Hey everyone,

So here's another update. It's 1st of February which means I only have a couple more weeks here in Korea. It's been an amazing adventure and I've seen so many wonderful things and experienced a completely different culture.

So since the last post, I did two weeks of winter camps. This consisted of 4 hours of teaching in the morning each day. I taught grades 1-6 elementary school. The grade 1's I taught the alphabet to, grade 2's learned some basic phonics - the sounds of the vowels, while grade 3-4 learned about a variety of topics - weather, family, sports, house and colours, and grade 5-6 learned about music. I put a lot of effort into making the 14 lesson music camp in which they learned how to have an entire conversation talking about topics related to music, lots of vocabulary words, and made a music video which is on youtube now. The camps went pretty well and although the grade 2's tried to play up the first lesson, I cracked down hard and there was no repeat of the summer's disaster. All in all, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out.

After the two weeks of camp I have had some more time off for winter vacation. It was freezing cold the first few days so we stayed inside (in fact it got so cold the pipes froze and we have no water one day!), but once it warmed up we decided to do some more traveling to see the last few things we really wanted to see here. We went up to Seoul for two days first. I went to Suwon, a small city outside Seoul, to see the Hwaseong Fortress, probably the grandest one in Korea. It was snowy and I got some beautiful photos. That night we stayed in Hongdae, a university district of Seoul and went out to see the area. The next day we went to a Hello Kitty cafe in Hongdae, followed by a visit to Pangyo, Korea's silicon valley area and saw the headquarters of some of the top Korean computer gaming companies such as Nexon, NC Soft and others. Unfortunately we were not able to have a tour. During the afternoon we went to a Kimchi museum in Insadong which was very interesting and then took a 3 hour bus trip down to Andong, which markets itself as the spiritual capital of Korea.

Having stayed the night in a hostel in Andong, we woke up quite early and got a bus out to the Dosan Seowon Confucian Academy, one of the biggest in the area and quite famous. The day was a little cold though so we didn't stay long and took the next bus back to Andong. From there we took another bus out to Hahoe Folk Village. This was an interesting place with lots of thatched cottages where people have been living and working for over 500 years...and still do. Unfortunately a lot of it was closed up so we didn't get to see inside the houses. When I went to Nagan Fortress in Jeollanam-do province in the summer, it was much better in my opinion. One highlight of the Hahoe Folk Village was a tree which was said to be inhabited by a goddess, and it was interesting to see how that was the center of the village's spiritual life. Very close to the folk village was a Mask Museum which contained a lot of interesting masks and displays from not only Korea but many places around the world. I found it fascinating and even got to try a few masks on.

Unfortunately on the way back I dropped my phone and spent the evening quite worried having lost almost 1000 photos from those few days. However, when I got home someone messaged me through facebook to say they'd found my phone and could return it to me in Busan on Saturday. It is great how honest and trustworthy the Koreans are.

We have also been doing a lot of planning for the next parts of our trip. We plan to be in Japan from 25th February - 4th April. After that we had planned to go to New Zealand but the weather is probably not going to work in our favour so we've decided to do that in February next year after our Australia trip. The plan is now likely to be - 4th April we will fly to Thailand. We will spend three months going around South East Asia - Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Nepal and India, before heading to Australia at the beginning of July. We have a couple of months volunteering booked at a cattle station not too far from Uluru (Ayres Rock) and then hopefully we will go to Melbourne in September to find work. I expect around Christmas time we will begin traveling again - first up the east coast of Australia visiting places like Sydney and the great barrier reef at Cairns, before going to New Zealand for two months in February and March 2017. After that the plan is Europe for 6 - 9 months (assuming people don't vote us out of the EU and wreck all our Europe trip plans) and then home…..to plan our next trip to the America's.

Regarding Japan, we will be going there on 25th February, first to Kitokyushu near Fukuoka for a few days, then to Hiroshima for a week, then up to Himeji to work on a volunteering project for a few weeks (and hopefully visit Osaka and Kyoto at the same time). Then we will head for Tokyo for our last week in Japan, leaving on Monday 4th April.

This will probably be my last post for a while, but hopefully I'll write another one in early March from Japan.

Bye.