Happy Holidays,

We both hope everyone is doing well and has had a great Christmas. We spent our Christmas reading Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris, our favorite chapter being “Dinah, the Christmas w****”. As you can guess, it’s a heart warming story. Following our festive and colorfully worded tale we watched National Lampoons Christmas Vacation, a slight let-down in the way that this may have been the last cool thing Chevy Chase has done. We headed out for our Christmas dinner at a Chinese dim sum restaurant. After stuffing ourselves with what may have been a cold spicy squid salad, we wandered around Myeong-Dong (a large outdoor shopping area). We saw such large crowds of people that it put cattle herding to shame. The best part of walking around this area is watching all the people. Lots of people were wearing costumes. Some came as Santa or reindeer, and then we saw the lesser known Christmas dinosaur and what appeared to be a flying badger. We found our subway exit, finally not having to give the Peoples Elbow to anymore elderly people and children. It just feels wrong during the holidays. We came across a beautiful neon lit beacon…Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Moments later on the subway ride home we ate our delicious doughnuts, hoping no one around would judge us on wanting a bit of Americana on this most ridiculous of days. Christmas night we slept with images of doughnuts and dinosaurs dancing in our heads.

PS: An Update.

We realized, while writing this, that we hadn’t posted anything in over a month. This is not, as some suspected, because we suddenly like everyone less. We have, in fact, never liked anyone, and do this all for our own amusement (a joke). The truth is that is has been a combination of a lack of interesting developments combined with the difficulty our internet has been giving us in accessing this site. Only this site. And it occasionally cuts me off after I’ve written pages and pages of mind-blowing observations. Hence us now creating our postings in word processor and just pasting them in.

So, what’s been happening? I’ve been teaching a lot. It’s my job now. It’s getting easier as I learn the ropes, such as how to turn out massive amounts of lesson plans with minimal effort, as well as were all the coffee shops are. This, I have been told, is THE key to teaching. Anyways, some days the kids even learn and it is incredibly rewarding, and a little self-centered, to feel as though you played a roll.

Last Friday, for our ECC Christmas party, I dressed up as Satan. I mean Santa. Both wear red and are tormented by children. My torture was having nine year-olds pull on my beard while yelling “your not Santa, your Dain Teacher!!!”. I know this. But your not suppose to. My manager insisted we not let the kids know we were teachers and not the real Santa. This, while they give me a tiny suit, made for a tiny Korean man, and give me all the kids I see everyday to sit on my lap. So they figured it out.

Another fun event was a few weeks ago when we took in a stray dog. I’ll preface this story with…we’re not keeping her. A small cocker spaniel was found outside our school and brought into the office. She was starving and cold, but no other teacher would or could take her. I told them we could keep her until an owner showed up or we found a home. I snuck home in the middle of the day to drop a puppy in Tara’s lap and say “please watch her, we’ll talk about this later.” Anyways, she was about four months, very bitey, and a lot of fun. We kept her for about five days until we found another teacher in town who wanted a dog. He had two at home in the states but was willing to take this one back home. He named her Lady and we put a few pictures of her in our last update. Fun while it lasted, but we miss our own puppy and should enjoy our time here, not raise another dog.

A few side notes. We’ve discovered that you can buy apple-butter waffles at most subway stops and that they are delicious. This is almost enough to make me want to stay in Korea. The whole street food industry is really lacking in America. Here and in almost every central American city we went to, good food was easy to find on the sides of every street. I think Americans don’t like the idea of an unsanitary food stall, but I’ve seen the people working at Wendy’s and they aren’t pretty. At least when street venders spit in your food, you can see it. Also, spare ribs in Korea are delicious. I pretty much love all the food here, minus the squid jerky. I think you have to be raised on that to ever enjoy it. What else? If I didn’t get the post up about the Blackhawk’s, Tara and I got a guided tour of some. There are thirty stationed at a military base south of Seoul and a friend of ours was a sergeant in charge of maintenance on five of them. So I got a quick course on what does what and could probably fly well enough to crash going very fast. That was fun. We saw another friend get a piercing I am anatomically unable to replicate. We had our first snow here. We fought a dragon and nursed its children. Ok, that last one didn’t happen, but I warned you it had been slow. Anyways, I think your caught up now. Don’t expect too much from our increasingly repetitive lives, but when the Blessed Leader comes for New Years, I’ll let you know. Take care an happy holidays.