More catching up:
The last week of December was an eventful one. Monday the 28th was a school day, but instead of classes we had a field trip! As I mentioned before, some special school events had been cancelled in the fall semester because of swine flu, so on the Monday after Christmas the entire school went downtown to see Avatar. I got to sleep in an hour and the movie was pretty awesome; the 1st and 2nd graders and their teachers saw it in 2D, but the 3rd graders and the rest of the teachers – including me! – saw it in 3D! I would definitely recommend it. We trooped back to school for lunch and all the students went home after that.
That same day Hyun Ju and I joined a gym - The Fitness Palace in Wellness, which is a five-minute walk from our apartment. The best part so far has been the hot shower, hands down. My apartment, especially the bathroom, is so frigid. The bathroom is unheated, and also has a window that might as well be wide open – it leaks cold air, and if someone smokes outside under the window, I can smell the cigarette smoke inside. Besides that, the showerhead is at a really awkward place on the wall, and although the water is hot, it’s hard to keep it at a steady temperature. Anyway, I absolutely dread showering there in the winter, so the prospect of a hot shower in a warm, clean locker room is the only motivation I need to exercise. I honestly skip showering now on days that I don’t have time to work out! Besides the awesome shower, there’s free soap, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, even toothpaste! They also provide towels and shirts and shorts to work out in. I got a 3-month membership for 80,000 won, or about $70, per month and I love it.
On Tuesday and Wednesday of that week we had a teachers-only field trip. We (almost all of the teachers and administrative employees at Jeil) left from school Tuesday morning and took a bus to Tongyeong, which is a city and several islands at the southern tip of the Korean mainland. It was a pretty relaxing two days – mostly sight-seeing and eating. Tongyeong is really pretty – a lot of water, a lot of mountains, and dozens of little islands. I got some beautiful pictures. Our hotel in Tongyeong was also really nice – I think there were about eight or ten female teachers in a four-bedroom suite, with a kitchen, living room and big TV, and two bathrooms.
We drove around in our bus, took a cable car up a mountain and hiked around a bit, took a one-hour ferry ride to one of the islands, visited the market (there must have been dozens of kinds of seafood and fish, much of it still alive, swimming in aquariums or hanging off of hooks), took a lot of pictures, and ate a lot of good food. As you can imagine, being by the sea we ate a lot of fish and seafood – including raw fish and live octopus! I tried some of each, and they were okay – raw meat in general doesn’t have much flavor to me, and the texture is really hard to get used to. Plus, I was terrified that the octopus was going to stick to the side of my cheek or throat and I would choke on it. Check out my pictures – even though I didn’t eat a lot of the fish, there were definitely enough side dishes to fill me up! Here are all my pictures from Tongyeong: http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg/TeacherSTripToTongyeong?feat=directlink
We got back to Daegu sometime Wednesday evening, and I woke up the next morning, December 31st, intending to spend the day cleaning my apartment, working out, and repacking my bag, because we were headed to Seoul for New Year’s Eve! Unfortunately it was not meant to be – as the day went on I was feeling worse and worse, and by 3:30 or 4pm, I was throwing up and my temperature was over 101 degrees F. I called my friend Jeannine to bail on the Seoul trip, and then my coteacher Carrie to get a ride to the hospital. The doctor pushed around on my stomach, and Carrie’s interpretation of his diagnosis was ‘inflamed intestines’ from eating too much raw fish in Tongyeong. I don’t really understand that, because I didn’t really love the raw fish. Even though I tried everything, I don’t think I ate very much of it. Guess it doesn’t matter though – the doctor’s visit and mysterious prescription from the pharmacy came to less than 10,000 won, or 8-9 dollars, and I did start feeling better after a day or so. But I completely missed Seoul and New Years, and still paid for the hostel and train ticket! Lame.
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