aMAYzing News

As I'm sure many of you are experiencing, as the weather gets warmer, the schedules get busier. The weekends fill up and the sunshine seems to make time fly by. It's been in the mid 80's here all week! I spent a lot of my May mornings substitute teaching kindergarten at a friend's school and then heading to my usual 2-9 job. Teaching continues to be wonderful. There have been some cases of swine flu in my town of Gwangmyeong so everyone's a bit on edge and parents are concerned but it's still business as usual. When people aren't concerned about swine flu, worries of N. Korea's latest threats are always enough to keep you on your toes. These latest developments are definitely the worst since I've been in Korea but I'm registered with the US Embassy and their latest email said there's no immediate threat as things stand. Still it's enough to make one nervous...

In happier news, I've been taking a wonderful course in Korean language at a local center for migrant workers. The other students are Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino. My friend Sarah and I are really enjoying the class. It's 6 hours a week and the teacher is excellent but the language is just so difficult. I know a lot of survival Korean - the word for this, the word for that, how to say basic things. But actually learning the language with all the grammar and sentence structure and pronunciation is proving to be incredibly difficult - plus it's showing me how little vocabulary I actually know. Still it's nice to be in "school" again and it's refreshing to be challenged in a new way.

I recently took a trip to Lotte World, one of the three amusement parks Seoulites have available to them. It has the unique status of the being largest indoor amusement park in the world. It also has a small outdoor section. It was fun...the decor and atmosphere were excellent, although quite the Disney rip-off (see the castle below). It had a lot of things to do and lots of gimmicks as all parks do but it's big rides were really lacking. It wasn't as good as Six Flags. The rides were quite short which is always a bummer but on the positive side the lines were short. All in all it was fun, but I'm looking forward to checking out Everland, the biggest amusement park in Korea, sometime this summer. Enjoy pics!