Anniversary Numero Uno

Well, Deanna and I have officially completed one year of marriage. A year ago, I don’t think either of us expected to spend our first anniversary in another country (or at least not Korea), but there you go. Crazy stuff.

We weren’t really sure what to do to celebrate, what with being in a foreign land and all. It seems like usually you might go to a favorite restaurant or have a night out doing something you enjoy. Unfortunately, we haven’t been here long enough to really have a favorite restaurant or have much idea of what there is to do around here, let alone feel confident enough in our abilities to travel anywhere in town we haven’t already been.

So as a result, we decided to have a sort of chill day around here. We slept in late, made brunch (scrambled eggs with red/green peppers and mushrooms, along with some grapes and kiwi), and then decided to go play badminton with our newly-acquired badminton equipment. Unfortunately, all the courts near us were either occupied or flooded, so that didn’t work out too well. But it was nice because it was a beautiful day and we got to walk all over the place looking for a court. After that, we went looking for a coffee shop to have a mini-date. We found a Dunkin’ Donuts (which they’re crazy about over here) and had a couple donuts and coffee (our donut-buying experience was greatly facilitated by the cashier who spoke English—God bless her). After that, we came back and made dinner and then settled in for an evening of downloaded TV shows from my external hard drive (thanks, Brett). So yeah, all in all, a pretty good day, even though we still don’t really know how to do much here.

In other news, I’ve learned to read Korean. That’s a pretty big accomplishment, but it still doesn’t help much since my vocabulary consists of about 8 words. That means that even if I can tell how to say what I’m reading, I still don’t know what it means. But yeah, I’m still pretty excited about it. I’ve impressed some of my students when I’ve read their Korean names, which makes me happy.

We’re still waiting on internet at our apartment. We can get a pretty simple browser on our Kindles, so we can check email and Facebook and stuff like that, but it’s not very good for responding to things. We also can get online when we’re at the school, but usually when we’re there, we want to be planning and/or grading. Hopefully we’ll get our Alien Registration Cards (ARC’s) soon so that we can get that stuff taken care of. As of now, we’re pretty much cut off from the world—no tv, no internet, no cell phones—when we’re at home. It’s kinda nice, but I miss being connected with people, too.

Other than that, we’re still trying to learn our way around here. We took the wrong bus the other day, which ended up taking us the complete opposite direction of our school. Luckily, I was paying attention and realized it when it turned the wrong way, so we were able to get off and walk back a ways and get on the right bus.

We’re also halfway done with our time at the first school, so soon we’ll be close enough that we don’t have to take buses. Which will be nice. We also have a holiday coming up called Chuseok (추석…I think. It’s either that or 주석) where we get almost a week off school. We’re going down to the southeastern port city of Busan (부산) for a few days and meeting up with Chris Allison (가리스 알이산)—our now (basically) Japanese friend. We’re getting really excited about that.

Ok, that’s all for now.

Brandon