Let's All Hear It For Christmas Vacation!

In my attempts to stay awake and adjust to the time change, I'm going to blog my little heart out.

On the Monday before Christmas the orphanage teachers went to the orphanage to hand out Christmas gifts. In November, each orphan who's in the English program got to make a Christmas wish, then different foreigners around Mokpo sponsored them. I ended up sponsoring one of my own students. She asked for a watch with some type of animation and other girlie stuff (so easy!). It was a really awesome time. Like I really got to experience the true spirit of Christmas! Then on Christmas Eve, all the teachers returned to the orphanage and ALL of the orphans (there are about 70 in total, only maybe 30 of which are in the special English classes) put on a Christmas concert for us. The picture at the top is of two of the orphans in their concert outfits. The boy on the left in Tur-Jin and the girl (my student) is Song-I. There are more pics on my Picasa site. After the concert, I spent the night Abby and Jason's (a couple who both work at the orphanage). In the morning, we exchanged gifts, had a big Christmas breakfast and watched some Christmas movies. I left that evening to go to the airport (about 5 hours away) and left early on Boxing Day to go home. Being home for a month was really awesome. My first 2 weeks home were a whirlwind. I had family Christmas stuff and visiting to do. On New Year's Eve, I went to Rachel's (for the 3d year in a row) and we went to her friends' house for an Irish Ceilidh (a fiddle party-type thing). It was a nice night and we were in bed at about 12:15am which was perfectly fine with me since I was still adjusting to the time difference. The day after New Year's, I took the train to Toronto to spend some time with Sam. That was an AWESOME 5 days (not long enough though, I hadn't seen Sam since June 29th). The highlights of that trip were FINALLY going to the AGO and seeing The Sound of Music musical. I spent the rest of themy time at home relaxing and visiting people (but mostly relaxing...I think I put back on the all the weight I lost in Korea!). My trip back was pretty uneventful. I flew from Ottawa to Detroit to Tokyo then to Seoul. I was in Tokyo for a few hours and while I was there, I bought a kimono! So so exciting. When I got to Seoul, I hopped on a bus to Gwangju (the buses go there much more frequently than Mokpo). However, a TONNE of snow had fallen earlier that day and what should have taken 4 hours, actually took 11! The highways were bumper-to-bumper the whole way pretty much. Once I got to Gwangju, I still had to bus one more hour to Mokpo. Oh. My. God. It was a LOOOOONG trip. Oh well. I can't imagine anything like that happening again since getting a lot of snow at once is very rare here.