Hey everyone,
I'm back with a new post chock full of goodies! From Wednesday-Friday of this past week I had teaching orientation at a resort in Osan, about 40 minutes away from Suwon. The orientation was nice, most of the lectures were pretty useful and it was nice meeting some more English speakers and network a little bit. Unfortunately I really didn't meet many people who live in Suwon so it looks like I'll be doing some more weekend travelling to meet up with new friends, but that's fine with me, the subway in Korea is really inexpensive. On Friday night I met up with a few people from my orientation and we went for Mexican food near a U.S. Air Force base. It was authentic, the chefs were from Mexico City and the food was pretty good, definitely worth the trip to feed my craving. Saturday was my co-teacher's daughter's wedding and I was very excited for my 1st experience at a Korean wedding. The ceremony was very nice, short and concise but very interesting. The wedding wasn't extremely traditional but they did retain some aspects of Korean traditions in the ceremonial process. For example, my co-teacher and the groom's mother were both wearing traditional Korean dresses called hanbok. Also, the bride and groom bowed before their respective in-laws as a symbol of acceptance into the family. After the ceremony we were ushered into a huge banquet hall for lunch, which was incredible. There were vast quantities of traditional Korean food and soooo much fruit. It was great and later on Saturday I went back into Seoul to meet up with Dave and one of his good friends from Boston. We hung out around Ilsan on Saturday night and rested up for Sunday. Today we went to Gangnam, which is an area in southeast Seoul. We ended up at a cafe and spa known for a very special kind of treatment called Dr. Fish. This basically consists of sitting in a pool of water filled with little fish, roughly the size of minnows, that nibble at your feet eating off all your dead skin. Supposedly it's a very healthy and theraputic method of cleaning one's feet. Dr. Fish is not for the very ticklish. The sensation of little fish nibbling at your feet is overwhelming and I couldn't help but burst out laughing. It was definitely a unique experience but my feet felt great afterwards.
That's all for now, next week is one of the two biggest holidays in Korea, Chuseok, which is a holiday celebrating the fall harvest and the honor of family ancestors, so I have Thurs., Friday, and the following Monday off from school. My tentative plans are to go out east to the coast and explore a few national parks, which I'm very excited to do. I hope everyone has a good fast, I know I'll have to explain myself to every teacher tomorrow as to why I'm not eating lunch.
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