행복한 HalfWay Mark 슬픈

Can you believe I am half way through my stay here in South Korea? I know I can’t! Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking into the future and I can’t make it slow down! This week’s camp theme is Wild Things and Warm Fuzzies and I am in charge of craft camp. Monday was fun; we made comic books in my club and had fun painting our own monsters in rotating activities. That night we had a brief staff meeting, basically a meeting to postpone our meeting till Thursday, then Jesa and I watched My Sisters Keeper and cried ourselves to sleep. On Tuesday we made paper cup monsters, aka glued a mess to a Styrofoam cup. That afternoon I got to take the kinders and the first graders swimming, which is probably my very favorite part of the day. These kids are so cute playing games and holding on to you in the water. Devin’s pretty lenient about letting us wrestle around with kids and letting them hang on me. Keyona, one of the major troublemakers held onto me the whole time and laid with her head on my shoulder and was actually behaved, best hour ever. That night Devin bought us pizza for having to put up with him and Jesa and I sneakily tried to make them let us watch Kristin’s bootleg version of the new twilight movie. That failed and we ended up watching Sweeny Todd and I feel asleep about 20 minutes in. Let me just take this brief minute to tell you about my very favorite kinders. So Aniyah is a gorgeous girl who is the most mature of all the kinders, and probably my favorite. She is the sweetest thing and always wants to sit in my lap during closing. Summer is another adorable kid, actually probably the cutest child I have ever seen. She was adopted from china and her face is basically like a pug dog in that it gets all scrunched up when she smiles. Oh and all the kids do this dance move called the Jerk, basically when they jump and walk backwards at the same time but without moving, pretty complicated but summer is the best. Kalisha is Summers best friend and she is also cute with two little buck teeth and always on her best behavior. Alex is the smallest kinder boy I have ever seen. He is so small and loves to lean on people and sit in laps and whenever you say his name he just looks up and smiles. Taygan is the man, he’s the cutest mix Caucasian-Korean that I have ever seen and he loves causes little problems but then tells me that he is sorry with his little eyes that I can’t stay mad at (common problem they are all too cute.) Andre is this little black boy that is just the man, but who still likes to hold hands, he gave me a legit play-by-play of the movie toy story three today. The rest are decent kids and the three trouble makers are Sammy, Keyona, and Joycelyn they are going to be extra trouble for the rest of my time here. Wednesday we made finger puppets, a fairly boring idea but they ate it up for fifty minutes. I got to go swimming again with the 2nd-5th graders which is still fun but not as good as the kinders. There is one little boy Matthew who has ADHD among other things who likes to climb on my back and play bumper cars with other people and pick up other kids, he demands I turn and go straight. It’s fun for about 0.2 seconds. Wednesday night Jesa, Kristin, and I headed downtown to see Twilight on the big screen and ended up arriving about an hour early so I had to buy two purses to pass the time, not too shabby for 25,000 won. Thursday was a field trip day, gruesome. We went to Woobang land and kept the kinders in the kiddy section much to their dismay. “Miss Smartie I wanna ride the big roller coaster, Miss Smartie this ride is for babies, Miss Smartie it’s hot!” Oh it was an interesting day, probably my longest camp day thus far. They all got ice cream at the end of the day, just twists on a cone and we were kind of standing on a hill when one kinder, Lanea drops her ice cream and it is so hot out that the entire mass just slides, melting, all the way down the hill kids on either side watching. That night two of our campers, Summer and Caitlin, took us out to eat with a couple other staff members. We had duck, family style/cook it yourself, and enjoyed a free meal then sitting around a camp fire outside after. Friday was a really good day, the kids were well behaved and the day flew by, I didn’t even have to yell until the afternoon.

