Above-two of my students in the snow
Below-the korean food I eat most frequently, Dongas. Basically a pork cutlet.
Below-Mexican food. Yum!
Below-Me at Buddha's Belly Thai Restaurant.

GOOD FOOD!! I have finally found some good food in this country. Their is an international district in Seoul called Itaewon. It is near the U.S. Army Base in Seoul, so it attracts all the Americans from the base, along with many of the other foreigners located around the Seoul area. It seems like foreigners outnumber the Koreans in this area. And the best thing about this place is that there are many great restaurants of a wide variety. Everybody had told me about Itaewon, but I hadn't ever checked it out until December. I will probably be going there a couple of times a month now, I suspect. These last two weekends, Anlee and I have gone and eaten at a Thai restaurant there called Buddha's Belly. And one of those weekends, we met some friends and went to a Mexican place there also. The Mexican place deserves a few sentences. The guy running the place was actually Mexican, which was a surprise. You just don't see a lot of cultural mixing between hispanics and asians. And then, our server was African-American. All the other workers, including the cooks, were Korean. So, we were getting Mexican food... in Korea...cooked by a Korean... served by an African-American. And it was actually pretty good. I will go back, for sure. I love Mexican food. And it's really hard to find here. The other cool thing about Itaewon is that there is an English book store there called What the Book? I've been there several times now. It's pretty nice. They have a decent selection, and you can order pretty much any book and have it shipped for free. I bought C.S. Lewis' The Weight of Glory a couple of weeks ago.

It is still freakin' cold here. I don't think it's been above freezing all this week. The low tomorrow is 5 degrees F. As you may have seen on the news, we got a foot of snow during one night last week. And since it won't really be above freezing for the next two months, it's here to stay. The Korean solution is to get backhoe's to scoop up all the snow and put it in dump trucks to be hauled away. Pretty funny.

This past weekend, my friend Tricia came up from the south part of South Korea to check out Seoul. Anlee and I had a great time hanging out with and checking out Seoul together. We went to the National Museum of Korea. I think the girls were bored, but I enjoyed learning about the history of Korea. After church on Sunday, we went out to a Nepalese restaurant near my place that serves great curry, and ended having a group of around 10 come with us. We made friends with some new great people and ended up all going shopping together after that. It was a really fun and refreshing day.

And I'll leave you with this story: On Monday this week, I was waiting at school for Cam to go out to lunch. A few of my students were having a snowball fight so I joined them. You know, just have some fun with my students, get to know them outside of the classroom, and show them that I can have fun too. Well, it was going well. The snow had been there a while, so it had kinda chunked up into blocks that were easy to grab and throw. They may have been kinda icy, but that just made them easier to snow. I had been chasing this one kid, Tom, around. I hit him once or twice. All the others were just watching us. During a lull in the action, another student, John, is standing about 25 yards away, his back towards me. I decide to throw one at him. Just before it makes contact, I realize that the throw was a little too high. It hits him in the face. He goes down. I run over to him. There's blood. I lean down, say I'm sorry and try to see where the blood is coming from. It's coming from his nose. That's good, I think. Just a bloody nose. The blood keeps coming, so I run inside to get some tissue to stop it up. I give him the tissue. It doesn't seem to be stopping, so I tell him to let me see his face. Darn, it's not a bloody nose. There's a huge gash just underneath his nose. Pretty deep and pretty wide. Darn! I give him another bunch of tissue and tell him to push it on it hard, hopefully the bleeding will stop. At this point, Cam and one of the Korean teachers come out. Long story short (or shorter), two teachers end up taking John to the hospital and he gets 8 stitches! I felt (and still feel) horrible. He's a really good student of mine. I felt so stupid. Injuring my own students. I will not be having snow(or ice) ball fights with students anymore.