The Long Christmas Post

It has been a busy 3 days. Sunday was the Seoul Grace Church (the church that sponsors the English Ministry I go to) Choir Festival. Our EM did a little rendition of Elvis' "Blue Christmas" and no, I will not be posting a video of it. Haha. We had a fun time though. Some of the choirs were really good. In the end, we didn't win any of the trophies, but we did get some nice soap as a participation gift :p

Yulia, Me and Felix at the Choir Festival

Dressed for Success (2 out of 3 of us don't normally look like this)

JoAnn and Lara REEEALLY excited about our soap prize

Nastya REEEALLY confused about our soap prize

Monday, Christmas Eve, I woke up early and headed downtown to do some Christmas shopping. Then I met Nastya in Noksapyeong for lunch. She's Korean-Russian and is in the country for university. I found out she'd never had Mexican food so we remedied that right away.

I didn't buy anything here. Haha.

Nastya's first ever taco!

After lunch, I worked. It was kind of lame because we didn't really accomplish anything. I gave a few tests and watched The Charlie Brown Christmas Special in all of my classes. None of my students had ever seen it so I figured it'd be a good excuse to not actually do any work on Christmas Eve. I finished at 11 and headed to Nick and Ily's apartment for our EG Christmas party. It was a good time. We did a gift exchange and had a good mix of Americans, Canadians and Koreans.

I realized I haven't posted many pictures of the people I work with so I thought I'd put up a few. Now, you can finally see all the SUPER MATURE teachers at EG International School of Language.

Brad - The Picture of Maturity

Steph and Her Man

Colin - Working Hard As Usual

Me and Nick in our gay couple, Christmas sweaters

Will - Pictures from the office just can't show how cool he is.

Christmas was fun. I got up early (yes, Dad. 9am IS early for me) and headed down to Itaewon to meet friends from church. We went to Suji's Tokyo Cafe, which is an amazing, American-style breakfast joint. I had a huge omelet with potato, onion, bacon and cheese. That's not something you come by too often here in Seoul. Then we went back to Pastor Robert and Jenny's house. We hung out all day, watched a movie, had a white elephant exchange and played some games. It was a good time.

Felix, Tae and Yulia at brunch

Zoya, Lara, Pastor Robert, Jenny, JoAnn and Moses just before the gift exchange

All in all, my first Christmas away from home was good. I'm blessed to have so many great people to hang out with.