Day 66: So we are a little late on our posting, we've been pretty busy! This past Friday we had a going away party for two of the teachers- Melinda and Mike at our friend Carissa's apartment. It was a potluck and we brought wine that we had gotten for teacher's day which was still unopened. It was a pretty laid back night, Brandon played his guitar and Mike played the ukulele and we all had fun singing along to some Jack Johnson, Sublime, etc. Carissa brought out these wish papers that she had gotten back home- the idea is to write a wish down on the paper, crumple it up, then uncrumple it and roll it loosely so that it can stand on its own- then light it on fire, and when the fire gets to the bottom of the paper, it flies into the air. The papers kinda looked like tissue paper, they were made specially for this activity by a family friend of hers. A few peoples just burnt out, but Shayna's got some good height and it was alot of fun. Below is a photo of our friend Kristina writing her wish...
We had alot of fun that night, but it was sad to see them go. Since Mike was leaving, he gave his cat to Carissa to take care of, her name is Bella, isn't she beautiful...

On Saturday, we decided to head into Seoul on our own to check out some palaces and Seoul Plaza (which can hold up to 100,000 people) which is right in the downtown part of Seoul. First we walked around the palace grounds which were gorgeous (our pictures don't do the place justice). they had a mixture of Korean and Roman architecture made in the early 1900's.


As we were leaving the palace, we noticed a HUGE amount of police and riot squad groups covering the entire area. It made us a little worried that something bad was about to happen but we were told that they do this every so often and it is normal. Here's a photo of just a small amount of the police guards in front of the palace gates.

We crossed the street to get to Seoul City Hall plaza and there was a huge area with water shooting out of the ground that children could run through. It was an extremely hot day, so there were tons of kids running like crazy through the fountain. We wish we could have joined them!


We walked around down town Seoul for a bit and came across an amazing block of camera equipment stores, that I will have to go back to and do some bargaining! After that, it was getting late and we were exhausted from the heat, so we headed home. Sunday was rainy so we just relaxed, played some scrabble and went for Korean BBQ. We hope you all had a great weekend and are enjoying the summer. Monsoon season has just started and so it will be rainy here for the next few weeks :( Anyways, that's all for now, we will leave you with some Happy Canada Day messages from our kids.

With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon

Enjoy!

Day 56: Hey everyone, hope you all had a good week! We wanted to share some photos with you from our school's field trip this Friday. From what we were told, we were going to a bug museum, and that was all the information we really got. Our instructions were, "make sure no one pees their pants and do not lose any of your kids!" So when the bus pulled onto a dirt road in the country, we didn't exactly know what to expect. After piling out of the buses and watching a very short video on insects, we then proceeded to a small little box filled with dirt and over sized beetle grubs (which our friend Patrick and our director Grace are holding in the photo below).
Each of the kids had to dig through the dirt to find a grub to take home with them in a jar (which we're sure their parents were super happy about, lol). At least the kids liked their grubs!
Above: Henry and Eric Middle: John, Louis and Daniel Bottom: Stella and Lina


Everything up to that point seemed to make sense seeing as we were there to supposedly teach the kids about bugs. However, we were then taken over to a small fenced off area where the kids were put into small groups. The "bug museum" owner then brought over two rabbits and put them in the fenced off area and told the first group of kids to go and chase the rabbits, and whoever caught a rabbit could bring it home. What seemed to be a fairly harmless activity turned into a fairly traumatic thing to watch. These poor rabbits were being attacked by groups of 20 young, wild children at a time, desperately trying to avoid being trampled. So then, once the rabbit (or both rabbits) were caught, the man threw them into the large orange sacks pictured below. This may not sounds as inhumane as it really was. Maybe you had to be there to watch it, but it was total animal cruelty. To get an idea of how horrible it was, after all the classes had their turn tormenting the rabbits, the ones that were caught were dumped out of the bag (with no care at all) into a box for us to take back to the school. A few of the teacher's went over to the box and pointed out that one of the bunnies wasn't really moving. The man came over, pulled it out, told us it had a broken leg (probably from being thrown around so much) and quickly threw a new one into the box as a replacement. So clearly, animal rights are not as important in Korea as they are in Canada! So after a long day in the sun, and having learnt next to nothing about insects, it was time to go. Even though it wasn't quite the learning experience that we expected, the kids seemed to enjoy themselves, which at the end of the day is all that matters.

The rest of the weekend was pretty relaxed. Two of the teachers we work with are leaving at the end of this week, so we all went out for a big dinner, bowling and some Noribong (karoake) on Saturday night. Besides that, we did a little shopping, and a little cleaning and saw Brothers Bloom this afternoon. We hope you guys got some good weather for the weekend :) Happy Father's Day dads!

