Christmas! :D

The most lights in one spot in Ulsan
This is all of them.

Merry Christmas everyone!  I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas day whether you celebrate or not.  Trevor and I had a different sort of Christmas considering Christianity (or even the secular tradition of Santa and all that) isn't quite as popular here as it is back home.  Those who do celebrate Christmas here don't do it to the extent that is traditional in the states.  Thankfully, the gospel is the same wherever you go so we had a whole church family to celebrate with us.  In fact, our ward Christmas party was on Christmas day, but more on that later.

As you may have seen on our last post, Trevor and I made our own Christmas tree because we didn't want to buy one since we will only be here one year and they are just too expensive here.  I also made a red and green chain to string along our patio window and drew a manger scene on our sliding glass door.  Even with all our efforts, it still seemed much less like Christmas than we are used to.  There aren't usually Christmas lights on trees and houses everywhere you look and snow on the sidewalks and perfect gift ideas in every store.  I'll admit I was kind of sad to not get the type of Christmas I'm used to.  Don't worry though, Trevor and I tried our best to make it as good as we could and we did have a really good Christmas day.

Christmas morning we woke up and opened presents.  We had presents from each other and then both of our families sent a package (mine was mostly from my sister Ashley who had me this year on our family rotation).  We really enjoyed getting some American goodies.  As usual, my sweetheart spoiled me more than he should have.  After presents, we spent some time skyping our families.

We had invited the 3 sister missionaries over for breakfast and offered them to use our computers to skype their families. We had pancakes and bacon and eggs and the sisters really seemed to enjoy being able to see their families for a while which made me happy.  After they left, I had to quickly get ready for the day because I had to go to the church early to help the Relief Society (women's organization at our church) get ready for our performance.

Performance? you ask? What performance?  Well for part of the Christmas party, our ward was having a sort of talent show and the Relief Society wanted to do a group dance which they asked me to choreograph.  Koreans love to be perfect at everything they do so even though the party didn't start till 5pm they all wanted to meet at 3 to practice the dance (keep in mind we have been practicing this once a week all of December).  Since I was the one who choreographed it, I got to teach it to everyone which can, in truth, be frustrating because of the language barrier.  With the help of one sister who speaks English really well and the helpful actions of Trevor queuing everybody on what came next, we got the dance down pat.  I will post a video of it below.  I also put together the music for the dance so hopefully you can hear that.  It was supposed to be a bit comedic so it's ok to laugh I will not be offended ;).

The rest of the talent show comprised of other little dances and musical numbers and such and everybody did such a good job.  Trevor and I did some swing dancing and everybody went completely nuts over it.  They even made us do some more at the end of the program.  I will also post a video of that for your enjoyment.

After the talent show, we watched a nice video of the true meaning of Christmas and although the dialogue was in Korean, I got the message.  It was a good reminder to celebrate the miraculous story of Christ's birth and I was very thankful for the sweet message it brought.  While the video was going, one of the men in the ward told Trevor that he was going to be Santa for the party (the real Santa had of course already come and brought presents to all good boys and girls who believe) so he sneaked away to change.  Turns out they only had a red coat, red pants which were too short and a hat so we had a very young, skinny, sexy Santa with only a small goatee.  The kids didn't seem to mind though since he called each one by name to give them a present and take a picture with them.  They even handed out some presents to the adults.  I did not get to sit on Santa's lap :( but I snuck a picture just in time before he had to get out of his Santa outfit before dinner.

Last but not least, we had a lovely dinner.  It wasn't a ham or turkey or anything like that but a bunch of Korean dishes.  Everything was very tasty (except maybe the acorn jelly...ya don't ask) and it was so refreshing since I hadn't eaten anything since 10am and it was now around 7:30 or so.  Everyone did so much to put on such a fun party and worked so hard.  It was really nice to take part in the festivities and watch the performances and eat good food.

We hope you all had a great Christmas and pray for your safety and well-being in the new year.  If you have any fun stories about your Christmas day, feel free to share in the comments!  We love you all!

Trevor's Turn

Hey everyone. Change of pace this week as I (Trevor) am going to write the blog. I guess its been longer than a week. We've been busy, and I keep forgetting to write. So here we go.

November has been a somewhat busy month, and its been a nice change. First week nothing special happened. We were going to go to an amusement park with the youth of our church but decided to chicken out since it was raining so hard. They still went and said it was okay, but not as fun as it could have been. We were glad we didn't go. The second week was about the same, lots of rain and getting colder. I got some good news that I got an interview with a graduate school in Winnipeg. It went well we think and are hoping to hear back from them soon. Also at the end of the third week in November the relief society president asked Kelsey to make a dance for the sisters in the ward to perform at the ward Christmas party.

