Author: Ryan/Dada

One of the highlights of our national park walk (not hike):  the cats that live in the park.  Can you tell we miss Celeste?

Yesterday we went to a national park just a few subway stops from our apartment.  When we got off the subway, we decided to follow a couple of people who had backpacks and hiking clothes on.  Suddenly we were in a swarm of hikers all in bright hiking clothes so it was pretty easy to figure out how to get there. 

They know how to do rest stops in Korea.  This one had massage chairs you could use for free.

The first day we were at the retreat center, the ocean was pretty calm.  But on Thursday our friendly typhoon came back to visit.  So by Friday, even though the rain was gone, we had big waves and plenty of wind.  I ate pancakes on the beach; it was wonderful.

We chaperoned the secondary students on a retreat last week.  We stayed in this beautiful retreat center on the eastern coast of the penninsula.

I’m very happy that I get to have my students participate in Civic Mirror (pretend country game) again this year!  Here’s some info about their countries. The name Unipigland came about as a compromise between a faction that really wanted to call it Unibrowland and a faction that was loyal to the name Spider Pig Ville.  Notice the national animal is an eight-legged unibrowed pig. 🙂

We love the park next to our apartment building.  And when you spend enough time there, it transforms the enormous city of Seoul into a small town.  We’ve found that if you spend more than about five minutes there, a teacher from our school is likely to walk by.  (About 20 teachers from our school live in buildings near the park.)  Some days we like to stand on the “Rainbow Bridge” between the two sections of the park.  One day we were looking at the sign below as Ryan was trying to translate it.  A couple teachers came up to say hi and thought it was pretty funny we were spending so much time reading a sign.  Another time we were staring up at some trees looking for cicadas.  Ryan pointed out that we’ll probably become known as “those people who stand around and stare at things in the park.”