room. Throughout the ceremony people were walking in and out of the room, it seemed to be fairly informal in that sense.
The ceremony started with the bride and groom walking down the aisle together. They then did the equivalent of exchanging vows and a blessing from the person performing the ceremony. Then it got funny…. A friend of the bride and groom sang the happy couple a song (fairly normal) but when the song was finished he wasn’t done. Watch this video to understand…
As you can see, the groom decided to get into the fun himself and start dancing away, meanwhile embarrassing the bride enough that she was crying. It was pretty fun to watch. After the groom had his fun the happy couple stepped off each side of the stage. One side was the grooms family and one side was the brides family. They bowed first to the mother and father of the bride and then to the mother (no father) of the groom, they then climbed back up on the stage to bow to everyone else. Once they were done they walked back down the aisle and the wedding was over.
This next photo is a professional photo of the couple. They had a bunch of them, in many of them they were doing cutesie poses, this one was my favorite (the fact that it is Photoshopped is besides the point).
After the ceremony, we were invited up to one of the top floors to have dinner. The dinner was not private, it was a huge buffet. There were guest from many other weddings in the same HUGE buffet as us. Below is a photo of the happy couple in their second outfit of the evening, the outfits were pretty!
That’s all for this post. ‘Halloween at the Hakwon’ will be up soon!
My youngest class is soooooo cute! I taught them to sing 5 little monkeys! YAY! My friend Sun Woo came up with some random hand coordination’s and I decided to use them for this song instead of the ones that are really supposed to go with it.
I made a video but they were being little kids and just didn’t want to stand still long enough. The girls are the only ones who finished the whole way through, the boys became crazy lol. Enjoy!