This is our Apartment!
That's right....the Sung Mi Village. It's nine floors and the roof has a big patio and awesome view of the mountains. Jennifer and I are in the process of findng free chairs to bring up there and leave. It's a great location....right across the street from the Subway station, jogging path, and gym. It's about a 10 min walk from all the cool bars in town. Inside we have a stove, sink, fridge, tv, and bathroom with a showerhead above the sink. The washing machine is inside the bathroom and just drains right onto the bathroom floor. I can take a shower, go to the bathroom and do laundry all at the same time! Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!
-Heather

Busan Museum of Modern Art
I went to the Modern Art Museum today here the city of Busan (about 35 min subway ride). The above pictures include a giant fish constructed entirely of garbage, accept for the television inside the fish's mouth (it played footage of the artists building it). The top picture is part of a giant multiroom piece in which you could walk through and walk on top of the hundreds of upside down Hite (Korean beer) bottles. It was quite impressive. The museum had several rooms with video art productions of various artists from around the world. Suprisingly they were mostly with English subtitles and no Korean. I enjoyed the piece on Mumbai, India which included video and photos from schools that were set up amongst the devastation after the "Mumbai slum demolitions" Around 2,500 homes were destroyed by the government to clean the city of its slums (forcing thousands to be homeless) Well on that happy note....Hope everyone reading this is doing well!
-Heather

More Pictures from Camp...
About last night....it was crazy! We had dinner with all of the teachers then went to 2 1/2 hours of presentations....then at 10:30pm they brought tons of alcohol and snacks to one of the director's rooms and everyone got wasted. Apparently this is customary for Korean teachers, foreign teachers and directors to spend time together in a drunken debauchery at such a formal teacher training event as this one. We had to be at a seminar at 9:30 the next morning. I asked one of the directors what would happen with the money our school won from the competition (thinking it went towards supplies for the kids or maybe the money would be split up between us) and she said "big party with lots of soju and beer!) I guess alcohol is more important than crayons for the students...oh well.
The next day we went to a temple and walked around enjoying the beautiful fall foilage as you can see above. There were hundreds of students there on field trips with their schools. They adorable and thrilled to see so many foreingers there. They crowded around me and the other teachers asking for autographs and waving pens and notebooks at us. The picture above shows some of the eager students asking Brent and Bob for autographs.
-Heather

Pictures From Camp
Above is a picture of Jennifer with our school's team playing "catch the tail" in our lovely matching track suits the school bought us. There are 6 KJC campuses and they split us into 4 teams. The game consists of two teams linked to each other...hands on waste...each team trying to break the other teams chain. Naturally our team won!
-Heather

Well...we just got home from our school retreat and we finally found out what cockfighting is. It has nothing to do with dildos or chickens. It is when you hold up one leg with two hands and try to knock over the other person. 20 people fighting at the same time resulted in sheer madness. It was a pretty hilarious site to see! Our trip was a lot of fun. We had games the first day at a huge sports stadium in Pusan. We not only did cockfighting, but we did a relay race, kickball, and catch the tail! Our branch won the most games and our reward was 1 million won (about $1100)! We were very excited!

That night we traveled to Gyeongju about an hour away and stayed in a traditional Korean Hotel. It was very bizarre. There were no beds, just a hard floor and comfortors in the closet that you sleep on (see pic.) We all got cleaned up and ate dinner and people from different branches gave speeches about discipline and the school curriculum. It was interesting!

After the speeches, each branch was given soju (korean liquor) and beer and lots of snacks (dried squids, raw fish, fruit, pringles, nuts, shrimp chips, ect.) So we gathered in someone's hotel room on the ground and drank and played concentration keep the beat and learned some Korean drinking games! It was a lot of fun and we got to know the korean teachers at our school a lot better. Plus we got to know other foreign teachers at other branches of our school, which was so cool!

Today we had an American breakfast in the hotel, because Kimchi and fish soup when you are a little bit hung over is pretty discusting! We went to a beautiful temple, where there were many Korean children saying hi...hi...hi... to us because they wanted to practice their English. One little girl gave me a little buddah figure! We felt like movie stars when they crowded around us and started asking us for our autographs! It was hilarious!
-Jennifer

COCKFIGHTING?
Jennifer and I have to go to a camp in the mountains with the other teachers tomorrow as I mentioned before. Last night they passed around a list to all the teachers requiring us to sign up for two events or sports. Most things had already been filled with the maximum number of people by the time Jennifer and I got ahold of it. So the only thing left to sign up for was cockfighting. We have no idea what it is but we're doing it tomorrow. Does it mean we have to strap on giant dildos and sword fight each other? Do we fight with roosters? Or as Bob thinks...it's a Korean woman on her wedding night. We'll find out tomorrow.

Haeundae Vaction
Jennifer and I stayed for 2 days in Haeundae at the Westin since Jennifer's discount (worked for Starwood) still applied. It was great and we were able to see the "Sea Art Festival" which consisted of about 100 modern art pieces from artists of 40 different countries. The pic above is one of the works. We only saw a handful, but they were interesting. One of the structures was a slilde, another was a giant baby lying in the sand. The artists utilized the beach into their pieces as you can see above for example. We also went to the aquarium where our friend Don works so he got us in for free and gave us private tour.

Heather and I decided to try our luck and pick up some guys at the Saugage House, but found no luck. They were all weiners!

A typical Friday night in Pusan

Staying up until 5am....because the bars NEVER seem to close...
Lots of dancing.....
Meeting a few new foreigners and running into one's we already know...
Last night we definatlely went BIG and this pic shows some of our new friends hanging out!

Korean Teacher
This is a picture of Jennifer and I with our Korean teacher Sueshi. We met her at Moe's bar last night. She is extremely kind and even went out of her way to come to my apartment and show us how to use the heater and washing machine.