It is my 24th birthday today!  It seems like the last year flew by.

To celebrate my birthday I went and got my Yellow Fever Vaccination today (for my up coming trip to Africa).  Fun, huh?!  Tomorrow, I’m going out with my coworkers for a birthday/going away dinner.  On Thursday, I’m going to go to Norabong with some other friends.  I love norabong (kareoke)!  It is one thing that I’ll miss for sure when I leave Korea.

Countdown until trip: 4 days!  (I’m going to Singapore, Malayisa, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam)

I’m leaving Korea in 5 days!  Crazy!  My life completly changed when I came here a year ago, and it’s going to totally change again.  It’s fun, but also a little bit scary.  Seoul has really started to feel like my home.

On Friday night, I got together with my Nowon friends for a little “going away” get together.  We ate some Korean BBQ and than went to Dragon Bar and had a few drinks.  (That was sort of fitting, because I orignally meet my Nowon friends at Dragon Bar about 10 months ago.)  It was fun to just hang out and chat.

I’ve finally started to seriously pack up my stuff, too.  I sent one box home by ship on Friday and it only cost $30 for a 25 lbs box (it takes 30-90 days to get there).  I have another box or 2 to send back this week.

I’m sure I’ll miss Korea, but it doesn’t even seem like I’m really leaving yet. 

For the past 2 months, I’ve had to take long subway rides(about 1 1/2 hours each way) every morning at rush hour (in Korea they call it Hell Hour).  When I lived in my old apartment I got on at the end of the line, so it was relatively empty.  But now that I live closer to downtown my trips are crazy!

The subway pulls up and already there are people literally squashed up against the windows and doors like bugs.  Then, as if by magic, me and about 15 other people push our way onto the already overflowing subway car.  (Every morning I have to stand in the 2 inch space up against the doors and push off the door frame so that I can make it safely inside the sliding doors.) 

It’s crazy!  It really seems like a magic trick or something!  And at the next 5 stops more and more people some how manage to make it onto the subway.

ECC (my school) provides my housing for me, and they decided to move me to a new apartment with just 2 weeks left in Korea.  (Very stupid!  But it doesn’t seem like any English hagwons think logically!)

So anyways, I moved into my new apartment last night.  The best thing about it is that it is a 10 minute walk from my school.  (My old apartment was 8 subway stops away from school.)  I’m now more in central Seoul too. 

My new apartment is a tiny studio.  It’s probably about 10-12 feet by 10 feet.  This would be fine with me, but they decided to move ever piece of furniture from my 2 bedroom apartment into this TINY new apartment.  I have 3 coffee tables, a big kitchen table, 2 dining room chairs, a office chair, 2 armoires, and a bed.  When they brought me to the apartment last night, I could hardly open the door let alone walk around the place.  I had to climb over the dining room table to get into the bathroom.  (What were they thinking?!)

Along with bringing me tons of furniture, they decided to move every piece of garbage that was in my old apartment.  They brought me the broken tv, broken fan, broken iron etc. that had been left in the apartment by past teachers living there.  They even brought along somethings that were in the hallway of my old apartment building.  Like a dirty old stool that someone had left in the hallway to prop the door open.  (Again, what were they thinking?!)

I basically solved the problem of too much stuff in too small of a place by thinking virtically.  I stacked dining room chairs on top of the armoires and have a big table over the smaller tables, etc.  Now it’s at least livable!

I don’t really like my new neighborhood either.  In the old apartment I was in a residental part of the city.  There were always people out and about, vendors selling things on the streets, and kids running around.  Now it seems like I’m in a commerical area.  There aren’t any cute little neighborhood restraunts and the area basically seems dead at night.  (However, I am only about a 15 minute walk from the university area, and there are tons of little shops and restraunts there.)

I only have 2 weeks left in Korea! But I still have a ton of stuff to take care of, including getting my visas for Vietnam and Cambodia. Anyways, I decided it was time to finally get my visa for Cambodia. The office is in Itaewon, so I thought it would be a quick trip to drop it off. I was definetly wrong!

I stopped at tourist information to get a map showing me how to get to the Embassy. It wasn’t really any help. It didn’t show many roads and the area where the embassy is at just had a picture of a bunch of trees. (Strange!) So anyways I found my way to the right area, and was walking up and down the main street with my eyes peeled looking for the Cambodian flag or a sign or something. I couldn’t find it. (I did find the Sudan, Loa, Thai, and Italian Embassies though.)

I started asking random people on the street and showing them my useless map. All the people pointed in different directions. I was getting really frustrated when I decided to ask one more lady for directions. She was so sweet! She didn’t seem to know where it was, but she made it her mission to find it for me. (She didn’t speak any English, so I just followed her around like a lost puppy.) She walked up and down the street peeking her head in houses, and asking everybody where the Cambodian Embassy was. We finally found it. But just my luck, it was Cambodian New Year so there office was closed for the day. I’ll have to go back next week, but at least I know where it is now.

Korean people can be really pushy and rude on the subway and sidewalks, but then they always surprise you with some extreme acts of kindness. (This kind of thing has happened to most of my friends in Korea.)

I was so happy when I woke up this morning and saw it was gloomy, gray and rainy.  Why?  Because it takes most of that horrible yellow dust out of the air.  I can actually breath today!  I’ve never been so happy to see it rain!

