Old News

I realize I've been a little slow updating, and there are a lot of things I never got around to blogging about, so here's an apology post with some old photos from last month. Terrible, I know. Basically, I went on a few trips that I never wrote about, but I have pictures for. The trips were a weekend outing to the beach with my co-teachers and a general teachers' picnic celebrating midterms. So here they are!

 
A long time ago, towards the beginning of September, Mr. Lim and Ms. Doh took me to the beach.  Here's a shot of the beach. I forgot the name, but it was just north of Pohang, I believe, and much nicer than the beach we went to in Pohang.

A rare picture of Mr. Lim. I always talk about him, but I never have photos of him!

Ms. Doh and me at an arboretum we went to after the beach.

The arboretum had lots of statues and carvings, including numerous totems, so of course, we had to take a picture.

The second trip was at the end of September, when the students had midterms. As the teachers put it, "Very bad day for students, very good day for teachers!" In other words, for three days, while students take tests, the teaching staff has basically nothing to do. So they celebrate by having a big picnic. The idea was to go hiking and then eat, but I ended up with a group of young, female teachers who decided to not go hiking after all. After 10 miutes, they just came back to the temple and had tea. But it was a lot of fun. In this picture, my friends: Lee Dong-yun, Ryu Young-mi, Hwang Kyoung-ha, the PE teacher (I don't know her name!), Baek Su-jin, and me!

Dong-yun wanted a photo of us walking across the temple courtyard, but as soon as she'd lift up the camera, everyone would instictively stop and pose. After she reprimanded us, we responded with "walking poses" for her.

Kyoung-ha and the PE teacher.

The group again.

A pretty, woodsy graveyard outside the temple.

Me posing on a bridge outside the temple. I thought the mountain was really beautiful, with lots of cool trees, streams, and hills.

The temple is called Eun-hae-sa. The temple is okay. It's really the surroundings that make the place.

Me sitting by a pretty stream.

 The stream again, without me.

A small bamboo forest near one of the monks' hermitages. At the time, the sight of bamboo made me do one of those Holy-crap-I-live-in-Asia double-takes. Now, I'm getting very used to it.