Monday, December 28, 2009

Christmas and More

Well it is now a few days after Christmas and while it was not like home and we missed everyone soo much we have kept busy and made some good memories. We started out Christmas vacation on Christmas Eve. We decided to go skating with some friends at Gwangwhamun plaza. It is a new complex with 3 rinks. It cost us 1000 won (around a dollar) to skate for an hour and included the skate rental. We had a nice day and it was nice to get on the ice again, it has been a while since we have been skating.



On Christmas morning, which was Christmas Eve at home we woke up early to attend the Christmas service at Calvin which was very nice and made us feel a little closer to everyone. Here are some pictures of us "at church", yes it was the first time I went to Christmas Eve service with pajama pants on!


Last Hymn with Candles, so beautiful!

After church we opened our Christmas package from Don's parents. We had received it a few days before and were excited to have something to open on Christmas morning. Look at all the goodies!! I had also asked Don's parents to pick up an iPod for Don for Christmas and to send it to us, since I had looked here and they are around $100 more. We also got some home made peanut butter balls!!! Yummmmm!











Here is my Christmas gift, I picked it out while shopping in Itaewan a few days before Christmas, very pretty!






Don's Dad made sure to send us a smoke/CO2 detector since fire safety doesn't seem to be of high concern here. None of the apartments in our building have detectors and we all have gas stoves and our heating is gas too.


Later in the day Don and I set off with a couple other friends to the U.S. army base to pick up the Christmas meals that we had ordered, just like we had on Thanksgiving. This time we ordered one turkey and one bone in ham. It was all delicious once again. We had about 20 people this time for dinner and therefore could not hold it in an apartment as small as all of ours, so a couple of the other teachers spoke to the owner of a bar that a lot of the teachers frequent and arranged for him to open up early so that we could have our meal there. It was great! We call the bar "A" bar but it is actually called Adventure Western Bar, but since the sign has a huge A we have re-named it.





On Christmas evening (Christmas morning at home) we were able to skype gift openings with both of our families, I didn't think to take pictures with Dad, Susan and Danny, but we took one with Don's family. Don's grandma was even there!




To our surprise we had snow for Christmas!! It snowed a bit on Christmas afternoon and has snowed more since and has actually stayed on the ground, quite a surprise since everyone has told us that snow almost never stays here.






Notice the organization of the power lines and phone lines, this isn't even close to the worse that we have seen either.


We have had some good meals since Christmas too. While shopping the other day we found snow crab on sale and had a great meal that night.



Yesterday, December 27th, was one of the new teachers' (Stephen) birthday and we had a potluck dinner party. It was lots of fun and we went bowling after, then to an arcade. Check out the picture of the cake, this is actually the least fancy cake that Brian could find, the cakes here are crazy elaborate, I don't even know how you would go about eating some of them.

Yes this is a massive bottle of Soju, Happy birthday Stephen!


Some of the arcade games, notice the one where you have to hit the flasher on the Subway, hilarious!





No comments:

Post a Comment