Sean and I were lucky this semester because not only do we teach the exact same group of students (he teaches them oral English and I teach them culture) but they had a week off during week 13 of the semester. We decided to put this time to good use and by combining weekends before and after were able to take a 10-day vacation to South Korea. Sean has some friends there who are also teaching English so we planned to visit them as well as travel on our own.
We booked the airline tickets in advance, but as the departure date arrived I was more and more nervous due to the rising tensions between North and South Korea. The week that the North fired on one of South Korea's islands was the week that we were supposed to leave. I talked to a lot of people and checked for travel warnings from the State Department, but they weren't issuing any advisories. Many people told me that this was just business as usual and that the two countries were always provoking each other.
The trip was a whirlwind because we left early in the morning right after celebrating Thanksgiving (at my place). Thanksgiving was really fun, though really busy, and more people than I thought would attend actually came. This led to lots of food, some drinking games and a big sleepover when everything was over. I came away from Thanksgiving with about two hours of sleep and a really dirty house/kitchen. In the morning, I frantically threw some stuff in a bag, said goodbye to everybody and met Sean to walk to the gate to get a taxi.
Because of traffic and the fact that I really wanted a cup of coffee, we ended up missing our train by like a minute. Oops. Fortunately, they let us get on another one a few minutes later and though we had to stand, we were very relieved that we would still make it to the airport on time.
The flight went well and we were even served a meal. During the flight we flipped through the Lonely Planet Korea guidebook (thanks Daniel!) to try and figure out where we wanted to go. Fortunately, David had been to Korea last summer and had saved his metro card and cell phone so we were totally set when we landed. Even though we had detailed directions on how to arrive at Derek's (Sean's friend) workplace, it was still quite a challenge. In situations like these, I always remember what my friend Emily said, "just pretend you are on the Amazing Race!"
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