A Day at the Beach + Hangin' with Minnie (formely Sun-miyo for those who met her :-D)

Hello again! We are sitting in the apartment on Sunday afternoon. Tomorrow we will begin teaching!! It will be nice to actually have something to do and get in to the rhythm, but we are both nervous to met our students. Megan will have a summer camp from about 9-2 MWF and 9-12 T/TH and then classes from 2-6. The summer camp will go until the end of August since all of the students are currently on vacation. What fun for them, English camp! I will go 3-9 MTWTHF with one hour of prep, which will all be the normally scheduled classes.

Last Thursday, July 31st, Jeff's sister-in-law Gumpil was kind enough to take us out to the beach in Yeosu. The beach is called Mosageum. We were there from about 3PM until 6PM. It was really hot, and the water felt really good. At one point we were offered a "fish sausage" - our recommendation - DO NOT EAT IT!!!! We did have some other delicious snacks, which we proceeded to buy from Lotte mart the next day.



However, the beach and water here is REALLY littered compared to back in USA. We take much better care to keep these things clean. It is nice to know though we have some international image issues, Americans do a few things correctly. As an aside, our cities are also much cleaner, especially MPLS/STP, so way to go us! After we went to the beach, we headed out to dinner. We ate a boiling chicken soup. Literally the entire chicken was in this soup (skinned, cleaned and de-limbed though). It was hard to eat since you have to pick out bones and things. Gumpil had to help us, we felt a bit like children, ha ha!

Friday - Megan went out with the foreigner girls to eat chili and watch the Sex in the City movie. It was good for her to get to meet some of them. I went out with "Evil" Marc and had dinner and them some drinks.



Saturday we FINALLY got the meet up with Minnie. For those who met her in Minnesota, she went by Sun-mi-yo, but has since changed her name to "change her luck." Her English has improved so much and it was a lot of fun to get to hang out with her. We went to a temple, with many pictures in the link below. Afterward we went out to dinner on Minnie's dime. It is almost impossible to pay for things we you go out with Korean family, we offered since she took us out, but she absolutely refused! We had a Korean style meal at a restaurant that, thank Buddha, offered Western style seating in chairs, instead of on the floor. Sometime during dinner I mispronounced a Korean word, and apparently the word I said instead meant something like "F@@@ you"! Minnie laughed sooo much... The dinner was really good - but Korean food always leaves this strange after taste! We then went bowling somewhere around Yeocheon. Minnie and Megan teamed up against myself and Minnie's friend, the loser had to pay. Lucky I pulled out some strikes in the end leaving Megan with the tab! (although we share all money... but it's ok!! It's the principle!) Minnie and co them came back to our house for a rooftop drink in the evening, which is really pleasant. Unlike back home, the temperature at night only drops to maybe the high 70's or low 80's, so with a cool sea breeze nothing really beats it. Sometimes it is still too hot or humid.

It was really a lot of fun because with Minnie we can have ACTUAL conversations instead of really simple, obvious conversations with lots of hand gestures. Her friend was also good at English, but was quite shy. They had studied together in Gwangju at the University. Both are elementary teachers, so Megan and them really hit if off. After that we had the standard fall asleep at about 10PM, big time party people!

Finally, here is a link to the latest round of pictures from the events I've discussed above, this time I made you read my boring stories first...

Click to check them out!

Megan wanted me to be sure and mention that Minnie thought Megan's Korean pronunciation was MUCH better then mine, :-P. Good bye for now. It is so good to hear from so many people, so keep it up.