Saturday in Busan

Dear Korea,

We really appreciate how you desire to love us and love us well. We are thankful for your abundance of fish, eel, crab, snails, squid, etc and how you want us to eat all of these things for our health. However, we are writing to ask that you at least keep what you feed us on ice or away from the polluted air and feast of the flies. We would be very appreciative. Thanks, D&A

Here are some great pictures of our exploration of Busan on Saturday. We really enjoyed walking around and seeing new sights, smelling new smells and tasting new treats. We even saw an octopus try to escape certain death in someone's dinner dish! He didn't make it :( Enjoy!




God is love and THE iMac!

Derek's uncle will be happy to know that Patagonia is doing well here!

We started our day by having some yummy hot cakes at McDonald's! What a feast for us! This McDonald's was huge and could probably have fit all of Stanwood, WA in it! We walked around exploring and found ourselves in the Jagalchi Seafood Market. This market is pretty famous in Asia for having a diverse and FRESH selection! Check out how fresh the skate are!?!


Umm...can I get some of those, please?
Believe it or not, this becomes a part of your daily routine here in Korea. We really do appreciate and love the exposure to Korean Culture and we have been changed by it. Learning about food culture is exciting and mind-blowing. There are so many rules associated with food here. Birthday soup is served anytime there is a birthday at my school. I'm not telling them when mine is. I don't like the seaweed stewed soup!

This lady is cute. She is determined to sell her fish. She set up her booth in the middle of the road.

Clams on steroids.
They have a variety of foods - My roommate Natalie would be choking right now. She taught me that anything left out of a refrigerator for longer than 4 hours should be thrown away immediately. My roommate Amy contradicted that and taught me that you can eat anything left out on the counter over night. I guess Amy could life here!
Not Pike's Place, but you get an ajuma's blessing with every fish you buy.
Ummm, yummy eel! Watching a lady hack these guys open was something I could have gone without, but she had a system that was comparable to the grace of a ballerina.
Caught you!
Trying to escape!
sShe's "crabby!" Get it!
Derek walking around like he's going to BUY something!
Jalgachi Fish Market...smelly...but great!
This is the dried fish market! ...yumm...
Want some shrimp? Dried?
Lotte Department Store...mall on steroids!
Derek's opinion of Designer Fashion.
Walking around, catching a glimpse of Lotte Department Store.
Is she your wife???
My gift to Derek. His favorite English shirt. There's rumor going around that you can buy a shirt written in Hangul that says "Do you know what your shirt say?"
Checking out the movie stars at Piff Plaza. We have no idea who they are.
Grabbing a hamburger for dinner - it was gross. Anlee only ate the bun.
This inspired us to "try" the burger...false advertisement!

Saturday was a fun day! We really enjoyed the sights, sounds...maybe not the scents...of Busan. We saw two films: one was great, the other was nails-on-a-chalk-board terrible! We have decided to stay away from Eastern European films. If for some unknown reason we are here again for the PIFF 2011, we are going to buy tickets for South American films!

FOOD ALERT: Attempted to eat 2 hamburgers in one day AND had McDonald's TWICE! Hotcakes and ice cream, but it's a start!

Beautiful Busan

We are back from Busan and we definitely enjoyed our time there. We caught a ride with Derek's head teacher, Mrs. Kwon to Gwangmyeong Station and boarded the bullet train, KTX. Thanks to last minute notice at Derek's school, we recorded Derek's students grades to turn in for mid-term the next week on the 3 hour journey. There were many foreigners on the train and it was both interesting and bewildering to hear what they had to say. I guess we are starting to feel like scenery here and are a bit surprised when other foreigners that are "foreign" to us are around.

We made it into Busan just in time for the rain. We caught a taxi, Derek did his thing in Korean and we arrived at our really AMAZING and ENTERTAINING hotel for the weekend. Seriously, this hotel was immensely interactive and equipped to relax you as much as humanely possible! When we arrived the owner greeted us out of the front desk/his kitchen window to his family's apartment and told us that he would be up in 5 minutes to show us how to use the "remote." This remote ended up being the real "universal remote." The remote controlled the lights to the ceiling - THE UNIVERSE!








Yep! We had blue lights on the ceiling! And a BIG SCREEN TV! This is pretty entertaining for a couple who have a TV only as decoration! We managed to find "KUNG FU PANDA" to entertain us. The room got even better with a 3-head shower, a sauna and a BATH TUB! If you know Anlee, then you know a bath tub is a little piece of heaven and something to be taken full advantage of!

Wake up at 8:00am for a day of exploring and movies! More to come later!

