Lost and Found

John has successfully finished his first week of school. He observed most of the time but taught a random class here & there. He is observing each of the teachers so that he can meet & get to know all of the kids. On Monday, a very small & feisty 10 year old (who looks like he could be 6), said, "John teacher short." John replied, "I'm taller than you" & the boy hissed at him! It was really funny. The reason he said that was because the kids are used to John's friend, Jude, who is really tall. John enjoyed his first week & really likes the school he will be teaching at. Also, on his first day, he came home & told Nicole the three "problem children" names... The same exact names that are Nicole's "problem children". Except, Nicole only has one of them now - the other 2 used to be in her class but they switched. So strange! We officially don't like those names.

Nicole has a busy week ahead of her... 19 report cards to do! 9 of them are 3 pages long, 10 of them are 5 pages long. Neither of us ever remember having any report card that long. EVER. John got lucky & he will never have to do report cards at his school. Nicole is a little bit jealous.

No more job talk - just Korea! On Wednesday evening, Nicole went to a football game (actually, soccer) with most of her coworkers at the Daejeon World Cup Stadium. It was a lot of fun! Everyone had a great time. Everyone was shouting random phrases in English - we were pretty obnoxious! One of Nicole's coworkers actually dropped her camera onto the field! After some searching for security people & yelling at random people on the field, she was able to get it back; and it still worked! Some of us also got pictures with the 3 cheerleaders & another one of Nicole's coworkers got 8 free tickets! It was a very fun time. When we were all leaving, there were some kids playing 'rock, paper, scissors' in Korean & half of us joined in. One kid tapped Nicole on her shoulder to play with him; it was so much fun & now we have learned how to play the game in Korean! Here is a fan photo we got of all of us! 

http://pics.dcfc.co.kr/photo/photo_view.php?photo_seq=6104&p_gbn=fanPhoto&sel_cate_gbn=170&sel_cate_name&search_gbn=photo_title&searchtext&page=4&sel_year=2013

The American teachers of Maple Bear with the cheerleaders
(all of the other teachers are Canadian)

We would like to thank everyone in John's family who has decided to help us pay for an oven!! We are so grateful for & surprised by your generosity. The news brought Nicole to tears! As soon as we get our oven, we will be sure to post a picture of it. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much! You all are fantastic! We can't wait to start baking with it!

Friday evening was an interesting night for us... First, Nicole did some shopping & met John after he got off of work. We went home to relax a bit & then were on our way back out to meet some friends at a bar. We walked around what's called Time World for almost an HOUR before we realized that this bar was not in the middle of Time World. Time World is like Times Square, but much brighter. The amount of bars in the area is infinite. So we started walking towards where we thought it might actually be & when we got to the area, it took us less than 5 minutes to find it! For 45 minutes neither of us even gave it a second thought that this bar might be somewhere else. But, it was a fun adventure & we got to see 7 Redbull cars driving down the streets of Time World. And we will never have a problem finding that bar again!

Headless mannequin scarecrow

Saturday evening to Sunday we went on a little road trip with some of John's coworkers & bosses. His bosses time-shared a house in the mountains on the east side of Daejeon so that we could all go celebrate a birthday & a coworker's last weekend in South Korea. It was so beautiful & peaceful! We grilled some meat, had ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins, jumped on the awesome trampoline, played Cards Against Humanity (which was highly entertaining with Americans, Brits, & Koreans), & drank. Needless to say that we were both doing some flipping on the trampoline! It was great getting to know some more of John's coworkers, for the most part. One of his coworkers caused quite a scene & it was beyond ridiculously dramatic; like 13-year-old girl drama, & it was one of his male coworkers. But all turned out fine in the end & everyone had a great time. Also, we got to see some scarecrows... They were headless & naked mannequins! Out of about 7, 2 were clothed & positioned like they were headless zombies. Too funny! Everybody got a kick out of that one!

View from the house we stayed at

On the side, we are both trying to learn how to read Korean. Nicole found a great website that breaks down the consonants & vowels very well so we are learning from that. It really is easy! Hopefully we will be able to read & start writing it pretty well soon!

A few more facts about Korea:

-Koreans believe that if you leave your fan on while you sleep, you will get hypothermia & die.

-Up until very recently (like this year), street names didn't exist. There were only neighborhoods (dongs) & building names. Our dong is Mannyeon-dong.

-In South Korean schools, getting a check-mark is considered bad. It's a circle that is good.

Giant rice cake anyone?

Sunset view from the Expo Bridge April 19