Our plan for Friday night was to head into town for a baseball game then hang out downtown for a while. Well it was raining pretty hard, James no longer wanted to go to the game but Devin wanted to prove our loyalty by sticking it out with several trash sacks, these two never agree on anything. Jesa and I decided to look up movie times for downtown while the boys walked over to the PX to get money out. Jesa and I brainstormed and decided to see if Daegu had a Dr. Fish. After much googling and searching we found one and decided to make it our destination. We met up with Kristin and the boys and told them we had a surprise for them, they were not pleased. After much badgering and threatening and a long interrogating taxi ride we arrived downtown. Now the hard part, locating our secret Dr. Fish, the directions online said it was on the same street as Gap so we were searching in the pouring rain for gap. People were getting crabby but luckily after about fifteen minutes of walking and asking about four strangers we saw the sign. It was still in Korean so they were still in the dark about our final destination. We walked into a coffee shop like room and told them our plan, all were satisfied. We ordered the self service bar and fish. The self service bar was bread and jam, delicious, sometimes the best meals are purely bread. Finally it was fishy time. We all took our shoes off and walked up to the bath area, we had to go three and two so Jesa, James, and Kristin went first while Devin and I sat to the side. You put your feet in a little tub and there are probably a hundred fish in there that eat away all the dead skin on your feet, pretty Asian if you ask me. After watching them squirm and laugh for about twenty minutes I was more than ready for my turn. It tickles so much. My little legs couldn’t reach the bottom of the tubs like Devin’s so the fish were under my feet and it was an interesting sensation. You get use to it after a while and it feels like your feet have fallen asleep or your holding them against the jets of a Jacuzzi. I really like enjoyed it and would highly recommend the Dr. Fish experience. After our thorough cleaning it was still raining so we decided to just run across the street and poke around in a few stores. Sadly the rain still hadn’t let up and Jesa wasn’t feeling 100% so she, James, and Kristin decided to call it a night. Devin and I decided to view a traditional Korean movie. We thought we would be able to decipher at least part of the movie, even if it wasn’t in English by watching and figuring out the story. False, I still have no idea what went on that whole movie. There were underground passages, a group of four friends with one mentally handicap member, people killing each other, evil villains with moustaches, it was interesting though. We returned to base and fell asleep. Jesa woke me up at seven am Saturday morning to help her get ready for her shopping trip. Miss Mary, a lady we work with at the center, had offered to take the girls on a shopping trip to Osan all day Saturday. Kristin and Jesa wanted to check out the black market purse section and headed off.

James, Devin, and I left around ten am for the subway then Seobu bus terminal to head to Gaya-San national park. After an hour bus ride we arrived right at the gate of the national park, convenient. The rain had let up and it was turning out to be a very, very humid day. Unbeknownst to us, Gaya-san is a unique national park. It house one of the three most important temples in Korea. We walked to the temple, about 1 km away and found a huge temple area with several buildings and statues. The temple is called Haein-Sa and was founded in 802 by monks. We wandered around taking pictures, James finally found the statue of the laughing Buddha he had been looking for and bought it. We continued to make our way around the compound and eventually stumbled upon the Koreana Tripitaka. We walked up these stairs into a wooden bar like room with wooden bar like windows and doors and you looked in and saw a ton of blocks carved with Korean symbols, 81,258 to be exact. It smelled wonderful, like an old library and it really was an awesome site to see. James pulled out my travel book and we read all about the blocks and learned their history. These wood printing blocks were created in the 11th century. They were created during a war and the tribes who created them thought this would inspire the Buddha to divinely intervene. These were the first set of Buddhist canon printing blocks ever, pretty sweet. After staring in awe and be baffled by what we were seeing, stored openly behind wood fences we decided to continue our hike. We found the trail around 1:30 and were greeted by two rangers curiously asking where we were going, we told them we wanted to summit the peak and they said we were very late but they would let us go anyway. They said the trail was very wet and slippery but believed we would be able to summit and return to that spot by five o’clock. We began our hike, which was gorgeous, through lush bamboo and other plants next to a raging river that was almost deafening. The trail started to get a little muddy and wet but we didn’t think too much of it and continued to trek on. After about ten minutes the trail turned into a small shallow stream and that was our trail almost the entire way up the mountain. We were covered in mud and our shoes sopping wet. The humidity really set in and we were dripping in sweat. The hike was a total of about 4.9 km to the top, not bad you would think. The first two km were pretty flat and wet but after that things changed. Up, up, up hiking up boulder stairs that were slippery.

