the start of goodbyes

When I came to Korea, I knew that there would be a lot of other people coming and going. However I wasn't expecting, what I thought would be the constants in my life, to go as well. I knew I would have some Korean co-workers and I guess I thought they would be the constant. It wasn't till a few months later that I realized how wrong I was.
Almost everyone who was working at my school when I arrived has quit... maybe it's me lol. I doubt it. I was told later that that is the issue with working at a private school. A lot of people come and go so much. But I have a good school. Seriously, I think of everyone there like my family here. It is so sad everytime someone leaves. About a month ago, we found out one of the Korean teachers is pregnant. She's been trying for over 2 years so this really was a miracle and we're so proud of her... but i didn't think she'd leave a week later. Literally a week. 1 week later, another girl said her family was moving... so she left the next day.
There has been another guy roaming around my school. When I asked who he was, I was told that he was the new director. I wasn't quite sure what to think of that. We already had a director. My director was Ho and he was great. He was the one who interviewed me, who took a chance on me, who has helped me continuously in every way he can since I arrived, whose invited me over to his house for multiple dinners with his family. Even though I know times were tough at my school, I didn't think he would leave. Today he said he wanted to talk to me and Rory (my British co-worker) after school. He took us into a class where he said
"when i hired you guys, I made a lot of promises to you. I promised to help you in whatever way I can. I promised to take care of you guys and to make this the best environment possible. But now I have to go back on that promise. I have decided to leave the school and today is the last day." I guess I should've seen it coming. But I'm still so sad about it. He said "you know many students have quit the school lately. I think it's because of me. So I am doing what's best." Which is complete bull shit. People have their own reasons for quitting the school (it has the best reputation in my city, the only one with foreigners, and the biggest). But the fact that he's taking the blame means that he's been contemplating for a long time. I knew he was stressed and depressed. But i guess i considered him the glue that kept everything together.
We have a new director now, John (and yes, these are their English names lol). He seems nice. Ho promised that he would be as kind and helpful as he was. I really hope that is the case.
But I guess this is the beginning of the next month which will be full of good-byes. ... I think the saddest goodbye will be to Gillian and Lacey, who have been my partners in crime since I arrived. They leave in August. I'm enjoying all moments until then.
Call me emo, but happy Danielle may be temporarily on hold. :(

My 6 month Anniversary

Just wanted to put it out there that this is my 6th month anniversary of being in Korea :) To me, it seems like a big deal for many reasons...

1. This time last year seems like yesterday 2. Time is FLYING by 3. I'm half way through my contract and 4. Someone once told some of our mutual friends "Danielle won't survive 6 months in Korea" so to that ex-boyfriend I would like to say 'I'm happy to prove you wrong. After 4 years, I can't believe you'd underestimate me that much.'

A bunch of my good friends will be leaving Korea in the next few weeks so I think the next 6 ahead of me will be different too. We'll see what the future brings :)

Visitor #2... ALAN from San Diego in Korea :)

