Christmas and Boxing Day

Our Christmas was enjoyable and relaxing! We especially loved being able to celebrate together for the first time ever! It sure beats only being able to chat on Skype... Christmas evening we had Fabrice over for a Christmas movie (Elf!) and then he took us to a department store, La Galleria, not too far from our apartment. We enjoyed the views from the eighth-floor balcony, browsed through a completely Korean bookstore (not my favourite type of bookstore...all the covers looked so appealing, but I couldn't understand one letter...), and ended up in the basement eating amazing American food!

Boxing Day (December 26 for those of you who aren't familiar with the Commonwealth holiday) was literally boxing day for us. We started to pack up our things and do a final cleaning of our apartment. In amongst the cleaning we also managed to find time to take Fabrice out to Toujours, a local patisserie and coffee house, for his birthday. Tuesday we continued packing, cleaning and moving furniture back into the rooms we found it in and today our apartment is empty of all our items (except the row of suitcases standing near the door) and ready for the next set of Seocheonan institute teachers to move in. We'll miss living in our spacious apartment and walking through the now-familiar streets of Cheonan, but we're excited for our 5-day sightseeing vacation to Busan, a city in southeastern Korea. Next term will be very different for us, but I think it will be good, too. Please pray for us as we move and begin a new chapter of our lives in South Korea.

Finished Christmas calendars (we managed to find them in the international aisle at E-Mart)

Eiffel Tower & Ferris wheel in front of La Galleria

Hedge bunnies

Smurf village (with oddly-sized animals)

La Galleria looking up from the ground floor

La Galleria's changing light walls displaying Christmas trees and snow

Christmas-themed blueberry cheesecake from Paris Baguette

Scrubbing the cupboards
(That purple bottle is the best all-purpose cleaner I've ever used! Sadly I can't read the name...)

The line between scrubbed and unscrubbed...

Jonathan vacuuming 

Tourjours bakery below, coffee shop above

Interesting coffee descriptions... (we decided to stick to hot chocolate and herbal tea)

Coffee beans on display

The infamous Kenyan coffee (refer to menu above)

An improvement on the traditional North American right-side-up Christmas tree 

Fellow Seocheonan teachers outside Tourjours - Fabrice, Ali & Jonathan

Neat circular walking bridge around a large intersection

View from the top of the walking bridge

Suitcases lined up ready to be shipped to Seoul while we head to Busan for the rest of our term break

Last picture of our apartment as we walked away to catch a taxi to the KTX station

Trimming our tree

We survived our first two-month term of teaching English and religion here in South Korea! This past week was filled with listening to and evaluating our students' term project presentations, giving and marking final exams, and the always-hectic junior classes, but we managed to make it to our last day of teaching on Thursday in tact. Now we have a full 10-day break between terms!

Second on our term-break to-do list (after Number 1: sleeping in) was decorating for Christmas. One of my family's traditions is to go to the mountains and cut down a real Christmas tree every December. I would have loved to keep this tradition up in our new family, but instead we had to settle with walking to E-Mart - an upscale and much classier Korean version of Walmart - and choosing a small tree from a surprisingly large selection of artificial Christmas trees (the selection also included an artificial palm tree). This afternoon we had time to decorate our living room and decided that you might enjoy watching us trim our first tree together. Here are some pictures and a video of our decorating fun!
- Ali

Our decorations before we had a tree

We ran out of places to hang our chocolate ornaments

We finally decided to light the candle that we found when we got here

It looks pretty good with Christmas lights

Trimming our tree! (click Watch on YouTube to see it bigger)

Our first family Christmas photos!

Oh MY...

.....

- Photos by Jonathan

Christmas Program

Friday evening was our Christmas Program at the Seocheonan Church. Jonathan, Fabrice and I invited all of our adult students to come and enjoy the program and we all had a few students come! Many of the church members participated in the program. Even Jonathan and I got involved with playing music. Once the pastor heard that Jonathan and I play string instruments he asked if we would play for the program if he rented a bass and a violin. We said yes and he managed to find us each an instrument. Another church member, Alice, plays the cello so we formed a string trio and played a couple Christmas carols. The church members and guests were so excited to hear the bass and the pastor told us many times that, "it was the first time we have heard the contrabass played." The pastor's wife, Mrs. Lee, also asked me to play violin with her two young sons and two other children. It was fun to be involved in a Christmas program again this year and I think everyone enjoyed the event! Below are some pictures of our program. (Sorry there isn't a picture of me playing violin with the kids. Check back later...hopefully we'll be able to find a church member who got a good picture of that. There were a lot of cameras out so I'm sure we'll be able to find one.)

Hazel and Gabe - the evening's emcees, joke-teller & translator

Alice was busy accompanying for almost every group during the program

The "Praise Ye the Lord" side enjoying the actions for "Hallelu, Hallelu" before the program started

The "Hallelu, Hallelu, Hallelu, Hallelujah" side

Our string trio playing some Christmas carols

This girl sang a song in Korean and had a beautiful voice

The guys playing a slightly-jazzy version of "Silent Night"

Alice's husband on electric-acoustic guitar (not sure of his name)

Gabe on bass guitar

Jonathan on piano

These four boys made up the children's choir.
The three on the right are sons of the Korean junior teachers and one of the institute secretaries.

Korean solo

Guitarist and a Korean duet

Lilly, the Korean junior teacher coordinator, on the flute

Caroline, another Korean junior teacher, and her husband, Larry singing a duet

Peter singing an English solo

An impromptu choir made up of teachers and a few willing students

We ended with the whole group singing "Silent Night" together

Happy December!

We walked to E-Mart today and found Christmas calendars in the International Foods aisle. Yay! Now, it's starting to feel a little more like Christmas, even though we don't have snow yet.

Happy December from us!