Day By Day

As the summer weeks pass by quickly, I am struggling to keep my feelings and emotions sheltered by my exterior. As the feelings of excitement to see family and friends in 2 months and the sadness of leaving my life here increase simultaneously, my face seems to be taking a pretty hard beating. It actually feels as though my face is struggling more than any other part of my body; including my mind. As my eye lids grow heavy, my cheeks feel sharp pains from grinning. It is as if my face is not working together as it has for the past 23 years; causing a sort of confused look to be permanently plastered on my face. I'm not sure when it will go away, but I sure hope it's soon, because I can't afford anymore wrinkles. With all of that being said, I am doing my best to just live Day By Day...

World Cup

As some of you know- the world cup experience ended for both South Korea and the USA a couple of weekends ago as they both lost in back to back games. Unless you are a big soccer fan, there is probably a good chance you didn't watch most of the games (if any) and some of you probably didn't even know that the world cup was/is going on. I just have to say this...living in Korea during the World Cup has been the single most amazing experience I have had this past year. The feeling of national pride and unity has been unlike anything I have ever been apart of or witnessed first hand. On game days- the entire country stopped. Not just a few people, and definitely not just soccer fans; EVERYONE. When Korea played during the week, restaurants and stores closed. In fact, my GYM was even closed. Every student I have (keep in mind I teach 5-6 different classes a day including 5 year olds) not only knew about the game in advance, they knew who was playing, what time, where they were going to watch it, and ALL of the national cheers people chant during the games. National cheers??? My kids would always ask me to sing/yell the songs we sing or chant for the USA team during the games. Um... USA! USA! USA! ?? I don't even know? On game days it felt like the whole country here was wearing red, randomly cheering in the streets, and for the first time smiling at foreigners as we wore our Korea jerseys. It was downright incredible and something I am envious of; living in a country no bigger than Minnesota. It was devastating to see it end, but it was great while it lasted!

School Life

My life as a Kindergarten teacher is starting to feel like one big treasure hunt. Each week I get to learn more about my kids' lives as they are able to communicate with me more and more; information that to me feels like small treasures. The harder I work, the more clues they give me. Eventually I get to hear an entire thought, idea, or question. Slowly, I am starting to piece together clues of what they did over the weekend and what they do after school. It is so much fun! It took me two weeks to figure out that Ryan is not actually moving into a new home with a new baby brother I assumed was going to come from his Mom!? Actually, his COUSIN is moving into a new home and he is going to visit him with his Mom soon! Our day to day interactions continue to become more lovable and fun as we all become more and more attached to one another (something that will make leaving them in 2 months very difficult).

Much to my dismay, we were surprised with a pet snail for our classroom last week (compliments of the Science company our school goes through) and we named him Beans. The ONLY reason I have been willing to pet-sit over the weekend, clean massive amounts of green poop daily (who knew?), and sneak extra lettuce into my purse at lunch time is for the priceless look on my kids' faces when they watch him sleep, slug around, and sleep some more. Most of them walk straight to Beans when they arrive at school in the morning, and very respectfully ask him how he is feeling. Then they proceed to answer for him and speak in complete sentences when talking about him. How can I destroy something that is furthering their English language skills and bringing out the best of their cute little kid spirits at the same time?? I guess the daily green poop clean up will have to continue..

4th of July

I would like to try and clear one thing up right off the bat: No, they do NOT celebrate the 4th of July in Korea. Some of you may laugh- but you wouldn't believe how many people have asked me if I watched fireworks! :) This day was a special day because one of my best friends, Christine, ran in a half marathon that she had worked hard to train for over the past month ! Not only was it the first race I had ever been to, but I was able to support my good friend as she accomplished her goal of running a race in another country. The experience was super cool, and I uncharacteristically (ha-jk) got choked up all day long as I watched people cross the finish line. In the afternoon, I treated myself to a new Canon SLR camera that I had been researching since the day I got here (I'm not even going to try and explain the excitement this event brings to my life because I could go on for days), and then we went out for nachos in honor of the great American holiday!:)

All in all life is amazing as usual, and the excited butterflies I get in my stomach when I think about seeing all of my family and friends in the USA seems to occur daily. As I said before, I am trying to live my life Day By Day but a dark cloud raining "reality" and "future" seems to be looming overhead as I start to think about the question...what comes next?