Christmas in the Land of Morning Calm

This is our first pet. On Christmas we bought a turtle. His name is Emannuel the Christmas Turtle but his nickname is Manny. He's transitioning well to his new home.

Janny didn't have a Santa in her present delievery group. Her group looked a little suspect. There were four young women dressed as Mrs. Claus, carrying a boom box and going into apartment buildings. Janny explained that in America people would think that they were "professional dancers."

This is me at Henry's house. Don't tell the other kids that Henry is one of my favorites. Everytime he finishes his work we wiggles in his chair and sings "I'm binished, I'm binished."

Does Santa come to Korea? ... You bet. The Friday before Christmas I dressed up as Santa Claus and Janny dressed as Mrs. Claus. and delievered presents to the kindergarteners. We sang Christmas carols and choked down any wild food that the parents offered us. It was fun to see where the kids from our school live. They typically live in large buildings in small apartments. Their Christmas trees were an average two feet tall. We'd huddle around them so the kids could take pictures with Santa. Instead of saying "cheese" before the pic. we'd say "kimchi" and then smile.

rice, kimchi and... meat?

We've found a few good Korean meals that we can count on and can both eat dinner for $7. (we eat a lot of rice and tangerines.) There's also a Pizza Hut right down the street from us if we need it, and thankfully we live in a very convenient area of Daegu and are right across the street from a grocery store where we can get cereal, fruit, milk, etc. We are on the subway line and can get downtown in 15 minutes if we need a Starbucks or other food from home. We are getting better at eating Korean food though, last night we had really good sushi and today we had bibinbop and kimbop for lunch. Bibinbop is a bowl of rice with different vegetables and spicy sauce all mixed together. Kimbop is a kind of roll with rice, some sort of meat, egg and vegetables wrapped in seaweed. The strangest food we seem to get for lunch at the school. The other day we were served quail eggs with rice and seaweed, once we had minows mixed with some sort of green vegtable. The whole minow... even the eyes! The weekend after that we went on a mission to find a Starbucks, I needed a little comfort from home. Ryan is trying to like kimchi. He's made it his goal to take one bite at every meal and to tell himself he loves it. I think it's working. ...I haven't gotten there yet.

We've been here 3 weeks already!

WE FINALLY HAVE OUR COMPUTER CORD!!
We've been in Daegu, South Korea for 3 weeks now, almost one of twelve months!!
I don't know where to start, so much has happened... We left Seattle on Saturday, December 9th and arrived in Daegu on Monday, December 11th. Mr. Ban, our director picked us up from the airport and took us straight to our school to meet the other teachers. Afterwards he dropped us off at our hotel, where we stayed for our first week. By dinner we were really hungry, but obviously had no idea where to go or what to eat. We started walking down the street from our hotel and found a little Korean restaurant. The server didn’t’ know English, so we got out Franklin, our trusty electronic translator to help us order. We were pretty sure we ordered chicken and rice (tak & bop) and were so excited to have food in our stomachs! Once it arrived we realized that our days of boneless, skinless chicken breast were probably over for the next year… we’re pretty sure it was chicken gizzard in the spiciest sauce we'd ever tasted!