We're back!

Yes, we are still alive! Sorry it has been so long since our last post...we've had a busy summer with school, English camps, and vacation, but we're back and we'll update you on our lives.

School vacation started on July 25th. No, we haven't been on vacation this whole time. We were lucky enough to teach 3 weeks of summer English camps. English summer camp was an experience to say the least. What it involves is students from all over the county come to our school and we teach them English. Our first two weeks of camp were the 4th and 5th graders, who we taught for 4 hours a day. It was actually pretty fun. We played a lot of games and did fun activities. Then our last week of camp we had the 6th graders... dun dun dun. This was quite possibly one of the worst weeks of our lives thus far in Korea. This week of camp started at 9:00 and went until 4:10, with no breaks. We even had to round up all 30 students and take them to a restaurant everyday for lunch. Basically, to sum up the week, I think our school recruited the 30 worst, most misbehaved students from our county. Just writing about it is bringing up too many bad memories so I need to stop...Let's move on to our vacation!

The first half of our vacation was spent on Jeju Island. This is Korea's "vacation" island. We spent 6 glorious days basking in the sun, or at least partial sun. The highlights of the trip included scuba diving, laying on the beach, and for Shawn, Asia's largest hedge maze.

The beach is pretty self explanatory so we'll give you the details on scuba and the hedge maze.

For those of you who didn't know, this was our SECOND scuba dive. Yeah, that's right, we're kind of a big deal. We got to the scuba place in the morning, greeted by the stoic German scuba instructor, wearing his speedos. We signed our life away and off we went. He told us we would have "down time" on the "beach" so we brought along books and music to entertain ourselves. We loaded all of our gear into the boat and sailed off to the island we would be diving off of. Well this "island" turned out to be a giant rock, sticking out of the ocean. The beach turned out to be rock. Funny how this sounded much more appealing when it was being explained to us. We were then informed, since we were not certified, we would have to dive one on one with Mr. Speedo. What this meant for us, is we each got a 2o minute dive, and 6 hours of sitting on the giant rock. Now, let me tell you a little something about high tide. This rock kept getting smaller and smaller, so it turned out that on this trip we not only got to scuba dive, but also rock climb. The rock was not only occupied by us, but also by thousands of nasty water bugs. They too were trying to escape the high tide so we ended up getting pretty close and personal.
As for the actual dive part, I mean, what can we say? It was a pretty coral, and there were some interesting fish, but when your ears feel like they are bleeding from the pressure, these things are harder to focus on. The one good thing about this trip was that no sea turtles were spotted. See previous posts if you don't understand.

Shawn's one wish on this trip was to go to Asia's largest hedge maze. It was actually pretty interesting, and by the end, half the people there were following us. Apparently we looked like we knew where we were going. Little did they know it was Shawn that was leading us. But after many wrong turns, we made it to the end and Shawn waited in line amongst the little kids so he could ring the bell at the end.

Most every night was spent enjoying a nice dinner next to the water. Steph and Kristen usually polished off a bottle of red wine or two each night, while Shawn sipped on his beloved beer, or for one moment in time, a Manhattan. I know, classy right? After our summer camp from hell, this was the perfect vacation to relax and unwind.

We have not had a chance to upload our pictures yet, so you will have to wait. ( Don't worry, we won't make you wait almost 2 months again!). And stay tuned to hear about the 2nd part of our trip!