That brings us to Thanksgiving week. I had graciously invited the missionaries to Thanksgiving dinner, because I know what it can be like in Korea. More times than not the missionaries don't get much of a Thanksgiving here. However, I did this on Sunday, without discussing it with Kelsey. So any plans that she may have had went out the door when I invited 4 extra bodies (2 of them being hungry Elders) to our Thanksgiving dinner. I also soon invited 2 coworkers but they had other plans. My wife being the amazing person that she is, took this all in stride. I soon realized why though. She was fine with all these extra guests because it gave us a good excuse to go shopping at Costco. Always one of Kelsey's favorites. There we purchased several things, including our turkey (about $50 for 13 pounds) some hot chocolate, and veggies. We also then got to go on several “shopping adventures” for pie tins and other baking goods for the desserts and rolls.

Thanksgiving dinner was great. We had the 2 elders, the 2 sisters, and Chloe, an investigator that the sisters brought. We ate, we laughed, we had a good time. Unfortunately it was cut a little short due to the fact the missionaries had English class, and I had been recruited to be a judge in a debate at school that evening. My wife being the trooper that she is was promptly abandoned with all the dirty dishes from the dinner. Luckily we have a dishwasher in our apartment now, so its not as bad as when we were first married.

Now that thanksgiving is over we are promptly moving on to Christmas and couldn't be more excited. Kelsey has had several ideas to decorate our apartment, which have resulted in several more shopping trips (noticing a pattern here?). I'm sure some of you have already seen our Santa door. We are currently finishing up our Christmas tree. We decided not to buy one since they are very expensive here, and we would then have to turn around and sell it when we leave. Anyone tried to sell a Christmas tree in July? I'm sure that's rough. Now do that in Asia. Yeah… we didn't like our odds. So we made our tree this year. That's about it as far as what we've been up to. Lots of shopping and getting things ready for Christmas. We have started going to a language exchange on Wednesday nights, in order to improve both of our Korean, and to make some more friends. These next couple weeks will be nice, since we are winding down here at school for the winter vacation, and we'll probably just end up having a nice small Christmas with just the two of us. We may have the missionaries over so they can Skype their families later that day. Don't know yet. So that's all I wanna say as far as catching us up. By the time I post this I'm sure Kelsey will have another blog post ready since its taking me so long to type this.

Now for all of you that are curious. I'll talk a little about my job. I teach at a private high school in Ulsan, South Korea. Its one of the most prestigious high schools, simply because there are always students from here that end up going to the top national university in Korea, Seoul National University. That being said, most of my students are very smart, and academically driven. For those of you that don't know the Korean school system basically revolves around the college entrance exams or suneong. You take this your senior year of high school, and if you do well enough on it and get into your school, great, if not, you may retake it NEXT YEAR. That's right. Think like SAT or ACT, but you only get to try it once a year. Combine that with vast amounts of social, family, and peer pressures, and you see why suicides always go up in Asian countries around the time of this test. If you don't get into one of the best universities you get kinda a low end of the stick, since many companies here operate on the good ol' boy system, where they will take people from their own Alma mater, rather than look at credentials all the time. This is changing but slowly. Anyway, so my students have lots of  incentive to learn, and grow. Sometimes I do get a few students that don't want to participate in class, simply because they don't like English, but really I can't complain at all about my job.

Lately me and my co teacher Joe, have been trying some new ideas. I had them research animals one semester and give presentations on animals of their choice, and we also had debates. This semester (which is just ending) we've been doing K-pop, or Korean Pop. More specifically how we can help spread it. So what we did was have the students pick a popular Korean pop song they liked, and make their own lyrics in English to it. They had to include certain literary elements, as well as make a music video. Its been a fun unique experience for them I think, since most other places don't do things like this. But I sure am glad its over. Imagine having to listen to over 60 different k-pop songs that don't have the best lyrics, and are done in almost karaoke fashion. Haha yeahhh…. But thanks to the Internet you don't have to imagine! I'll provide a link to our facebook site where a lot of these music videos are. So head over there and listen to a few maybe! It's kinda fun! Anyway, thats about it, just a normal high school teacher. I guess I may write more but since it took me so long to get this one out, maybe Kelsey will ban me from the blog all together! Thanks for all the support and prayers. We've appreciated it. Love you all! Cya!

Music Videos: www.facebook.com/hcumusicvideos

*turn down your sound, the videos are a bit louder than normal

Also, check out this video of one of the students at a little talent show at school.