Day 154: Hope you all had a fun Halloween! We celebrated at school with the kids and had tons of fun. Koreans don't celebrate the holiday, so the kids were very excited to be able to dress up, get scared, and to eat candy of course :) For the younger kids, they had a bunch of activities to do like making masks, carving pumpkins, and playing the toilet paper mummy game. We also made a pretty awesome haunted house in the library for the kids to go through. We were both assigned (along with 3 other teachers) to be in the haunted house and try our best to freak their freaks! Brandon wore a pretty scary pumpkin mask and popped out of a grave which made all the kids cry- and gave them a Halloween they will never forget. Here's just some of the cuteness from the little ones...
Oh right, we dressed up too- Brandon was a cowboy and I was an Indian :)
JD and Jamie were vampires! And Jenny was a character from Harry PotterThe older kids were pretty cute in the afternoon, and they had a costume fashion show that was pretty fun- check out our grade 2's below in all their cuteness...awww.....

That's all for our quick update, we'll share more soon. Miss you all!

With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon xo

Day 144: The last two weeks have been great. Last weekend we went into Seoul with some friends to look for Halloween stuff - Brandon's going to me a cowboy and I'm going to be an Indian. Since Koreans do not really celebrate the holiday, we didn't have much luck, so it looks like we'll be getting creative with the art supplies at school :) We also went to Yongsan with our friend Jenny to do some shopping. Brandon bought a video game called Uncharted 2 and I got a pair of fall/winter boots. We ended our day of shopping with a lunch at a trendy restaurant that overlooked Seoul.
This weekend we had beautiful weather, so we took Jenny to the zoo, since she hasn't been there yet. Plus I love any excuse to go to the zoo...Anyways, we couldn't of asked for nicer weather and the leaves were all such beautiful Fall colors as you can see...
And of course, the animals were beautiful and fun to watch as always. Since we have been to the zoo a few times already, I took Jenny around to the animals while Brandon took a hike through the mountains that surround the zoo. Here are a few of the photos I snapped as we walked around....

We met back up with Brandon just in time to go watch the lion feedings. They have about 9 lions and they are so awesome to watch, especially when they are being fed. We showed up a little early and got to see the four big males all cuddling and relaxing together which was pretty amazing. We watched them jump and fight over raw chickens that were being thrown to them by their trainer. At the end of the feeding, there is one "extra" chicken that gets thrown and they have to fight for it and there was a chase scene which was pretty epic.

Then on Sunday, we got together with our friend Dennis and his new baby girl Iris. He had asked me to take some photos of the baby for him, which I gladly agreed to do. She is so adorable and has the most stunning dark green eyes! I'm still working on the shots, but I'll share them as soon as they are ready. That's all for now, we'll update you again shortly.

With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon xo

Day 177: Hey guys. So here's our long awaited update- we've been having issues uploading photos on here, so it took us much longer then expected to be able to post. Anywho, since there's so much to catch up on, we figured we'd keep the writing short and sweet...so here's the last month in pictures:

First, we had Pajama Day at school which was fun for the kids and relaxing for the teachers...


Next, Brandon, Jenny and I went to a beautiful palace in Seoul called Chang Deok Gung where we got an awesome English tour with more foreigners than we are usually used to seeing...


After that we celebrated the Korean thanksgiving (called Chuseok) at school and all the kids wore their traditional Korean outfits known as Hanboks, and we spent the day playing traditional Korean games. The kids outfits were so bright and colorful, they looked adorable as you can see...
Then of course we celebrated Brandon's 25th birthday! We had a long weekend (because of the holiday) and amazing weather so Brandon wanted us to check out Bukkhan Mountain. Our friends Jamie and JD came with us for the adventure, and boy was it an adventure! We had decided to climb to the peak of this one mountain and had no idea how long it would take, not to mention how hard it would be. To make a long story short, Brandon was the only one to make it all the way to the top, and after about 2 and a half hours of hiking to the top, the sun was starting to set, and we made the majority of the climb down IN THE DARK! Climbing down really steep rocks without being able to see ahead of you is not the funnest thing ever, but we made it down with only minor injuries, and can laugh about it now :)





Lastly, we had our friend Greg's wedding. He has been in Korea for a few years and married a really nice Korean girl named Kuen Hwaa. The wedding was beautiful and got us even more excited about our own...So that's what has been happening with us, and we hope that life is treating you all well. As always, we miss you and think of you often!

With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon xo

Day 162: Hi everyone! Sorry we haven't been posting lately, and we promise we'll be updating you soon. It's a long weekend here right now so we'll have plenty of photos to show you in a few days. But until then we figured we'd let you see what's been keeping us so busy at work these past few days. We had a monthly test recently, and of course, we are in charge of marking the essay questions that the kids have to do. Since English is their second language, this is not as straight forward as it seems, here's one our our favorite responses from a girl in grade one:

Question: If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be? Tell why.

Answer: I like Vocab. It is funny.Because it is easy. But vocab is lot of HOMEWORK! But that is
easy. I like easy BOOKS. Because it is easy to HOMEWORK my self. Some thing is hard
But any thing is easy and hard. Some thing is hard and easy. So, I like Vocab. So, I like
to do Vocab. I want to do lot of HOMEWORK. But i get tired Because I have some
school too. have lot of HOMEWORK. Than i like Vocab.

So needless to say, although very entertaining, having 20 or so of these to mark become a little draining. But as we said it's a long weekend right now, so we are going to enjoy our free time and get ready for Brandon birthday on Monday :) So check in soon, updates are on their way!


With love from South Korea,
Brandon & Shayna xo

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