Kimbap/Cookie Day

Today Ali and I had company for the first time! One of the other teachers, Ellen, had mentioned to me a while ago that some teachers should get together sometime and make food, and I immediately thought of making kimbap (what we in America call sushi). I suggested it to her, and she said it sounded great. A week or so later, she randomly asked me if she could host some of the All-Day Club students at my apartment so that one of the students could make cookies for them. I remembered about kimbap again, and said that we should make it a cookie/kimbap fest! So we set a date, and finally today it came! A few teachers and a few more students all showed up this afternoon, and we had a great time making kimbap, cookies, and tteokbokki (pronounced toke boke ee), which is rice cakes in hot sauce.

All the shoes (minus our own, which were put away to make more room)

Richard and Daisy cutting vegetables

Michelle (in the blue jacket) starts making the cookies

Mixing them up

All ready to put on the pan!

Cookie crew and spectators

Jin cutting the eggs for the kimbap

Michelle very meticulously placed each cookie on the tin foil

Jennifer frying up some vegemeat

Ellen (the teacher who helped organize this) making tteokbokki

Making kimbap

Ellen still working on the tteokbokki

More kimbap!

Ali helps cut it

All ready to eat! ...except for the tteokboki, which I forgot to wait for when I took the picture.

Of course, Koreans are most comfortable on the floor, and Ali fits right in (but not me)

After lunch, a couple of the students were tired, so they sacked out in the "office"

The cleanup crew

Jennifer posing after a short nap

For pictures of our first two-person Kimbap Day in February, click here.

Final weekends of Term 1 All-Day Club

We're finally finishing up with the All-Day Club pictures from last term. The next-to-last Sabbath of the term, February 18, was really busy here at the Seoul Main Institute. We started with a teacher's Prayer Breakfast. We have Prayer Breakfast once a month at 8:30 on Sabbath morning. We usually sing some songs, someone presents a short talk, we prayer together in small groups, and then we eat breakfast together. Ellen usually makes pancakes and they're always great!

Jason, Ellen, Janice, Kevin, Dillon and Jonathan at Prayer Breakfast 

Cereal, pancakes and strawberries 

Ellen doesn't really want to hurt Dillon with a fork. Really, she doesn't.

After Prayer Breakfast we hurried upstairs to the church for Sabbath School. All-Day Club put on Sabbath School that weekend and the special music was all the All-Day Club members and teachers singing together. After that, one member, Stella, gave her testimony about getting baptized because of learning about Seventh-day Adventism through All-Day Club.

Stella giving her testimony and Jooch translating

Then we all dispersed to our separate Sabbath morning duties. Jonathan and I went to our Morning Clubs and then met back up again for church. In the afternoon we helped out with the Bible Video Club from 3-5 p.m. It was really fun because Pastor Caleb, the assistant director, had made up three games for us to complete. He put us into four groups of All-Day Club members with one foreign teacher in each group. For our first task we had to cut words out of newspapers and paste them onto blank sheets of paper to make a fairly extensive Bible verse. Next we played a Taboo-esque game where each team member had to describe a word that Pastor Caleb showed on the screen to the rest of their team and the team had to try to guess the correct words. Some where names of students or teachers and others were from the Bible. It was really close and by the time we were done that game the teams had very close scores. The final game was one the foreign teachers couldn't participate in. It was Korean riddles. In the end my team got really close to winning because of Gisele's great guessing, but Jonathan Lee's team finally beat us in the end. But we all had a really good time together. Right after that we rushed back to our apartment to change and then met back in front of the institute to go out to eat for a farewell to the leaving teachers. We went to a restaurant called Seven Springs that was several stops away on the subway. Yum, it was good, although trying to find vegetarian food proved to be a bit of a problem. We vegetarians just filled up on ice cream and floats, though, and all was fine. :)

Us in front of Seven Springs Restaurant

Then the next Friday afternoon, February 24, we went to Ashley's, a buffet restaurant, again with the All-Day Club members. It was a nice time together, especially since it would be one of the last times to see and spend time with some of the students.

Eating out at Ashley's restaurant

The guys - Jerry, Jonathan L., Koon & Jonathan G.

The girls - Ali, Angela & Elly (and a guy)

A game of "Rock, Scissors, Paper" (the Korean name for it) - Koreans use this game to decide all kinds of things

Waffle dessert

Ice cream dessert

Rudith, one of Jonathan's Level 2 students and a Half-Day Club member

Jennifer, another of Jonathan's Level 2 students and a Half-Day Club member

Vivaldi Park Ski Trip

Forgive us while we back up a bit to bring you a wintry post that we missed from back in January. On Sunday, January 29, we went to Vivaldi Park with the All-Day Club. We were up early and on the bus at 8:30 and left the campus about 15 or 20 minutes later. After a refreshing breakfast of kimbap we snoozed for most of the hour-and-a-half drive. (We would have looked out the windows but the bus was so dirty you couldn't see much of anything out the windows and soon after we started out the windows were all fogged over anyway.) Things were a bit muddled when we got to the ski resort and we stood around for awhile waiting for some people to bring the lift tickets. During that time we got numerous group pictures, but sadly the teacher who took most of the pictures on his iPhone accidentally had them deleted so I guess we'll never get to see those ones. Once we had our lift tickets we quickly rented ski gear and bought some ski gloves, then got our rentals. But by then pretty much everyone else from our group had already left and so we set out alone. We only ran into people from our group a couple times during the day, which was too bad. But we really enjoyed the bright sunshine and blue skies. The snow, although a bit icy, wasn't bad either. All in all, a great day on the slopes!

Waiting in the rentals area

View from the top of the mountain

Jonathan ready for a run

Going down

Posing for a picture

Now there's snow, now there's none...

After readjusting his boots

Waiting for the ski lift

We ran into Rudith and Jennifer in the lift line

And they took a picture of us

At the top again

It was a sunny day and we forgot to bring sunglasses...

An eight-seater chair - hugest we've ever seen

The gloves we bought were definitely worth it - our hands would have froze with just our thin cotton gloves

Skiers get ready on the left, snowboarders on the right

View from the other side of the peak

This person had an interesting backpack, which was also wearing a backpack...

Leftover kimbap for an afternoon snack on the trip back to Seoul