Whew! It's been a while since I posted! Sorry about that guys! Last week was kind of a blur, and I can't remember a whole lot of details , but I'll try to remember for all y'all~!

Day 8 (Holiday) - Today was Korean Memorial Day, held in remembrance of the Korean War, so there were no classes. Myself, Steph, and her church friends all decided to go to a lake where we had planned to set up a barbecue. Unfortunately, we were told we needed a permit to do it in the area we wanted to - this nice lakeside spot - so we relocated to a rather crowded park a bit further down the road. It was still nice, though. Loooots of big burgers, greasy sausages, and a bunch of American junk food bought off a nearby air base (I forget which one) by one of the group's friends. It was SCORCHING out, and I just about died, but fortunately the wind picked up a bit and the sky clouded over, so it didn't turn out so intolerable after.

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Days 9-10 - I honestly can't remember too much about these days. Neither daytime nor evening. This first full week of teaching by myself had exhausted me, and I kind of just wanted to flop after work. On Friday though I was invited by my fellow teachers (not Steph) to go to a Korean BBQ. I kind of didn't want to go, seeing as how I was the only guy, and the newest person, but I figured I'd be polite. It was similar to the other BBQ I went to; get raw meat, plop it on a grill at the table, cook it, cut it, and eat! This one was neat though; they came by with a kettle of beaten eggs, and poured it around a trough surrounding the grill, and the eggs cooked while the meat did! It was a really cool idea, and went great with the soy-onion dipping sauce that was intended for the meat :3 Also had some pig's skin, which is... exactly as it sounds :S It was really weird, kinda gelatinous, even cooked. It wasn't gross, I just probably wouldn't spend money on it again. After that, I went to more chicken with Steph and her church friends. It was awesome times, as it was the week before.

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Day 11 (Saturday) - Myself, Steph, and Steven, one of her church friends, went to Seoul once again to see some sights! We took a day tour bus, which was a really neat concept; for about 10 bucks, you could get on a bus that went in a big circle through Seoul, passing by popular tourist spots. At any point, you could get off and look around, and another tour bus would come every half hour, and you could just hop back on. It was a really neat system. We had plans with the others, though, so we were on a fixed schedule.

First off, we went to Namsangol Village, a tradtional Korean village (like a dozen buildings or so) that's apparently used for making movies often. As we got there, we heard music, and from behind a stage, we saw some colourfully-clothed dancers moving about, so we checked it out, and, wow. It was well-worth the random chance; we arrived right at 2, and the show started at 2. Here's a video I took

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQFqoSyWsjQ

After that, we explored the village itself. There wasn't a whole lot there that I hadn't seen the same of in Gyeongbokgung, which is to be expected, since this was apparently some rich family's resort back in the day. In the village, I picked up one or two more souveniers - in particular, a paper fan for my manager, upon which I got to paint "Thank you Wendy!" in Hangul, which was pretty cool (pictures to come)

After the village, we hopped in a cab (it was quicker), and he took us to the base of the mountain that Seoul tower was on top of. Unfortunately, only buses were able to go up the veeeeery steep, narrow road leading up, so he... rather zealously got out and hopped in front of a bus, trying to wave it down for us, lol... he was very helpful, and I felt bad that tipping isn't a thing here in Korea, otherwise I would have given him a large one.

The tower itself was... sorry to say this, disappointing. The view would have been breathtaking, I'm sure, and for what I saw, it was; the tower was directly over a densely-forested set of mountains, and you could see Seoul spreading out from the base of the mountain.... for about half a mile. After that, it faded away into a hazy, smoggy veil. It made me pretty angry, but I tried to not think about it too much.

After sightseeing, we had to run (literally, we vaulted over lane dividers, and stowed away on a train) to catch our ride to this restaurant called Fogo's. I had reservations about getting on a train for which we had no ticket, but as we ran to the train itself, Steph tried to buy tickets, but the machine had already stopped selling the tickets which we needed for the ride, so that was good enough for me... fucking machine wouldn't take our money, that's okay :P

We got to the restaurant and... oh man. All you can eat meat. It was around 26 bucks, but the chef came out again and again with different cuts of meat... sirloin, bacon-wrapped chicken, sausages, garlic chicken, plain ol' steaks... it was aawwwwesome... ate until I was almost sick lol. I was so focused on eating that I didn't snap any pictures except for the restaurant sign itself.

After a drive home, I relaxed for the night.

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Day 12 (Sunday) - At this point, I had pretty much declared Sundays as my do-nothing days X3 Relaxing, eating 5-dollar pizza, and playing tanks made up the majority of my day. Something I had eaten a few days ago had been bothering my stomach, so I didn't - and haven't since - been trying anything very adventurous in terms of flavour and spice.

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Days 13-14 - Again, a bit of a blur. It was around this point that I started looking forward to the elementary classes in the afternoon more than the kindergarteners in the morning. The kindergarteners are cuter, and I know them all better, but by God... they do not listen... @_@

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Day 15 (Teaching) - Today was a day where the school celebrated every student's birthday that was in June. It's an unusual, but cool, way to do things, and it was a bit more of an event that way. There was lots of fried chicken, which sounds like my kind of birthday celebration :3~~ The cakes they had were okay, but a little... weird-tasting. Reminded me of a gluten-free cake we made for my celiac friend years ago. Not terribly, just odd.
After class, I was invited to Foreigner night, but I turned it down, being too wiped out by the day, and the week thus far.

