VACATION ! part one

Well hello blog,

Good to be back online! No new or good news on my computer situation so I'm coming to you live from what's called a PC Bang (pronounced bong) with a direct translation of PC Room, but otherwise known as an Internet Cafe. It's super cheap compared to other countries I've been to and it adds up to around 60 cents an hour - also there is no spell check so bare with me. Anyway on to the good stuff!!

I went on a 2 night three day stay at a vaccation rental known as a pension with some co-wokers and over our five day Lunar New Year break from school.

This is the subway station at the end of our journey. It was about 2 hours total with a few transfers by subway to the area, to the north-west of Seoul. The couple that we were renting the pension from where really nice and they offered to pick up all six of us at the subway station. It was about a fifteen minute drive from the station up into the woods where the couple lived on their pear farm. Korean pears are much different than the pears back home, there are tomato shaped and grapefruit sized and DELICIOUS.

This is the house and my co-workers. There's the owner in red at the top of the stairs. We had the side on the left and there was no one on the side to the right which was nice. To the right of the house is the pear trees but ofcourse they were baren. I really like the rental we picked because the other rentals we saw were close to roads or in a cluster other rentals. This one was way out at the back of their property and you couldn't see barely any other roads or houses.

This is a picture from the back of the house up at the woods. The ground looks green because there were dozens of trees that looked like they had been recently bulldozed, presumeably to make way for more pear trees.

One of my co-workers girlfriend is Korean and so she was great the whole weekend translating and planning what there was for us to do - we absolutely couldn't have pulled off the trip with out her. The first afternoon we got situated and hung out for a while in the pension. Then we walked down to the road and caught a bus that took us to the Garden of Morning Calm, that is supposedly pretty famous. It's a big garden where they have strapped Christmas lights around the trees and bushes. Check it out:

Pretty wild huh? So we walked around this place for a long time and then took the bus home and got ready to cook an amazing Korean meal.

There was a side-room attached to the owner's house that had a few indoor bbq's in it and we grilled up some pork, onions and garlic and, put them in lettuce with seseme seed leaves and some sauces and ate until we were all stuffed to the brink of collapse. Hopefully I'll have some pictures of that to come.

The next morning we watched a movie or two and relaxed before taking the bus down to the town for the Winter Festival that was going on. Origionally we had planned to go ice fishing for rainbow trout but since it was pretty expensive for all of us to to stand over a hole and wait for fish to come we just watched from the outside.

Hahah that last one makes me laugh. But that's what a lot of people were doing, they would just lay with their face in the hole and wait I suppose until they saw fish coming and then try to use their fishing hooks. The trout that they stock the lake with were pretty huge, they looked to be about a foot long and each person could catch three a piece. Also that middle picture was a trip because of all the frost hanging down from the trees that lined the river. It was beautiful and serene, even though there was a carnival-like atmosphere going on on the river .

I think I'll stop there for now. A couple more stories about finishing up the weekend on the next post and at work I will try to get an assortment of all my co-workers pictures too and throw them up here.

Before I go though I want to say how excited I am in anticipation for baby Jack to be welcomed to our family!!! My thoughts were and are with Devon and John the entire weekend! XO