Phew!

This week was a doooozy. I haven't looked forward to a Friday so much in a while (except for maybe every week that I was teaching...). As I contentedtly eat a "Choco Fudge" popsicle, I feel pretty proud of how much we've done already!

This past weekend, Fulbright treated us to a weekend excursion to a small city called Sokjo (how lucky are we!). We stayed in a really nice hotel and were treated to dinner on the 15th floor overlooking mountains and the water. There was also a special vegetarian place setting for me and Monica- another Northwestern grad!

We also got to hear a talk from an American Buddhist who was super goofy but had a lot of meaningful things to say about mindfulness and self-awareness. Then we visited his temple-see: beautiful scenes below.

The next day we explored Sokjo, (hindered slightly by soju-induced illnesses...) and ended up getting Italian food. #basic

On Sunday we stopped by some beautiful, old places with signs in Korean, and then headed back to Fulbright boot camp at Jungwon, but not before I snapped a pic of a lopster-chef for the cute Korean signs collection.

It turns out that learning Korean is hard and my old 24 year old self is having a hard time sitting still for

the 4 hours of class plus up to 2 additional review sessions nightly. However, I cannot believe how much we have learned and am pretty proud of myself for even witnessing the learning (and processing about 55% of it.) In 2.5 weeks we have learned: the alphabet, basic questions, introductions, present and past tense verbs, sentence structures, numbers to 100,000 and days of the week !!!!!!. We had our second quiz today and I felt a lot more confident than last time- so as the Koreans say "Fighting!" or "Whiting!" I'm not sure but I think it means like, keep going!

The other big thing going on around here this

week was the unveiling of our placement forms and then their due date at Midnight Wednesday. For those of you I haven't spazzed out to, the idea is this: we get to preference where we'd like to be by using a form with a lot of options 1-26 about size of placement, near other ETAs, etc. The catch is that "The Office" only looks at your top 1-3 preferences. So, you have to be kind of strategic about what you preference. As you might be able to imagine, putting 70 type-A ish control freaks into a situation where they have a irritatingly minimal amount of choice in what is really a non-choice type of scenario has caused a lot of freak outs. I went into SK with the attitude that "anything goes" but I still felt it hard to avoid getting worked up about what to pref. Ultimately I made the "other" category my first choice and requested a teaching setting where I would be the lead in the classroom. I also mentioned my vegetarianism and noted that I could only live in a homestay if they understood that diet (it is extremely odd to not eat meat here- and waaay harder than I thought.) We should find out about placments sometime next week (cue drama part 2).

Here's the brightest part of my week/day. I got to teach my first ESL lesson!!!! We did demos with students here on campus for a Fulbright Camp. I taught "low beginners" in 5-6th grade and had an awesome time. It was great to be in front of a class again and felt very natural. I also realized that a lot of my first grade skills will be very relevenet to students with low level english as they attempt to sound out words and form basic sentences. Then, I helped out at "Night Fun" wherxe the campers play games,etc. and did my first official work of cultural ambassadorship: I instructed a student in the makings of a solid top knot.

The students were so kind and fun to be around and I can't wait to meet mine! Anyway, I can't imagine anyone would read all the way down here, but if you did, thanks! I miss you all tons and cannot wait to share more of this journey with you.

Love, love, love,

Maeve