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Day 16-17 (Teaching) - These days went by quite quickly, but for a slightly different reason. Yeah, they were still stressful, but I had something to look forward to over the weekend;  Engine was coming to visit on Friday! Friday itself was pretty good; the kindergarteners weren't terrible, and the elementary classes were taken up by a speech test; every class in each time slot sat in the gym, and one by one they came up and (tried to) say a pre-determined set of sentences that they had to memorize over the past few weeks. They were each judged and scored by foreign teachers, and the best student from each class got up to repeat the sentences, and we recorded them for their parents.

Day 17 (Evening) - I managed to get off work relatively early after the speech tests, and trotted to the bus terminal to meet Ben. After standing around and staring at the one foreigner guy I saw and mentally compared him to the picture I had of Ben, I discovered there was an entire other side of the terminal that I'd never gone to before, and there he was sitting on a rail :P We hugged, I grabbed his stuff, and we headed to the apartment. I set up the TV and we watched some staticy (I think the cord I have is faulty), zany Korean TV. There's this bizarre young kid's anime about some pastry super heroes - literally, one is a slice of bread, another is a walnut/red bean pastry, and the other was... I had no idea... and another pair of super heroes seemed to be a rock-paper-scissors man, and some girl who punched things and turned them wobbly, and emit hearts...??? - and watched Inglourious Basterds on his laptop, then curled up and went to sleep :3

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Day 18 (Saturday) - We decided to check out Insadong - the street market I went to with Steph on my first weekend - and the surrounding area in Seoul, which would be interesting; up until then, I had Steph to guide me around, but this was the first time I would be by myself in a completely foreign part of the world. Fortunately, I paid attention the two times I had been in Seoul before, and felt pretty comfortable with the subway system. We managed to get to Insadong without incident, and thanks to an information booth, we found a hotel for cheap (50 bucks for a double bed) that was actually in Insadong, which was amazingly convenient. We wandered up and down the street, but at this hour of the day - around 4 PM - there wasn't a lot to see, so we stopped at a place to get food. We were presented with an almost entirely Korean menu, and my phrasebook was pretty useless, but we were able to determine what was and what wasn't chicken :P We ended up ordering a large pile of garlic chicken, and a bowl full of fried chicken chunks with this tasty sweet chili sauce. The garlic here in Korea is just... blegh, it's not nearly as tasty as it is back home, and this plate had literal HEAPS of the stuff on it. I ended up letting Ben finish that while I went in on his plate of fried chicken bits X3

After that, we wandered around a bit more. We just missed a taekwondo demonstration, which was too bad because Ben does that stuff back where he's from. Made me sad we missed it, but as we wandered back towards the main part of Insadong, we grabbed some Turkish ice cream, which is basically just a really stringy, kinda chewy form of ice cream, it's pretty neat, and he'd never had it before. It was odd to see a foreigner (a Turkish guy, go figure) manning the stand, and he regaled us with his story about how he liked Taiwan better, and he's only in Korea for his wife. I felt bad for him, but then he said he was a little drunk, so I felt less sorry :P

I picked up another souvenier for someone I had forgotten/was unable to get the last time I was there, after a very desperate search. I got something that I'm very pleased with, though, so I hope he'll like it X3 I showed Ben those court cake guys; the guy we had this time wasn't nearly as entertaining, or maybe that's because I had already seen it before, but he just didn't seem as lively. Either way, the cakes were, again, delicious. I think I'm gonna stop there again before coming home and grab like... 3 packs to bring home X3

Around 9 or so, we came back to the hotel - incidentally called a "love motel" because of how cheap it was - and chilled out for a while. We watched the second half of Iron Man 2, and Shrek Forever After on TV, while we watched the motion-sensing (?) light in the shower/toilet area flick on and off for minutes at a time. It was pretty weird. The room was quite small, but it had all the ammenities; sink, TV, AC, computer, water cooler, complimentary toothbrushes, everything! It was really impressed. I was less impressed by the size of the single blanket we were given, and the way the AC would turn on and off after it reached a certain temperature. It was like the room had a heartbeat, and it was very distracting.

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Day 19 (Sunday) - And here I am. We woke up at the crack of FML (6 AM) to catch the subway to the airport, which took about an hour anna half. The subways were thankfully pretty deserted at that hour of the day, which let us take a seat for the often-long rides between transfers. But we made it without incident. We got his ticket after a bit of wandering around aimlessly in the airport, and sat down for McDonald's (disclaimer: I was still uncertain about trying weird Korean food, my stomach had only just settled maybe the day before?). After eating, we went back upstairs, hugged, and he went through security.

I'm glad we decided to do something other than laze around Anjung the whole weekend... It might have been what I impulsively wanted, but I would have felt like a terrible host if he didn't get to see SOMEthing. I loved having him over, but I was glad to get back home, after a sleep-filled 2-hour bus ride. I stumbled home like a zombie, chugged a Hot-6, and vegged out all day (It was around noon by the time I got home) on tanks :D A great weekend that I won't soon forget <33

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Ooof, big one. Hopefully there won't be as much of a gap between this journal and my next one. I'll try to do one on Thursday, since not much usually happens monday/tuesday, and Wednesday I'll probably crash after foreigner night. I'll post a bunch more pictures I have from days 11-onward, and that should catch me up on what I have to update. Until then~! :3