The weekend

Yesterday we went to Sokri-san (속리산), a mountain 2 hours south east of Suwon. We drove down in our typical "rainbow bus", the company we use to transport our group whenever we go somewhere. But little did we know until yesterday that the bus was equipped with a karaoke complete with a microphone that travels to the back of the bus, and videos with lyrics for us to sing along. It was pretty ridiculous, and kinda fun. A little more than half of the bus was coerced into singing a song.

When we arrived, we had lunch, and then visited the temple Beopjusa (법주사) which was beautiful and had a giant golden Buddha there.

After lunch, we only were given an hour to go hiking around the mountain. The trails were quite simple, and I would have loved to spend a whole day there.

When we got back, Joyce came over and we went to Bon Juk (본죽) for dinner, which is an asian style porridge restaurant. About halfway through dinner, Sheila texted me that her and a couple of coworkers were getting together for a picnic at a park in Youngtong (영통), the area around my school, and asked if I wanted to come along. We were really close to there, so we decided to walk over. Until I got over there, I didn't realize that they were having a 4th of July picnic.

We had watermelon and fireworks and people playing guitar. Overall, it was pretty fun. The guys tried to put some roman candles in the ground, but they wouldn't stick too well, and looked a bit dangerous. I recommended that we try it out of the second half of the watermelon that no one seemed to be eating. It was pretty much a success.

Today I didn't really do much except for when Sheila once again invited me to dinner at NOW! Bar (the expat bar in Youngtong). One of the other English teachers had just gotten back from India, and he learned to cook there while living on a farm so he cooked dinner for us. The food was delicious, and I saw some of the people from last night again. We also played some pool, and I met some more English teachers. It's kinda bad that I've met more foreigners here than I have Koreans. At the bar there was this one Chinese girl that spoke no English, so we had to communicate in Korean. And it's perfect that she lives in my building one floor down, so that's at least somebody who lives closeby and I can speak Korean to.