Salutations. This may or may not be my last entry before heading home. I have a feeling the rest of my time here might be fairly uneventful, mostly waiting for the time to fly so I can get home.
Over the first weekend in June, 3 friends and I traveled to an island south of Busan called Geojedo (Kojedo). It was a 3-day weekend and also the last weekend my good friend Lacey spent in Korea before heading back to Washington. It was a good time, but transit to and from and around the island itself was kind of a mess. We had to take 3 different busses to get there and back, taking 6 hours to get there and even more to get home. But I can say it was time well spent with 3 great people, lovely weather, and goats! There were goats at one of the hotels we stayed at. Super cute little guys and a mother. I had no idea goat kids had such energetic personalities, wow. They bounced around like rubber balls. Graham took a video and was kind enough to let me post it...

It's not very long but it's cute! I now want a pet goat.

Okay, some other cool pictures from the island are as follows...


The three friends with which I ventured: Lacey, Cary, and Graham.
친구




The beach we spent most of our time at was a pebble beach (as the pictures have illustrated for you). The only other time I've been to a pebble beach before was when I spent a month in England and we went swimming in the English Channel in Brighton. They're nice, but I prefer the comfort of sand beaches. However, it's nice not having to worry about getting sand on and in everything, namely my not-so-cheap camera. And there are always beautiful stones to hunt (and keep). So all-in-all, spending time on this island was a pleasant escapade.

Once again, I have to talk about my students and throw in a couple of pictures, as if they're my own and I'm bragging about them. One day we made sandwiches in one of my afternoon classes, as requested by the students. Korean sandwiches are on a totally different wavelength than our sandwiches. They really don't make them anything like we do. Lunch meat, for the most part, does not exist here; except in certain department stores and underground foreign food markets. Mokpo has neither of these places. Ham is easily found here, but it's some of the most disgusting processed garbage I've ever tasted. We had the students retrieve all of the ingredients beforehand so my coteacher and I didn't spend our money on this lesson, if you want to call it that. The shopping list was quite humorous. It included:
Ham
Cheese (Korea's poor excuse for cheese is nothing less than disgraceful, again, at least in Mokpo)
Cucumbers
Strawberry jam
Ketchup
Eggs
Mayo
Carrots
Apples
Bread

I kid you not, all of the said ingredients were actually forced together between 2 slices of bread (swords were drawn), but only when we left it up to the students to trouble-shoot. Koreans tend to mix many things into a salad-type thing, which is fine. Egg salad is delicious, even when diced cucumbers, apples, and carrots are added. Red flags star to appear when jam and ketchup and grossly processed not-so-goods are thrown into the mix. I shudder at that memory, but what a funny one. If only I had documented such a culinary disaster...
Everyone scarfing down some pseudo-sandwiches


This is probably my favorite little guy. He has a lazy eye and the cutest tiny-person voice in the world. He can't really function well in reading or speaking English, but his mimicry is priceless. He tries so hard.



I will miss these kids a lot, and these ones are just my afternoon extra class kids. I finish teaching next week. I'm having all of my 4th-6th grade classes watch (the near and dear) Dr. Seuss' new movie 'Horton Hears a Who', since we've finished the textbooks already. That's... 12 times of watching the same movie in a week! I will be able to recite it verbatim by... yesterday.

See you all soon. I can't wait! (But I'll have to)--

Hugs.


P.S. I added a picture to a past blog; the one about the field trip to a ship. We're dressed up and fancy.