Chrissy Renae

After a week in Thailand, I’m very much in love with the place.

Here is Bangkok, Phuket, and Ko Phi Phi.

Much more to come, don’t even worry.

It turns out that not teaching is actually quite time consuming, so it’s been hard to find space to blog. I mean, watching all this Gossip Girl is harddd work, not to mention trying to plan a trip to Thailand! I think we’re all struggling with the winter blues around here. It’s just too cold to go outside much or really venture to do anything. We’ve occupied ourselves with a few shopping trips to Uijeongbu and Myeong Dong, some late nights at Miller Time, and over the weekend we had a big breakfast at John’s, which turned into an all day chat session on the heated floors. Life is just so easy and care free here, it’s weird to watch everything occur so smoothly. Great friends, great city, great job, great food, and a really great trip just two days away!!! Everything’s easy, yet I still feel like I’m growing and learning and expanding. I guess trials aren’t always required to help push along that process. *knock on wood*, that  is nottt a request for things to get harder. Things are just lovely as-is.

Andrea was in town last weekend so I got to go to Seoul to meet her and Lette before they took off for their Singapore/Malaysia/Thailand adventure. Andrea’s been one of my best friends since 2nd grade (and she saved my life by entertaining me during the Spokane months this fall) so it was nice to have a familiar face in town. There are some people you just can’t help but want to be friends with forever and ever.

I think winter camp can best be summarized with this paragraph, taken from an email I sent to Ian earlier today in regards to the paper mache project…

“kids here are major perfectionists, so if one layer got screwed up they would tear off the whole thing and restart. they also don’t like getting messy, so dipping their hands and newspaper into flour water was reallly hard for them to handle. so they were making all these crazy faces and then ringing their hands and flipping paste all over the place, and then ripping wet newspaper off their balloons and then dropping the balloons on each other on accident and then trying to ask me questions about what to do next, which of course i couldnt decipher, and things were just getting so loud and CRAAZZZY and all of a sudden i started laughing and just couldn’t stop. i mean here we all were in this freeezing classroom (the heaters randomly stop working sometimes) and we all had newspaper and paste all over us and kids were crying cuz their fingers were too cold or mad cuz their balloons didn’t look perfect or giggling and throwing paste at each other and we were all totally unable to communicate with each other and it was just the funniest thing i’ve ever seen. i love imperfect moments like that to remind me that life isn’t really so serious.”

Most of english camp was full of times just like this, where it was much easier to laugh and appreciate the simplicity of life than bother getting frustrated with surprises, miscommunications, or language barriers. The kids are cute, we all had a fun time, they feel more confident in their English capabilities, and that’s all that really matters.

We just completed Day 3 of winter camp, and I am still alive! We’re making paper mache globes, watched the movie UP, and have been busy with plenty of role plays. Initially I thought I had to make up the role play topics and was quite concerned with filling up the whole time. However, when I arrived Monday morning Sophia showed me a lovely pile of tubs in the english classroom. Each tub has its own theme, and is full of tons of props and gadgets coinciding to it. Sooo there are different boxes full of wonderful items to role play scenes from the hospital, post office, bank, restaurants, etc. The kids love being able to dress up as the different characters and carry around fake money and have fake jobs. I’m not really sure how much English we’re learning…. but we’ve definitely been having fun!

View Full Album

We also had a giant snowstorm on Monday, which took the record for most snowfall in one day (at least in the past 100 years or so). It was only about 8 inches… which by Utah/Washington standards is pretty average for a crazy storm, but for some reason everything seems worse here when it is cold and blizzards. Since it never snows that much at a time, it caught everybody off guard and caused all sorts of chaos. Despite some major bus delays, I was definitely grateful to hop on a bus instead of wrestling the storm in a car, and I realized how much I do nottt miss my old Utah commute to work on the frozen freeway. This was outside my classroom mid-morning… it kept dropping huggge snowflakes alll day long! At least it’s pretty I suppose.

I can’t believe 2009 is over and we’re on to a new year already. We went down to Seoul to celebrate and brought in the new year with about 5 million other people packed into one little neighborhood of the city. We were downtown to Jogna where they ring this big bell and have a bunch of performances– basically the Korean equivalent of Times Square in New York. It was suuuuper crowded, there were police everywhere (like the entire Korean police force) and it was about –30 degrees. At one point I truly thought we were going to get trampled and/or freeze to death… BUT, we survived and it was lots of fun and we lit a bunch of fireworks and had a midnight toast and screamed really loud and did all the other cliche new year’s things you’re supposed to do. I’ve never done the whole big-city thing for New Years, so it was fun to be outside with a bunch of other people and be part of a big ole celebration. Perfect chaotic intro to what is sure to be a very chaotic year…