Teachers' Retreat

The weekend of April 6-8 was the annual SDALI teacher's retreat. The retreat was at Yangpyeong English Village, about an hour to an hour and a half (depending on traffic) from our institute. Even though it was only an hour from Seoul, the English Village was quite in the middle of nowhere. And strangely, it was built to look like a Virginian city with brick buildings, Virginian street and building names, and, for some odd reason, a small-scale Statue of Liberty and a British royal guard. It was quite a peaceful place, though, or would have been had there not been 200ish people descending upon it for three and a half days.

Our schedule for the three days was pretty packed full of meetings. Our institute, Seoul Main, was in charge of the first song service of the weekend on Friday night. We were also in charge of the Sabbath afternoon communion ceremony. Let me tell you, I have a newfound respect for deaconnesses!  I always thought their communion ceremony jobs (and that of deacons, also) looked rather complicated. Now I know it is. It was good to learn a little bit more about the ceremony, though. We got the emblems ready after Sabbath lunch and then helped to pass them out as well. Fortunately, there were no big mishaps and I didn't drop the trays or anything silly like that. Phew!

All in all, the weekend was great! The two speakers, Randy Skeete and Stephen Bohr, who had taken time out of their busy evangelism schedules to be there for the whole weekend, were quite amazing and I learned so much from both of them. I especially really enjoyed Pastor Bohr's sermons on the Sabbath and on the similarities between John the Baptist and Ellen White. I took tons of notes throughout every meeting and by the end of the weekend my right hand was wishing for another weekend to relax and rejuvenate before going back to the textbook office to grasp my collection of colourful correcting pens. I wish I could tell you more about all the meetings, how uplifting and inspiring and education they were. But alas, this post would be miles long and you would stop reading hours before you would be close to the end if I did. So I'll just say that if you'd like to learn more, feel free to message me or Jonathan on Facebook or e-mail us if you have our e-mail addresses, and we'd be happy to try to condense it all into a few paragraphs for you. Or you can just wait until the next time you see us and take a peek at the multitude of verses scribbled throughout the notebook I used to take notes.

Hope you enjoy the pictures of another new place for us in South Korea.
- Ali (with photo captions by Jonathan)

The "Airport" where registration (umm, I mean immigration) took place as we arrived

Yangpyeong English Village passports and boarding passes for when student groups come to use the village

Dillon, our Seoul Main coordinator for this term, trying to hand Ali a Yangpyeong passport

When we first got there, we hung out in a gym for a while while our rooms were being cleaned

I decided to try some new tricks with my camera while some of the other teachers played basketball

It was really dim in there, so my pictures are a bit blurry

I caught some pretty good moves though

These pictures are the first time I've tried sequence shots

Pouring the wine for Sabbath afternoon's communion service

Seoul Main teachers helping to organize the emblems

Breaking the bread into smaller pieces so there would be enough for everyone (don't worry, we washed our hands)

The finished communion table

This is the auditorium where we had all the meetings

Each song service was lead by the teachers from different schools

It was nice to all sing hymns together

On Sunday, it finally warmed up, and we had some free time to go outside

Ali getting acquainted with the British royal guard on duty

The campus was made to look like a city in Virginia, complete with... the Statue of Liberty??

Documenting the English village

One of the buildings

I think this was one of the largest buildings there

A cool wall

The South Korea part of the wall painting

Looking back down the main "Street"

Capturing the picture above

Up the hill, we found a huge chess game

A horse for a horse

Ruminating

Carnage

Ali hopping

Our great speakers, Stephen Bohr and Randy Skeete, during a question and answer time on Sunday afternoon

Goofy picture of our current Seoul Main crew (minus two) :) Four teachers are leaving/transferring at the end of the term on
Thursday and some new ones should join us by next week for the start of the new term. (photo courtesy of teacher Ellen)

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.

Joined choir!

Last week Ruthie, who works in the Academic Office, e-mailed Jonathan and asked him if he and I would like to join the church choir. Recently they've been announcing in church that they are looking for new choir and orchestra members. We thought the orchestra looked like fun, but since we don't have our instruments here, we aren't exactly able to join. And as for choir, all the songs are in Korean so we never really considered joining it. But Ruthie said that she didn't read Korean very well either and the choir members wrote out the sounds in English letters so she could sing along. She had joined the week before and now was actively recruiting other foreign members so she wouldn't be the only one. We decided to take the plunge and Jonathan picked up two copies of the choir songbook halfway through the week. On Friday night after vespers we went to the practice and were happy to find out that Ruthie had convinced another foreign teacher, Sandra, to join as well. So that made four of us foreigners. All the choir members were so kind and helpful, even though some of them knew very little English. The ones who did, sat beside us, helped us write the sounds in our music, and translated with the director was saying. Ruthie, it turned out, was being very, very modest. She actually reads Korean quite well and didn't even need to write the sounds in her music to feel confident enough to sing for church. The other three of us, though, were very glad for the assistance. But we're all planning to study up on Korean and try to be self-sufficient in the near future. Here's a little look at our music and Korean lyrics.

Choir songbook for this quarter

The special music song for March 31, Communion Sabbath

Korean and English details

Korean snowman hidden in our music (it's pronounced 'hung')

Hymn in Korean with a cheat sheet - The choir sang this for passing out the wine

And, for your viewing pleasure, you can feast your eyes and ears on these two videos taken in church last week. The first is the theme song we've been singing at the end of song service time during the month of March. I believe the theme song will change for April, so I wanted to get a video of it before we stopped singing it. It's called "We Will Keep Our Faith Alive" and is a song I'd never heard until we first sang it in March, but it's definitely one that I want to keep in my repertoire. It's so beautiful and uplifting! Another foreign teacher said, during a song service practice, that it sounded like a Christian anthem. I agree. Apparently it's very popular with Korean Adventists, and now it's popular with me, too!

The second video is of our special music song with the choir, "I Could Not Do Without Thy Grace."

*Both videos were taken by an All-Day Club student, Jennifer, since Jonathan and I were both in the choir. I neglected to tell her how to focus the camera in the few seconds I had between the end of our practice and the start of the church service, so it's my fault the videos aren't focused. But you can still hear the pretty songs! (And also, sorry the musicians are overpowering the singers in the choir special music. I'm sure it didn't sound like that from a little farther back in the church.) Thanks, Jennifer, for taking these videos for us!*

So that's the recent news from our part of the world. We're leaving tomorrow morning for a four-day teacher's retreat with all the teachers, directors, and administrators in the SDA Language Institute system. We'll be back sometime on Monday, so I'm sure we'll have something to post from our time at the Yangpyeong English Village when we return. Stay tuned!

Haircuts

Well, we've been wanting to get some hairs trimmed for a while now, so finally we did it! I (Jonathan) was really getting tired of my long hair, and Ali's had long hair for quite some time now, too.

So, here's some pictures of our new hairdos!

My new haircut - the beard will come off soon, too.

Ali's new cut - pretty crazy huh?

Ali really branched out and got a pretty different style - I'm surprised she went for it. She's not sure she likes it yet, but I think she'll get used to it soon.