wish you were here.: Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone!! My holidays in Korea were great!! We got off for our Winter Break on December 24^th, not after a wonderful little holiday party. Cherry Class made a “gingerbread house” made out of cardboard, paper, hot glue, and about ¼ the amount of candy actually needed. Afterward we had a little visit from Santa.

All of the teachers had trips planned for our vacation time, so for Christmas I had to think out of the box. Lesley and Brian made a local Korean friend, Tom, who is a professor at a university in Suwon, but he was a professor at University of Iowa, where his family still lives for most of the year. Since Tom is usually without a family, Lesley, Brian and I will go to dinner with him sometimes during the week to keep him company. Well I was invited to spend Christmas with my new friend Tom and his family. So Christmas Eve I was invited to go to his house for dinner. Dinner was supposed to be right after I got out of school, but I was freaking out because I wanted to bring flowers or something for his wife as a thank you for the hospitality. I was working with a time crunch though, so I went to the dollar store that is right by the bus stop and was scrambling to find something appropriate/Christmas themed to bring for dinner. All that seemed to fit the bill was a little potted cranberry plant, works for me. Dinner was great, it was not as big of a deal as the Christmas Eve dinner that I am used to, but I was a great home cooked Korean dinner. I got to meet Tom’s wife, who was cute and small, along with Tom’s 20-year-old daughter who is a Junior at the University of Iowa. It was the perfect little Christmas Eve dinner with the 4 of us. The next day I went with Tom’s family to Christmas Mass. Their Catholic Church is this beautiful, big church on the top of a hill in Suji. Everyone there was wearing fur coats! Though it was all in Korean, I recognized some of what was going on, and for sure I recognized the Christmas Carols that they were playing. We stood up to sing the opening song, Come All Ye Faithful, my favorite, and all of a sudden it was like “woah I feel so tall!!” That was the tallest that I have felt in Korea yet! I for sure stuck out like a soar thumb with my slight height advantage and my light hair. I think every pair of eyes in that church were on me, and it probably didn’t help that I was singing the Christmas Carols in English louder than everyone else. It was quite the experience, but I was so thankful that I was able to go to church on Christmas, especially in that big, beautiful church!!

So after my Christmas Church experience, I had to patiently wait for a couple of days, and then I had my first visitor!! Adam Swanson got into Seoul at about 9:15 on the 27^th. I got to the airport about 2 hours early to make sure that I was at the right place in that giant airport, and then I was just stuck staring at these slightly transparent doors for about an hour. There was only one 2 ft slit of actual glass on the doors near the bottom…I have never judged legs to hard. But Swanson made it! Two days later we were off to Tokyo for New Years Eve. We stayed outside of one of the parts of town called Roppongi. Every day we would just hop on the subway and head to a different part of Tokyo. On the 30^th, our goal was to find a sports bar that would be showing the U of A game, but we didn’t have much luck (probably better we didn’t have to watch that). We went to the Imperial Palace, Tokyo Tower, the Coast, Shibuya, and saw a great view of Tokyo from a museum on the 54^th floor of a building. I had an absolute blast, minus the hangers just about every day. Lucky for me, Swanson was in town for my first week back to school, so we got to go have fun in Suji and Seoul after my full day of work. We went to see the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, and then wandered up next to the palace where the city starts to go up a mountain. This is where all of the old, traditional Korean houses still stand, and it has turned into a little café, restaurant, shopping area that slopes up a hill. It was a quiet, peaceful area that backs right up to a giant, busy city.

Shibuya