With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon

Day 49: Another exciting weekend here in South Korea. On Friday, we went out with the teachers from the school (both English and Korean) to celebrate our friend Melinda's birthday. We went out for Korean BBQ and then to a karaoke place. It was a pretty late night, but we got up early the next morning to take a 4 hour bus south to Gwanju with our friends Patrick and Byung Chul. We left from Sopooong station (pictured below) which took us to a pretty awesome terminal, that had a huge Imax theatre and lots of restaurants and shops.

We then took a local bus to a bamboo park in a nearby town. The place was beautiful, we were surrounded by HUGE bamboo tress all around us. There were tons of photographers and people just hanging out enjoying the nice weather.
By the time we left the bamboo park, it was getting late into the afternnon and we only had time to go to one of the three other locations we were hoping to see. We made a decision to go to a place where we were told had a gorgeous waterfall. It cost $20 by cab to get to the place and we were all pretty excited until we arrived here...
Yup, that's it...that's the amazing waterfall...we were not too impressed! It was very underwhelming to say the least. We made a quick photo opp from it and headed up a massive flight of stairs to a bridge that overlooked the mountains.
The view from the top did not dissapoint, it was awesome up there. We could not have asked for better weather, and the photos don't do justice to how gorgeous it really was! After a long day, it was nice to just sit and enjoy the view :) It was getting late, so we left to grab some dinner and some Coldstone's ice cream at the bus terminal. By that point, we had missed the last bus back home, so we had our first stay at a Korean motel and then headed home early the next morning.
Getting away from the city and heading south was beautiful, we will for sure go back again soon. Anyways, we hope your weekends were as enjoyable as ours. We miss you and love you all!

With love form South Korea,
Brandon & Shayna xo

Day 44: Hi guys! Just a quick update to fill you in on the past week or so. Everything here is really good and we have been super busy. Last Saturday we met up with our recruiter because we had yet to meet him and his business partner. They were two guys in their early 40's. They took us out to Korean BBQ and then we all went for a Starbucks :) It was nice to finally meet them, they are good contacts to keep while we're here especially, if we plan on doing a second year later on. Then on Sunday we went with a few of our friends to go see the Royal Tombs of the Joseon Dynasty.

It took us almost 2 hours by train and bus to get there! So we weren't very happy when we got there and they told us we could not go up the hill to the tombs until the next day because the tours were not ready yet! So our Korean friend decided to call the information desk to tell them we had come all the way from Canada and we really wanted to go up and check them out. After going to see the woman who was in charge, she decided she would give us a personal tour of the tombs herself. Her name was Regina and she was the nicest woman ever. Not only did she give us a personal tour, she then invited us back to her office for tea, and when we asked her where else we should go check out in the area, she pulled out her car keys and drove us to a Buddhist temple to show us around. After we walked around the temple, she bought us snacks and took us to the bus so we could get home. It is so nice when you meet people like that, it made the day so much better!

This weekend was more low key. On Saturday we went to Bucheon Station to do some shopping and some people watching. There were a ton of cute shops and restaurants and it's very close to where we live. We had dinner at T.G.I.F's where we had real cheeseburgers (which are very hard to find here in Korea) and then we went to see Night at the Museum 2- which was actually pretty funny.

That night we decided to try our hands at night time photography. Having no real idea what we were doing, we took my tripod and camera and headed to the roof. After a lot of bad shots and frustration, this is the best we came up with. I'm looking into to getting some filters soon that will help with the night time lighting so hopefully we'll end up with some better shots of the city.
Sunday was rainy, and so we went out to buy Scrabble and a DVD player, and spent the day indoors playing games and watching movies. So there you go, you are all caught up on what we've been up to. We hope you guys are all enjoying the summer! We will try and update you more often, we miss you and love you all.

With love from South Korea,
Brandon & Shayna xo

Day 35: Last weekend, as we mentioned in the previous post, we went to Seoul Land Zoo. It is ranked the 5th best zoo in the world! They kept all of the animals out in the open (there was no glass) and you are totally allowed to feed them, which made for some interesting photo opportunities. First we came across these hippos- the baby was so cute, we were so close to them- it was awesome!
The funniest animal by far were the 4 types of bears. As with the hippos, there was no glass and people were finding berries in the bushes and feeding them! After a few minutes, the bears started actually begging for food and posing...
We'd never seen anything like it and we both were able to feed them, which was pretty cool! They seemed to enjoy it as much as we did, look how happy this guy looks...
Next we saw the Red Pandas- we were really looking forward to seeing actual pandas but they didn't have any :( So these were the next best thing, and they were pretty cute.
Nearby were some lemers, which were pretty entertaining to watch, especially the babies!
Next we saw the cougars, and thankfully they were behind glass, because they were eyeing all the little kids pretty intensely...
After that we wandered into the peacock garden that had tons of peacocks just roaming around. They had colorful ones and white ones and they were stunning!!!
After walking around all day and seeing all of the animals, we took a nice relaxing ski lift up the park which had amazing views! It's a beautiful place with breath taking scenery...
Before we left the park for the day, we decided to check out the rose garden which was on the way out. The place was huge! It had rows and rows of all types of flowers and every kind of rose every made. The place was filled with young families and photographers snapping tons of photos.
So that was our Sunday last week, it was a very long but super fun day! It's amazing that it only cost us each $4.00 for the whole day :) We've already made plans to go back in October because the polar bears and gorilla and orangutan areas are all under construction until then. Anyways, hope all is well back home, we miss you!!
With love from South Korea,
Brandon & Shayna