I have a friend, whom I met in San Diego about a year ago. Alan was the neighbor of one of my closest college friends, Chanine. We've kept in touch over the course of time, meeting up every so often when I visited San Diego for work. One day a brilliant idea popped into his head that he should visit me in Korea. Being the genius that he is, he bought a ticket and 2 months later, he arrived in Seoul :)
There is really nothing like the feeling of having a friend from home visiting you in your new country. Not only can you show them everything you've learned, but they keep you in touch with reality.
Alan arrived in Seoul on Friday night. Due to my late work schedule, I wasn't able to meet him then, but I arrived in Seoul via bullet train at 10am on Saturday. My friend Lacey joined me on the trip as well to visit her friend Kevin who'd just arrived in Seoul. We met in the subway and went back to the hotel to drop off my luggage. Once in the hotel, he had a huge table decorated in what seemed like a MILLION things that he brought for me... a care package from him, his friend JR, and my friend Chanine... seriously, the most awesome, nicest, kindest people ever! There were DVDs, San Diego shirts, flip flops, fruit snacks, couscous, photos, bed sheets... how he managed to fit all of that into his suitcase is beyond me. I felt soooo special. There was so much stuff. I am so lucky to have such awesome friends. Little things from home remind me that people haven't forgotten about me. It meant so much.
After the opening of the gifts, we headed to Insadong to meet Lacey. While on the subway a nice Korean man decided he wanted to be my best friend. He talked to me for a good 20 minutes and almost missed his exit. I'm always amazed, even in a big city like Seoul how much people want to speak english with you. It really is amazing. ANYWAY, Insadong is such a great street. It has the best tourist shopping that I have yet to find anywhere in Korea, it's gorgeous and they have the Court cake presentations! lol They're hilarious! My brother David and I discovered it during his visit. They take huge chunks of fermented honey and wind up stretching and pulling it and doubling it and making it into like 60,000 hairlike strands and wrap it around some peanuts or almonds. It's delicious!!! And the presenters are so funny!! I tried to take another video of it but my camera ran out of memory. Darn it!
After Insadong, we explored a bit. Our ultimate goal was to go to Seoul tower around sunset time so we just strolled around on our way there. First stop was the heading to the Gyeongbok Palace. I visited there with my brother David, but I guess you can never visit a Palace too many times. It was just as nice this time around as it was the first (with less rain). After our walk through, we went took went to visit the Blue House... the President of Koreas house. The walk there was really beautiful. We passed by some old style Korean houses, a lot of antique shops and cafes. Very nice area. I thought we'd be able to walk around, a tour or something but now. There was very tight security outside so this was about all we got.
After the Blue House, we wanted to find the river. Along our walk, a protest was breaking out. At first we were intrigued, but after we saw old ladies beating police officers, and the riot force come in, we decided, considering we were American that we'd better go. Who knows what it was for but better safe than sorry. After that, we went to the Cheonggyecheon River. We bought a glass of wine and listened to the liveband playing La Bamba and some other spanish music. Wierd? Yes, but VERY enjoyable :) Almost like home. It was so relaxing. Next to where we were sitting (u can kinda see it in the back of the picture), there was a tiny ramp going into the water. There was a little girl walking down it and into the water. On her way in, she managed to slip on the ramp and land flat on her bum. Her father rushed after her and when he got to her, he fell right behind her as well. They were both drenched. The little girl and her older brother started laughing up a storm :) It was a very very cute moment to watch. It was those moments that for some reason, really hit a heartstring. Someday I''ll have that...hopefully... maybe I'll have something like that. We managed to make it to Seoul tower after that. It was a bit of a hike but it was worth it. It was gorgeous. The entire area surrounding Seoul tower is just filled with thousands and thousands of locks. I guess it symbolizes love for a lot of people... best friends, lovers, family. They write a message on the locks and then place them all around. Pretty impressive. Of course me... I'm anti-love lol. I made that clear in my photo lol. It was just amazing how many locks there were. Pictures couldn't capture it (1 cause it was dark. 2 cause the surrounding area was so large). Once we got up to the top of the tower, we had a gorgeous city view of Seoul. It was beautiful. There were windows all around. Written on top were different city names... if you headed that direction for so many miles, you'd get there. There were maybe 25 different major cities in the world. It was very interesting. Of course, I found my favorite one... Italy <3. onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcRtd6gF1vr4yp7VsllOET3ymSg5c_BF4exu_vhDls7MqgJHbwST5dSAeZDGeDmebIa0vAjGOMGfW2VPAGqWYNj_3drXqJd9L1G2JDlT9wmfAwEvObN9pgngyEx-SP6bMcE4MaTQU6j88/s1600/Alan+at+school.jpg">nt?" lol. I guess he's a little taller than they're used to. It was hilarious hearing him being called a Giant. Some of my upper elementary and middle school girls were soooo excited to meet him. They all got so shy. It was pretty cute. "Teacher, very handsome" they'd say. It was adorable. After a long, fun week, the weekend came again. He was leaving Sunday and I was going to miss my partner in crime. But of course I wouldn't let him leave without a proper send off :)
On Saturday, we were supposed to go to a Lotte Giants baseball game, but due to the rainy weather, we wound up bailing on it. We decided to go tourist shopping through Nampodong (the market area). Lots of things to look through. Once the rain became unbearable, we found the cutest coffee shop and took a break. I REALLY liked this coffee shop. Everyone gets their private little cubby. It overlooks the market area (it's on the 2nd or 3rd floor). In each cubby, there are pillows, a flat screen TV, and little table and we just sat around for awhile. The perfect girl friend date place :) When the rain calmed down a bit, we met up with my friend Thom. Thom worked at my school before I did, I am his replacement. It's been great hanging out with him and finally putting a face to a name in all those emails. He went home for a bit, but came back to Korea a few months ago. We 3 decided to go to Busan Tower. We didn't quite make it to the top, but we got like halfway through when we decided to find a place to sit and drink some left over Champagne. However, it was pouring rain. There was one dry bench where we tried to sit, and we were shooed off by some Koreans (apparently that was his umbrellas spot... not for us). What a jerk. We improvised the best we could... Which turned into us putting our umbrellas on top of the vines (which i am assuming create shade because they definitely didn't keep water out). Quite an adventure for sure. Around 6pm, we met up with some of my friends in Seomyeon where we were all going to have a BBQ dinner together. And what a dinner it was!!!!