Generally I do pretty well with the hiking keeping up with the boys and all but not in this humidity. They would call down from like an eighth of a mile up asking if I was coming and I would shout back slow but steady. (Mind you I was the first one down, because I conserved energy!) I missed having Jesa there to chat with but I did enjoy my little bit of hiking alone time and encountering friendly Koreans. I had my hair in two braided piggy tails and they loved them, stroking them and saying beautiful. Great ego boaster if you ask me. So after falsely thinking we had made it to the top oh about four times, then getting really angry when I realized we hadn’t made it we found the peak and a sea of clouds again. The wind was blowing really hard and we were walking across some smooth slick walk, a little bit frightening at times. We all felt really accomplished though when all was said and done and enjoyed a long break hanging out and trying to get a clear picture when the wind blew the clouds away. The decent wasn’t as easy as you would think. Jumping down boulder to slippery boulder gets old and is especially hard when your legs are shaking. After slip and sliding down mud, and not encountering any Koreans for about a half hour we made it back to the flat land. It started to pour so we waited it out a little in a tree canopy before heading back to town. Walking back in we bought popsicles and hand painted fans from monks. We checked out the sketchy camp grounds but ultimately decided to get on a bus for the hour long trip back to Daegu. As soon as we boarded the bus the clouds opened up to reveal blue skies, whoops too late. We arrived in Daegu muddy and hungry, well the boys; I had eaten two peanut butter sandwiches on the bus. So we decided to stop for dinner outside of base at a restaurant James had wanted to try. We ordered pork of sorts and one was marinated then cooked them ourselves. I enjoyed meat, rice, and potatoes avoiding all spicy vegetables. We returned to our rooms, showered then met up with Jesa. Devin wanted us to watch a documentary on sustainability, and we were all asleep within the first fifteen minutes only to be woken up an hour later by a very disappointed Devin.

Sunday Morning I woke up at eight and walked to nine o’clock mass on base. I saw a ton of my kids and co-workers there. After mass I hung out till Jesa was done with her service at 10:30. Once all praising was complete, Jesa, Devin, and I headed out to Mount Apsan again, the place we went on the first weekend on Sunday that is literally five minutes from base. It was a hot but beautiful day. The sun was out and beating down hard. Devin has a big macro lens and is very into taking pictures of bugs, frogs, etc. so he had recruited Jesa to be his bug herder and I thoroughly enjoyed watching her try to swat bees and dragon flies towards him. We hiked about half way up the mountain, suppose to be looking for bugs, but Jesa and I were too busy socializing. We got half way up and realized there was no need to over exert ourselves today since we had already hiked to the top before. There is a big stream that runs next to the trail so we decided we should mosey our way back down and spend a long time playing in the stream. Jesa lay in the sun while I hid in the shade, I still have a sun burn, and we dangled our legs and feet in the water talking and laughing. Reluctantly we left when we realized suddenly that every other Korean had left. We bought popsicles and headed back to base where Jesa and I went for a swim then all the girls decided to give each other haircuts. I am the proud new owner of swishy bangs, which I like when they are straight but when they are a curly mess on top of my head I can’t decide. Our big boss Kristine, our project coordinator, came Sunday night to check up on things. She goes to UNI and is super nice, we each had an individual meeting to see how we were feeling, then we were up really late looking at Devin’s Africa pictures and making fun of James.
All in all the weekend was pretty fun! Next weekend is Mud feast, I am so excited! I hope everyone is enjoying their summer, there isn’t too much left!

I love you more than Koreans love weird food,

Elizabeth