For Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival (sometimes likened to Thanksgiving in the West), we got a three-day weekend! Wooo! Amazing! I went down to Daejeon to visit Maggie! It was a great trip (even though I was pretty sick for half of it!). I got in in the early afternoon, and we just kinda bummed around, found a market, had a dinner of cold noodles (I love Korea... haha), and watched some Grey's Anatomy. Haha. Of course. The next day, though, we went to Gong Ju, a nearby city with a beautiful fortress. While the buildings have been built and rebuilt, the site itself has been in existence for two thousand (2000!) years. Ummm, that's really old.



Gong Ju is this quaint little town that was nearly completely shut down for the holiday. I'm sure it's normally bustling with people, but on this day, there was no one. Which was kinda nice.



It was a lovely weekend. It was nice to see Daejeon... which seems to be a toned-down version of Seoul, a nice change for awhile. And it's always nice to be in the company of an old friend. Especially when I've been so sick!



School has been alright. It's hard when I haven't been feeling well, but the kids are adorable. I've been promising some pictures, so here are a few to tide you over until I get a bunch more. This is from my youngest class. They're pretty adorable. These are my girls...



... and these are some of my boys getting ready for a game. They're pretty great. Most of the time.



In other news, we went on a tour of the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. It was interesting to see. We got to see the first train station to connect to Pyeongyang, the capital of North Korea.



In addition to the station, we saw a tunnel dug by the North after treaties and cease-fires... It was one of four tunnels discovered tunnels coming from the North in attempt to invade the South. They assume that there are others. I, sadly, don't have pictures of this as cameras weren't allowed down there. It was really cool, though. 70m down, 1.65km long (I believe). We got to see the third tunnel as depicted on this map. It was pretty sweet. (And it was definitely built Korean-size. As in everyone had to duck and wear hardhats.)



Another stop was the observatory, so, basically, I got to see North Korea!



It was hard to get a decent photo because we couldn't cross the yellow photo line which was strategically placed (about 15ft back from the edge) to prevent good photos. That's the best one I've seen, and I stole it from someone else! But yeah, it was pretty sweet. North Korea, man.

And most importantly, I got to do all of this with a great group of people.



We're a good lookin' bunch, if I do say so myself.