We started at Donae-Nu, a great BBQ restaurant. We weren't that surprised when we got placed in the 'dungeon.' FYI, people tend to place the foreigners in the corner or in a seperate area... apparently, depending on the bar/restaurant, we're bad for business. Yes, now I know what it's like to be segretated against...however I'm pretty used to it by now. However we had a long table and we were next to another long able of about 10 Korean guys (more on that later). We had a great dinner. My friend Gill, Lacey, and Mary came (Mary brought her friend Cari), and my friend Thom, and Sunny (Sunny is one of my Korean co-workers that I"m close with) and some of Lacey's friends, Gavin and Josh (??). After going through a couple of beers and sojus, some of the boys decided to challenge the other table to drinking contests. Sonny was like "they shouldn't do that. Korean men can drink a lot." lol and she wasn't lying. Who would've thought that the American boys who drink like fish would still lose. There was a couple rounds of that. Then Lacey stepped in. She challenged one of the guys to drink. He said "if I win, I can kiss you." Her response "You can kiss my ass." Well I think she underestimated the amount of beer in that very large bottle (a Korean small bottle is an American large). So the crowd began chanting "kiss, kiss, kiss." lol. She she did it. The rules were that he couldn't stop until she did, and there began the world's longest kiss... a good 8 minutes straight of pure just making out!
It was quite eventful to say the least. At one point, we all (Koreans and foreigners) sat at one table and played the '3,6,9' game that we play in our classrooms. You go around the room counting. When you get to a number that has a 3, 6, or 9 in it, you have to clap. Sadly and Pathetically we never made it pass 20 lol. Who would've thought. The Koreans did better than we did as well! Embarrassing for a native english speaker lol.
After the dinner festivities, we headed to a bar in Seomyeon (the center of Busan) called Fuzzy Navel that had just been redone. We watched the World Cup game there. And it got pretty crazy! The Koreans go crazy over the soccer... especially being in the World Cup. I took a video of what kind of craziness was in the bar. It was packed!! (though it doesn't look like it from the video). There is a picture here of me, Thom, and Sunny. Kinda nice to have us all together. Since i was Thom's replacement at my school and Sunny still works there. I told them I was going to give the picture to our boss lol. NOT! Thought he'd probably be really excited if I did. More pictures were taken and more fun was had. We made new friends, danced around with the old ones. It came to a sad ending however when Korea lost in the World Cup game. Definitely brought a damper on things. So we moved the party to Kyungsun University area where we hit up one of our favorite bars, Kino Eye.

At Kino Eye, the fun continued. More drinks, dancing, talking, laughing, etc. Mary and I found this guy who was walking around with the Korean flag like a cape so we thought we'd indulge in our inner Korean.
Honestly, some of the night was a bit of a blur. I had no expectations of staying up till the sun rose. But I knew that Alan had to catch a 6am train and I was very sad to see him leave. Another great traveling partner. Knowing people who have the same passion in traveling as you do is such an attractive quality! It was great having brunch together and exciting stories of Europe and South America and where the other should go, etc. Definitely got me a bit more amped to see more of Central and South America (of course that's AFTER my European ventures... and Canada travels, and Africa and India travels... and eventually I'll figure out where I want to live and do with my life). :) One can only dream. :)
So we all saw Alan off at 6am. It was sad but we all had a great last night. Rumor has it that he passed out on the train and had to be woken up in Seoul. That's what a whole night of drinking will do to you. My story is that I drunkenly decided it would be a good idea to go HOME (since the subways were running) instead of staying with Gillian or Lacey. So I went to the subway and waited and waited. Well they start running at 6, but it still took like 40 minutes for it to reach where I was (in the middle of the line). So I survived the subway, and hopped on the intercity bus to go home... and of course, I managed to fall asleep on the bus as well. I woke up just as we were entering Ulsan. I hopped off the bus in a sleepy, drunken, daze and searched frantically for the bus going the opposite direction. I finally found one and took the 10 minutes back home... Finally arrived home a little before 8:00. I was MISERABLE! I slept about 3 hours, and then headed to my Sunday writing group. It was quite a chaotic 24 hours. :) But good times were had. Alan, visitor #2, trip= SUCCESS!