A Synopsis: July-September

This is a little rough and unorganized. I sort of created the narrative around the pictures we have, which is not always indicative of the most important things that have happened in the last few months, but I gave it my best shot.

1. Columbia.

It was so good to go home and see this pretty girl get married. I wish I had more pictures from the wedding. It was gorgeous.

After six months of cheap, crappy Korean beer, Stephen couldn't wait to wrap his mouth around a bottle of a cheap, crappy American Stag.

2. Kansas City.

We love Rob's work uniform. And Rob.

3. Chicago.

A two hour layover turned into a twelve hour layover. I'm bitter towards American Airlines, but we still had an amazing time basking in the sun, feeling the perfect Chicago summer breeze, listening to some jazz band play at Millennium Park...

The big bean mirror thing is sweet.

Do I already look frazzled? I still have a good 24 hours of travel ahead of me including more unexpected delays. American Airlines. Ugh.

4. Incheon (FINALLY).

It was really good to get back to Korea. Not just because American Airlines sucked, and because we were stuck in Beijing for a night, and because they almost lost our luggage. But it just felt like home, in a really great, surprising way. A second home, I guess.

Anyway, we had gotten to be pretty close with Jesse and Emily, so we tried to spend as much time with them as we could once we got back from vacation. Here's Emily on one of our scenic little bike rides:

Unfortunately this is the only picture I have from the night we got a "love motel" (you can guess why they call them that) in Hongdae (trendy college-y part of Seoul) I liked all the plants outside our love motel!

We had a little triple date at Garten Bier with our Academic Coordinator and her boyfriend. This is a bar where every table has a little switch, and when you turn it on the little spot for your beer turns into a little refrigerator. Soo your beer stays ice cold down to the last drop. Pretty neat, but...efficient use of energy? Probably not.

The girls: Emily, me, Hana.

And the boys: J.H, Stephen, Jesse

Do you see the glass beer mugs? You can get a single, double, or a triple. I got the triple on Stephen's birthday and it felt like it was bigger than I was. It took forever to drink, but gee whiz, it stayed freezing cold the whole darn time.

And here's what our lives pretty much revolve around:

Show and tell. This was so freaking cute:

These little girls are, like, BFFs.

Stephen and some of his kiddos (I love this picture):

We just enjoyed three days off to celebrate Chuseok, which is kind of like Korean Thanksgiving. It's a very big holiday, and there are a lot of great traditions to go with it. Leading up to the holiday we did some projects at school to celebrate.

We made songpyeon, a traditional kind of rice cake dumpling thing (those dark spots are red beans):

And the kids wore their Hanbok, traditional Korean clothes.

My little Helen looked like a Korean princess (But notice her tacky, bright orange indoor shoes. hehe).

We celebrated our one-year anniversary at a fancy restaurant. We clean up nice, right?

And that brings us up to now. We're so glad Derek and Ashley are here!! They live in the same apartment complex as us, and our fancy robot screen lets us call them directly, so none of us really need to get phones.

Life is really, really good. More to come on adventures with the cousins :)