The air is incredibly polluted now with yellow dust. (Basically dust/sand blows over to Korea from the Gobi Desert in Korea.) I feel like my entire body is covered in a fine layer of sand, including my eye balls, inside of my throat, and my lungs. The air is so full of it I can hardly see the mountain that is about 200 meters from my apartment.

I’ve heard that the dust is only suppose to last a week or 2, but who knows. It sucks!

I just got back from a temple stay at the Lotus Lantern Buddhist Temple in Incheon. I went with 2 of my friends Shannon and Laura. None of us knew very much about Buddhism, so it was very interesting to see how the monks live first hand. I still don’t think I understand very many details about the origins of the religion or the specific reasons why they do things, but I’ve learned some of the general things.

I choose this temple for 2 reason, 1.) they had english translation people there 2.) it was close to seoul. It is actually on a island in the West Sea, but it’s only about 45 minutes from Seoul. I was really surprised that almost all of the monks spoke fairly decent English. It also really surprised me how international they were. There was 1 monk from Korea, 2 from Russia, 2 from Bangladesh, and 1 from China/Thailand.

There were only 4 foreigners there, so we really felt like we were part of their little community for the weekend.

On the first day, we basically just hung out for a while drinking tea and talking to the volunteer translator lady. Then she showed us how to behave during the ceremonies. She also taught us how to do the full prostrations (which we would come to hate the next morning). After that we got a meditation lesson from a monk. I thought the most interesting thing that he said was that people have a “monkey mind”. Our minds are always jumping around from thought to thought, and it’s really hard to catch them and calm them. Basically meditation is clearing your mind of everything, and trying to think of absolutely nothing. (Much harder than it sounds!) After these lessons we ate dinner with the monks, which was veggies and rice (what we expected).

But after dinner we got an unexpected surprise of getting to have a cake/tea party with the monks. One of the younger monks had just completed his 4 years of study and was became a full fledged monk, so we got to join in the party to celebrate the milestone with them. They were actually a lot more talkative and friendly than I thought they would be.

The nect day it sort of turned into a kind of “Buddhism Fat Camp”. We had to wake up at 3:30am, so we could join in on the morning ceremony. It was really beautiful seeing the temple in the pitch black sky glowing a pinkish color from the light of hundred of lotus laterns. The ceremony started with some chanting, then came the tough part. We had to do 108 full prostrations. (Which means that everytime a monk said a chant we had to 1st bow, 2nd kneel, 3rd get into a crawling position, 4th curl up in a ball with our foreheads/elbows/knees on the ground, 5th reverse all of that to a standing position. The trick was you can’t move your feet at all and you can’t use your hands for balance or to push you off the floor.) We all thought our knees, thighs, and calf were going to give out on us! My legs haven’t hurt that much since I climbed the Great Wall of China!

After the morning ceremony we had some breakfast (more rice and veggies) and then we went on a hour long walk in the woods. Now I know why monks are so skinny!

The rest of the day we basically hung out and relaxed.

It was a very cool and memorable weekend!

The last Friday of each month is Club Day in Hongdae.  Club Day is basically the biggest party in Seoul, and I hadn’t had the chance to go until now.  You pay 15,000 won (about $15) and that pays for your cover at all the clubs and 1 free drink.  Hongdae is a big university area, so it’s mainly Koreans and foreign teachers (soliders aren’t allowed into the clubs, so it’s a much better scene than Itaewon). 

I went with a bunch of my friends from Nowon (Shannon, Lydia, Monique, Dave, John, Sam, and a new guy Stewart who had just arrived in Korea 4 hours before we went out).  First we went to Tinpan, basically because it’s cheap and they play good music.  (With beers being $2.50 and tequila shots at $2.00 its the cheapest place in Hongdae.) We hung out there until about 2:00am, and than decided to get to the clubs and start dancing.  We went to M1 (which was really boring, so we left after a few minutes), than we went to M2.  M2 is one of the biggest dance clubs in Seoul.  It was packed when we got there!  It was sort of a weird, everyone was facing the stage like we were at a concert instead of a club.  (On the stage there was a dj and a few people dancing, but nothing too interesting. Weird!)

After about an hour at M2 we decided to go somewhere less crowded and we ended up at Sk@ bar/club.  It is pretty small, but they were playing good music.  We had a great time dancing and the Koreans there were really friendly so pretty soon we were dancing and making friends with everyone in the place.  We stayed there until about 7:00am, when the party started to break up. 

After that Shannon really wanted to get some food so we ended up going out for Samgebsal (sp?).  (Which is basically thick cuts of bacon that you cook on the Korean BBQ thing.  You put it on a lettuce leaf add some hot sauce and onions to make a little lettuce wrap.)  We managed to make friends with a few random Korean guys at the club and they came with us for food.  They were really nice guys, but I don’t think they spoke or understood English every much.

After we were finished eating we took a taxi home.  Boy was that ever a long ride!  Hongdae is on the west side of town and we all live on the north/east side, so it took about 1 hour to get home.  Luckily, taxis are super cheap in Korea, so it only cost about $25 (and with 5 people in the taxi it wasn’t too bad at all).

It was so funny as we were driving up to my apartment at 9:00am, all the kids were dressed up in their uniforms walking to school!  That is the latest I’ve been out in a long time.  I had to spend all day Saturday sleeping and recuperating from the night out.  But it was worth it, we had an awesome time!