Day 78: Hey guys! Hows it going? Things with us are great, we are still really loving Korea and exploring as much as we can. This Friday, we went to the movies- we saw Transformers 2 which one of us loved (we'll let you guess which one of us that was, lol). Then we went straight home to rest up for our day in Seoul on Saturday.
On Saturday morning, we met up with JD, Jamie, and Jenny for a day of clothes & shoe shopping for the girls and electronic and video game shopping for the boys. First we took the subway to Bupyeoung which is an underground shopping mall type thing. Being the tourists that we are, of course we spent the ride taking photos...


of this girl's awesome sparkly headphones
Jenny (above) and JD and Jamie (below)Once we got there, we dragged the boys around a million shoe stores that all looked the same for about two hours. After finding some super cute flats, a really nice dress for $10 and some flowers and bows for our hair (we're trying to fit in, lol) we agreed to move on to let the boys have their fun. We got back on the subway and headed to Yongsan which is a huge indoor/outdoor electronics market. Here's a shot of the boys trying to figure out how to navigate the place...
After we walked around a bit in the blazing heat, we decided to stop off for some lunch. We went to a food court type of place. Food courts are very different here- instead of going up and ordering your food at the restaurant you want to eat at, you have to go to a main booth in the middle of all of the restaurant and place your order there. You get a number and then when they ring your number you go to the station to pick up your food. They do everything a bit differently here, but we've gotten used to it~
After we ate we headed back outside for the boys to do some more video game shopping (Brandon got the new UFC game), while the girls took some photos...
By the time all was said and done, we were pooped, and we went home. On Sunday it poured all day so we developed some photos and just hung out inside and watched Little Miss Sunshine. It's a good thing we were able to rest Sunday, because the kids are always super crazy on Mondays and today was no exception. We hope you guys all had fabulous weekend!

With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon

Day 70: Hey everyone! Hope you all had a great weekend. We started off our weekend by going out for dinner on Friday with the new teachers, J.D. and Jamie (a couple), and Greg. Greg's been here for a couple of years but it was J.D and Jamie's first time having Korean BBQ and they really seemed to like it. It was nice to hang out outside of school to get to know them better. After dinner, we grabbed some drinks and hung out a little more before calling it a night.
Then on Saturday, we slept in a bit and decided we would head into Seoul to a huge electronics market called Yongsan to check out camera equipment and video games. The selection was insane and because all of the stands are competing, it's a great place to get deals! We didn't buy much yesterday, but we'll for sure go back again to do some bargaining. After that we took the subway to Myeong-dong to make our way up to Namsan mountain. Getting up the mountain can take two hours by foot and since it was crazy hot outside, we opted to ride the cable car :) Besides the convenience, the views were awesome!
Once we got off the cable car, we went up to the tower where there were cute little restaurants and shops overlooking the city. There was a fence surrounding the food court area which was totally covered in locks that people bought there, and wrote on. North Seoul Tower is known as a very romantic spot and the locks have become a tradition for visiting couples. There must have been a million locks covering the fences, it was pretty unique sight. Although we didn't spend $20 to get our own lock, we wrote our names on the tables in the cafe that were covered in love notes.
By that point, it was getting dark out and we went to the main area where there was a 10 minute light show. This wire figure looked awesome all lit up by the lasers, and the tower was lit up in all sorts of colors and even had photos of flames going up and down the side of it.
After the light show, we made our way to the elevators to go to the top of the tower which overlooks the whole city. The line up was sooo long and by the time we got up to the top, we had to hurry to make sure we didn't miss the last subway home. The views were beautiful with all of the city lights~ Unfortunately, the thick foggy glass, made it nearly impossible to get any good photos- but trust us, it was gorgeous! Its good we made sure to hurry since it took us almost an hour to get back down to the cable car because of another huge line up. Luckily, we were able to run and catch the last subway for the night back to Bucheon!
After that long day yesterday, we spent all of today just relaxing in the park, enjoying the sun and taking some photos. As we were walking around the park, a reckless old woman came speeding by on her bike and ran into Shayna! It's hard to yell at someone who doesn't understand your language but we tried to tell her to slow down and watch where she was going as best we could. Thankfully, she held on tight to her camera and it didn't get damaged. That is of course until about an hour later as we were walking across the street and Shayna slipped on a very slippery and slanted part of the sidewalk and sent her camera flying into the crosswalk! Luckily no cars ran over it and someone grabbed the flying lens cap...and by some miracle, the only part that got scratched were the lenscap and the filter. By that point, we decided it was a good time to call it a day and we made it home without any more accidents :) Hope you all had a good Canada Day weekend!


With love from South Korea,
Brandon & Shayna

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