Day 30: Friday was Poly's Mini Olympics, so we spent the entire morning and early afternoon in the park with all of the pre-kinder and kindergarten kids! It was fun to be outside and we had great weather. It was awesome to spend some time with the kids outside of the classroom and our director asked Shayna to photograph the event...so we finally have photos of our kids to share with you!
In the photos above, Brandon is with his home room class, Rylant (all of the classes are last names of children's authors). Starting on the far right there is Solomon, Ashley, Christina, and Alex is the one hanging on Brandon's neck. Below is another shot of his of those four, since the other kids were off playing and didn't want their photos taken :)

These next two are from Brandon's other kindergarten class, Vincent who he teaches science to. On top we have James,whose a bit of a hand full but has a big heart. On the bottom we have Michael who is really smart and a very sweet kid.

The rest of these shots are of Shayna's kids. First we have my home room class, Blume. To say they are a handful would be a huge understatement. They are extremely cute and very wild! This first photo is of Justin and Esther, they are the best of friends on most days as you can see in this photo :) But, it was only a few days ago that he strangled her against the wall and she cried on my shoulder for 25 minutes, lol.
Next we have Scott, who is so sweet but pretty clueless. This picture captures him perfectly, he kind of looks confused and somewhat lost at all times but never gives me any real trouble. Yesterday, he gave me my first experience with puke! I looked aver and he was covered in it, poor kid :( He just shrugged it off, washed his face and came right back to class- he's a trooper!
Then we have Daniel, who is the complete opposite of Scott. Although I think he is one of the cutest kids I teach, he gives me the most problems. He never pays attention and is constantly hitting anyone that comes near him- so he keeps me on my toes at all times!

Next, this is Louis on the left and Justin on the right- the two class clowns. they are so cute but so crazy. Always making faces at everyone and getting each other to laugh, its hard to get mad when they are really so cute!
This picture of Thomas is my favorite from the whole day! He just finished some type of game where they had to fish gummi worms our of some type of powder and this was taken 5 minutes after the game was over and he was still walking around with it hanging out of his mouth :) As you can see, he gets the cutest little dimple on his cheek when he smiles, that I think is so adorable. He is one of the younger ones in the class, and needs help at all times. He's a handful but I adore him!
Now we have John, who is easily one of the best behaved kids in the class. As you can see, he's a cutie and if only I had 12 John's I'd have a perfect class :)
Finally, we have Nari (left) and June (right). Nari is super cute and super sweet, and June is super cute and a little evil. People always think June is so cute at first glance (this is not her best photo...) and then the more you look at her the more you see the mischief in her eyes. She always lends people things and then two minutes later starts a fight with them because she's decided she wants them back. No matter how much she gets yelled at, she always says she loves me :) She's the one who gave me the mug on Teacher's day that she wrote i love my teacher on, awww. She also dresses in some sort of princess dress on most days which makes it hard to yell at her with a straight face. I do love this class, they make me nuts, but they are good kids at heart.Lastly, here are a few on my second pre-kinder class, Carle. I dont have photos of them all- and I'm also missing some of Blume now that I think of it but I'll find more to post another day. Anyways, starting from the left, we have Henry, Eric, Andy, and Rose. These kids are angels compared to the others, they all love each other and are great friends. Today I actually had to stop class becuase Eric would not stop kissing Jacob (pictured below) :) They really are adorable!
This is Lina, she is the youngest of the pre-kinder kids and I love her. She is so quiet and by far the cutest girl in the class. She is pretty shy and her smaile makes me melt :)
Last but not least, we have the three of my favorite boys- from the left: Jacob, Eric, and Henry. Jacob is so smart and so sweet, he makes my job much easier. Eric has total A.D.D but is his cuteness makes up for his complete lack of focus at all time, lol. Finally there is Henry, who is awesome! He always asks me to stay and eat lunch with him, and gives me a big hug before I leave the room.

So, there you have it, these are (most of) our kids. Sorry for the really long post, but we want you to see who we spend our days with. So we hope you enjoyed it! We went to the Zoo on Sunday, and so expect a big post of zoo photos soon as well...but that is all for tonight.

With Love from South Korea,
Brandon & Shayna