A Fabulous Picnic

Well, the picnic turned out to be just the four of us; but it was so much fun.  We went to Semyung University and the weather was a little on the hot side, but great nonetheless.

I actually remembered to take a picture of the food!  We had onigiri, fruit, veggies, banana bread, and some crunchy snacks and sweets.

Ben is like a Coke ad.

The SMU grounds are beautiful.  Artificial, but beautiful.

The boys being boys.

I suppose "the girls being girls" would be accurate for this picture.

Pretty irises.

 Ian and Ben had a rock skipping competition.

Then they challenged each other to cross the waterfall.  Ian tripped and nearly went over.

Luckily, this was the only injury.

Later, they tried to play badminton.

But, it didn't really work out because this kept happening.

Japanese Maple.

Pale!

We spent all day just hanging out, talking and goofing off.  We didn't pack, book for our trip or accomplish anything that we thought we might; but, we had such a good time that it didn't matter.

Good night!

June is Busting Out All Over!

Today is a happy day.  The sun woke me at 6:30 because we had forgotten to turn the fan on and our room was boiling hot.  So, I cracked the window, turned on the fan and went back to bed.  When I awoke again, the weather was still beautiful.  We went to the gym and I had a great run.  It wasn't spectacular in time (though I did drop a few seconds from last week's), but it felt fantastic.  No fatigue, just a relaxing, sweaty run.

It's June 1st.  While summer hasn't technically begun, writing "6" for the date makes it feel like it has.  Summer is the close of our contract.  So, this is the beginning of the end.  We just started the last term that we will teach for Yoon's and we have roughly 90 days left.

Tomorrow is Voting Day, so we don't have to go to work.  We're planning a picnic with Rahee, Angela, Ben, Amy and maybe Danny, so it should be a really great day.  We're also hoping to pack up a couple boxes with our winter clothes and things we don't need to send on the slow boat home.  If we're feeling really productive, we might be able to book some of our South East Asia trip.

I hope you all had a great Memorial Day.  Good night!

The End

Today was my last day at Sinback.  It was my last day in my routine with my students and my materials.  As of Monday, I'll be starting over.  From scratch with students I don't know and lessons I'm not familiar with teaching.  Swapping teachers from campus to campus is not unusual at hagwons, but they are normally all running on the same system, not completely different ones.

So, I intend to fully enjoy this weekend.  Tomorrow we are meeting several of the other foreign teachers for a picnic in a park near Uirimji to say goodbye to Kate, Pete (a couple from Australia) and Hayley(a girl from the UK).  The weather forecast keeps changing, but it should be very warm, so I'm excited.  Maybe I'll get a little tan.  We're making onigiri, chopped veggies and a simple fruit salad.  Ben and Amy are bringing snacks and homemade cookies and we're all going to share.  I have no idea how the other folks are doing things for the picnic, but they are hitting the bars afterward.  To keep the calorie binging to a minimum, Ian and I invited Ben and Amy to a movie instead.  It should be a great day.

We don't have any truly concrete plans for Sunday.  But, I want to get my haircut and Skype with my mom.  We picked up some boxes from the post office today, so we might start packing away our winter clothes and unnecessary items.  We're going to send them home the cheap way, on the slow boat.  It takes anywhere from one to three months, so we'll be sending stuff home next week.  It will feel good to start that process.

Ian brought home my lesson plans for Monday, so I'll have those to look over, too.  Though, I'm not looking forward to that.  I have all of my worksheets from the past two months on a jump drive; if I can reuse some of them it would save me a lot of work.

I'll be sure to take photos of our fun day tomorrow to share with you all.  Hopefully it will be gorgeous out!

Good night!