The view from my apartment balcony

Hello again. Sorry for taking so long to update the blog, but here we go. First of all, I've finally done some more exploring and found that my apartment is actually really close to a much more happening area. I knew that I was pretty much in between two subway stops but had only been showed the way to one. In my search for a decent cup of coffee, I decided to venture to the other stop by way of the maps application on my phone (thank god for smart phones). Not only does this subway have a Starbucks literally across the street, but it's actually the stop with the major grocery stores and a lovely running track!  I'd been walking 10 minutes to another subway stop just to ride the subway for about 2 minutes and get off to go to the grocery store, just to find that I could actually be walking there in the same amount of time. Definitely one of the best discoveries I've made in the past couple weeks. This revelation has really eliminated my feelings of isolation and I'm really starting to love where I live.

Another awesome discovery in the past week has been Kimbop. Kimbop is like Korean sushi. The difference between this and regular sushi is that the seaweed is on the outside surrounding the rice, and the fillings are usually some kind of fresh vegetables, radish and cooked meet. I had heard from so many people that Kimbop was great but had yet to try any until I had dinner with a friend last week. We decided it would fun to just walk down the street and pick a little Korean place randomly and hope the food was good...it was a win for us. We both ordered a roll of kimbop, which was rolled on the spot with all fresh ingredients, and some kind of fried, cheese filled pancake that came with rice and salad. All of our food came with an assortment of little Korean sides like kimchi, some kind of tofu (or maybe it was fish? I can never tell) and a broth like soup. We were certainly full by the end of the meal which came to a grand total 6,500\, which is about $6 at home! It's crazy how cheap some stuff is here but such a nice surprise to find good food that's so inexpensive.

Alli and Mari at the "Oh! Motel"

Prior to dinner that night I had my first Korean lesson! I've decided to take one on one lessons with a Korean instructor once a week for at least the next month or so. My first lesson was great and very informative. We started with the basics, going over all the symbols, their sounds, how to form a basic syllable and some irregular rules of pronunciation. I've just finished some practicing and can actually sound out syllables now. Even though I have no idea what I'm saying, it's still really exciting to start to read Korean!

This weekend I went on my first real cultural outing with some friends. We ventured out to a Buddhist temple past Haeundae beach with was a ways away. I had to take the subway about 25 stops to the end of the line and then hop on a bus from there to get to the temple. Also, it should be noted that was my first real Korean bus ride; there should be a warning on the side of the buses that should read something like hold on for dear life and try not to throw up. First think of what you would consider a packed public transit bus, now triple that; this is typical Korean bus ride. It was also a beautiful day so there was tons of traffic, and what should have been a 15 minute ride turned into an hour. But the temple was well worth it. It was in a beautiful setting, sitting on top cliffs that overlook the ocean. The weather was beautiful and we had a great afternoon walking around, taking pictures and sitting on the cliffs taking in some ocean air and the spring sun.

There are so many great things about Korea and I'm having so much fun exploring all of them. However, not everything can be perfect and it would figure that I've run into a bit of an issue with one of my co-teachers. For the most part school has been a pretty easy transition and I'm getting a lot of encouragement from two out of my three co-teachers. However, this one teacher in particular isn't giving me hardly any class time to actually teach. When the students learn new words or phrases, she has them repeat after her rather then me and more often then not, her pronunciation isn't quite right. I feel like the students are really missing out as this is the whole reason I'm here, and I'm in the process of trying to figure out how to address the issue, if at all. Other then this one minor issue though, everything is going great here and I can't wait for all that's to come!