Adventures in South Korea

Day 144: I just realized that its been almost two weeks since our last blog post, I guess we just totally forgot about it last week since nothing too exciting happened. So thankfully, this weekend was very busy. On Friday, it was my student's birthday and since the girls always dress like princesses on their birthdays I brought along my camera. As coincidence may have it, our art project for the day was to draw faces on paper bags that the kids could wear on their heads. Put the two together and I give you the ultimate "paper bag princess"...

After school on Friday, all of the teachers went out for our friend Katie's farewell dinner. Here's Katie (on the left) and Abby . We went to a place that served Shabu Shabu which is a type of soup that has tons of meat, vegetables and potatoes in it. Not my (Shayna) favorite thing ever, but we were in good company :)

Here's jenny enjoying her food, and smiling with Sophia who is Brandon's Korean partner teacher. It was nice to have the Korean teacher's come out with us to celebrate Katie's last night.
On Saturday, Jenny and I had a full day of shopping at Myeong Dong which is an awesome area of Seoul. There are well known stores such as Forever 21 and Zara but there are also tons of street vendors selling all types of things, most of which are only $10. Once we were all shopped out, we decided to go see a chick flick. By the time we got to the theatre, the movie we wanted to see had already started so instead we went to "My Sister's Keeper" and we had no idea what we were in for. I knew it was supposed to be a sad story, but man. We cried so hard throughout the whole thing and even a little in the elevator! It's about a little girl whose sister is dying of Cancer and what the family does to try and save her- that's all I can say without giving away too much. It was an amazing movie, and I totally recommend it, as long as you bring a ton of Kleenex with you.
As if the weekend wasn't already so fun, on Sunday night we went to go see R.E.N.T.!!!!! We found out a couple of weeks ago that it was coming to Korea for two weeks only. So, since I've always wanted to take Brandon to see it and Jenny loves R.E.N.T too, the three of us got tickets right away. We took the subway to the island of Yeouido which is like a Manhattan type island in Seoul and as always, had to document the entire trip...

We finally arrived, and had the best time ever! The play was just as good as I remembered it being from the first time I saw it in Toronto almost ten years ago. The two guys who played Mark and Roger in the original production were back for this tour and they put on a great show. It was a very interesting crowd of young artsy Koreans and foreigners. I don't know how they could keep up with the story from reading off big subtitle screens on the side of the stage, but they managed to laugh at all the right parts, so I guess they knew what was going on. Now after years of singing R.E.N.T in our apartment (completely off tune may I add) and dragging him to the movie of the play, which doesn't do it justice- I think Brandon now gets why I love it so much. I'm actually pretty sure that he secretly loves it too and now will sing along when I play the soundtrack on my Ipod :) So that was our weekend, we hope yours was just as fun!

With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon