Are You at Peace?

The traditional Korean greeting, which they use in place of our 'hello' as well as 'good morning/afternoon/evening' is pronounced 'an-nyeong-ha-se-yo?'. Meaning, "are you at peace?" To which one should reply, "ne", which means 'yes'. Quite pretty. I find myself, however, responding with another an-nyeong-ha-se-yo out of habit from responding 'hello' to a 'hello'. And I just realized that this is funny (to me, anyway) because it could come off as "Are you at peace?" Or like I am copying them, which I kind of am, but not to be rude.
Anyway, it's been a while since I have posted. i guess I'll start with pictures of kids. Here are some from the day before our week long 'summer vacation' at school. Everyone was in a good mood.















Sophia.
















When teaching Kindergarten, you keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The infamous Alex.














We have a party at the end of each month for all the kids who had birthdays. The kids individually go up in front of everyone and say who is their favorite friend and who is their favorite teacher. I'm sure it's nerve-wracking. Anyway, I was Annie's favorite teacher.















I was also Eric's favorite. Here he is with his favorite friend, Paul. Paul is no longer with English Friends and I miss him very much.

Every class had to prepare a dance for the party. Here is Eagle class-- Billy, Esther, Andy, Sophia, Daniel, and Edward. I added this to show you what a piece of.. er, work.. Edward is. Sure, it's funny to you...

By the way, the lyrics to the song are "When you wake up in the morning and it's quarter to one, and you wanna have a little fun, you brush you teeth... in the morning and it's quarter to two, and you don't know what to do, you brush you teeth... quarter to three, you've got a great big smile for me... quarter to four, you hear a great big knock on your door... quuarter to five, and you're so happy to be alive, you brush your teeth..."

This is an elementary girl named Mary. I don't have her in class but this picture is priceless.












Me in the morning. Dad sent me some ties.
















Oh, I did finally go play with the frisbee club and here is a pretty accurate shot of how I felt afterwards. No, it went pretty well, even though nobody knew who I was so I didn't get to touch the frisbee as much as I would have liked. I'm pretty sure I was the fastest person in the park that day.

A bunch of us went down to Busan on break. Busan is the other major city in S. Korea and it's on the beach so it was packed for break. If Pittsburgh is on the same latitude as Seoul (not if, it is) then Busan is level with Washington D.C. so it only took a few hours to get to. I sat next to Dianne on the train. Notice the jerk in the background ruining a good picture.

Dianne, Nicole, Amber, Ross, Nari. Ross and Nari, on top of being wonderful people, speak Korean so they can be pretty handy to have around.

I eventually got too close and spent the rest of the day wet.

We spent a night on Hae-undae Beach with about a million other people and got to know this guy and his buddies. Koreans who study English give themselves English names, usually. His was Brad Pitt and he would later go on to try to drown me in the East Sea.

UH-OHHH!

UH-OHHH!

Dianne and I visited the Aquarium in Seoul in the humongous Coex Mall.

I was going to add a couple more videos to end this but the site is not cooperating at all so I will leave you with a shot of Eagle and Lion in science class yesterday. We made these vials with red water, oil, and green colored rubbing alcohol to demonstrate how liquids can have different weights. They were supposed to be three distinct levels but as soon as we were done adding them to the vial everyone just shook the hell out of them until they were a nice black color.

I took a shot of my favorite corner of my apartment. We found the organ in the trash and carried it home and, surprisingly, only 3 of the keys don't work. I took a video of my whole place but, yeah, I can't get any more videos to work on this site.

Been trying to watch the Olympics but the channels here have been showing only Korean events and I have seen the.. I think it's the 400 meter individual swimming race where the Korean won gold.. about a million times. They just keep showing it over and over.

Byron Leftwich, huh? Awesome.

Oh, the good news about the postcards is I bought more. The bad news is I still haven't written any. I can't write anything because when I get in the mood I feel like I should write a blog and I end up doing this all night. From now on it's only short ones.

And I finally saw the Dark Knight and need to talk to you about it-- maybe next time. I don't owe you anything. I found a bootleg on the street the day after it came out here so I need to watch it a few more times first.

I'm awesome,

John.

Oh, here is the video of my apartment..