Typhoon week

This was moving week and it's craziness resembled the craziness of the typhoid fever experience.  I now have a new neighbourhood, a new apartment, a new school building, a new co-teacher, a new kindergarten class, and a new manager.  It's been an overload of new information, but I'm happy with the changes.  My new apartment is nicer than my previous one.  It's not smaller, not bigger, but the orientation of the rooms is nicer.  I like our new school building also.  The classrooms are smaller, but it has a much friendlier atmosphere to it than the other one did.  I met my new class today and, while I can see that some of my kids will be a challenge, I'm pretty excited about them.
To add to the craziness, though, tonight a group of us are taking a overnight bus to Seoul.  We're leaving tonight because tomorrow morning we're taking part in a tour of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).  The DMZ is a strip of land that acts as a buffer zone between North and South Korea.  The two countries are still technically at war, and, contrary to the name, the DMZ is the most heavily militarized border in the world.  Other friends have gone on tours of it and have come back saying it was a memorable experience, so I'm curious how it will go.  But weekends to Seoul do tend to be somewhat typhoon crazy themselves, so I'll have no break from it.

This past Thursday was a national holiday - Korean Independence Movement Day.  This meant that we got a break from the craziness of moving, which was good, but we never get holidays here so that was a bit crazy in itself.  For this holiday, my co-teacher Roman had the great idea to get a group of friends together and do a scavenger hunt downtown.  So that's what we did, and it turned out to be great.  For the scavenger hunt we broke up into teams and then took pictures and videos of ourselves doing and finding random things amongst the holiday shoppers and shops (ex. holding someones baby and ballroom dancing in the street).  We all embarrassed ourselves and no doubt some Koreans have now realized that they have crazy way-gooks (foreigners) living in their city.  Here are some pictures:

That's it for this week.  I'm heading to dinner now.  Then to hockey.  Then to the bus station.
Thanks for reading,
Michael