garbage soup.... YUM!!!!!

We have been very busy and need some time to get back on track with Blogging.  We'll just put a quick review of what we are up to and what we have been doing as of late. First thing is that we lied and are not in downtown Bundang.  Instead we are just at a subway station that is three stops away from downtown (around 4 min or less by subway).  We are also located on the Migeum station on the "Yellow" Bundang line, if you want to look at a Seoul subway map here.

We started work Monday Feb.7th because our boss felt bad.  Our contract stated we were to start on Feb. 1st, but they changed the start date to Feb. 14th and never told us.  So we got to start work a little early and on the 14th we start training.  I got to write a P.E. curriculum for the school and Danelle got to clean up the art room...... lucky her........ Its been nice to come in to school everyday because we have so many staff greet us with bright smiling faces everyday.  We also have been able to get to know all the teachers who are leaving, so we are already trying to get connections on free stuff they can't take home.  We're learning more about the school itself and the culture of Korea.  Plus we get great cooked Korean meals for lunch Everyday!  They usually consist of some type of meat and veggies, rice, seaweed, spiced radish, and soup.  All the meals are really good and healthy.

We got cable and internet in our apartment and we are so excited.  We were hoping watching Korean games shows would be like Japan, but disappointingly they are very boring.  Usually its a dating show full of celebrities and they just speak Korean to each other laugh a lot and they show a ton of replays of stuff we don't understand.  So Instead we watch K-pop music videos and American Movies.  We've got one song stuck in our heads most of the time that we love.

On Saturday Feb. 5th we went to Gyeongbok Palace which is the main one of Seoul.  It was really pretty and we learned a lot about their past.  We'll save this for a future post, so stay tuned for a post on this place.

  

On Tuesday we went out with a co-teacher to get a router for our internet.  We went into Seoul and had a great time.  We stopped off at Lotteworld, which is a shopping mall and the largest indoor amusement park in the world.  We got to see some of the amusement park and it looked really neat.  We found a place to eat that was a typical Korean restaurant.  We were told a little history about the food we were going to try was from the Korean war.  When the U.S. troops left Korea they got rid of all their rations, which were things like spam, sausage and ham.  So poor Koreans used these leftovers and put them into a soup, added some veggies and spice and we were told it was called roughly "garbage soup."  It was really good, but also very hot.  From there we went three stops more to techmart to get our router.  We got a really nice one for $31!  We also saw a beautiful view of the frozen river from the top of the building and see all the pretty lights that were still up from Christmas.  Yep, they still have Christmas stuff up in many different places.  

We have been exploring and eating out most nights.  Eating out here is wonderful because there are no tips, and food is cheaper to eat out than cooking.  So it has been nice going out for dinner most nights and enjoying really good food.  The one thing we are still having problems with is finding different things to do in Bundang on the internet.  I think we are going to go exploring on our own and write about what we have found in this city.  Seoul is fun and we'll explore that as well, but I'm interested in our new home city and what it has to offer.  We'll post more photos and entries soon.