We are on our way to Busan! The international film festival is world famous and draws over 10,000 film fanatics and critics every year. It placed Busan on the map and certified Korea as a hot spot for film making. Our experience of the festival last year included the WORST film ever made, straight from a Polish director, and a great environmental film - of which we remember quite a bit - and lastly a film about the Palestinian conflict showcasing the day-to-day life of a Palestinian in Israeli occupied Gaza - striking, captivating and eye-awakening.

This year we are venturing out a bit and taking in a film by an Italian director. We have high expectations to laugh a little since the film is about a bunch of old men reuniting with their old rock band road-tripping through Italy. :) Saturday we are becoming official movie critics and Sunday we are becoming official beach bums. We plan on enjoying the cooler temperatures on the sand and looking out to sea. We need some down time after a week of fighting colds and hectic school schedules. We leave on the KTX train tonight; this train goes upwards of 200mph and is so smooth you're not even aware you are moving. We arrive pretty late tonight and will make our way to our "couples hostel" for the night. It has a bathtub so Anlee plans on being a prune by 11pm! YES!

This is a special trip for us because last year we really solidified our friendship during great talks and excursions throughout the city. (Anlee was completely ga-ga over Derek and he was just starting to recognize the warm fuzzies!) Click on the Busan poster above for a link to Anlee's blog post about last year's Busan trip - complete with a video of the highlights!

Look below for an excerpt from Derek's blog about our trip last year:

This past weekend I took a trip with 3 friends down to Busan on the south tip of the Korean peninsula. The purpose of the trip was to go to the Busan International Film Festival. We took the high speed (180 MPH) train there and back. It was about a 2 and a half hour trip. Super smooth and comfortable. I could have stayed on there much longer. Hopefully, the flight tomorrow will be similar. It was a good weekend. Spent some time on the beach-walking, taking pictures, playing Frisbee, etc. Ate some great food, most of it western. Went to a couple of Italian restaurants. For some reason, I just haven't been feeling the Korean food lately.

His love and ours

D&A

The week in review

Derek enjoying his shower in the porta potty after his ultimate match!

Berries in Fall

The sun ray is reflecting off of the 63 Building.
The name of this park is "Nature's Study Area."
The flowers study in Korea, too!

It's Fall!

Go Team Shake-n-Bake! Undefeated!

Handsome hubby!

Worshipping with Shane & Shane and arts n crafts...amazing prayer.

Bike ride to Daebudo - about 8 miles, half in the rain!
Here's Anlee's treat!

Here's Derek's Lunch!

Two for D and one for A!

Teacher's training this past week!

I'm Freezing!
Thanks to our lovely bike ride in the rain, I'm now sick with a cold and we are 5 days away from our trip to Busan. The plus side is that I have an amazing husband who wants to take care of me and help me get well. Also, our students are currently taking midterms, so basically, we are seat warmers for the week. No classes! Sad note: D's computer has slowly experienced old age or maybe some kind of arrest and is not waking up anymore. We are hoping to get into Seoul for some repair work this week. Be praying that we can at least salvage our information from the hard drive.
We had a great weekend. D's team is still undefeated. We had some deep dish pizza from Pizza Hut and I actually ate a pepperoni! We had yummy burritos with our friends AP and Dennis, watched some Blue Planet and set down some more roots in our home.
Up next, a tour of our "villa."

Oh....it's Fall/Winter. I had my heater on today. Flannel pj's are coming out of storage tonight!

Teacher's Training

For the past three days I (Anlee) have been at a Teacher's Orientation Training in the mountains of Osan, about an hour away from our city, Ansan. As many as 300+ teacher's from 7 different countries were packed into seminars - some of which were really helpful and relevant - cultural awareness classes AND too many Korean cafeteria meals!

I enjoyed training and the community of teacher's. Each has their own story of what brought them to Korea and their experiences of adjusting to the culture. Most of them have been in Korea for a couple of weeks to a couple of months. I'm now going into my 14th month in SoKo, so being reminded of the feelings of finding yourself in a strange land for the first time was good.

However, leaving your new husband at home is kind of tough. If you add up the days, we've been apart more days than my mom has ever been from my dad minus the days she came to visit me in Korea last year! And we've been married for 6 weeks!

I met people on the trip that really blessed me, had some great conversations on faith and travel and really enjoyed my roommate for the training. For laughs: My name is Anlee. Her name is Lee Ann!

This coming week Derek is free from extra classes so we hope to enjoy the evenings together and catch up with friends and family. Friday we are headed to Busan for the International Film Festival. More to come later...

His love and ours,

D&A