All the colors of the wind...

"Sunset is still my favorite color, and rainbow is my second."

-Mattie Stepanek

    Last weekend, we took a weekend trip to the Southern coast of Korea to visit the island of Geoje.  Our weekend started with an overnight bus arriving at a Korean spa at 3:00AM to sleep on the floor of a communal room next to a human fog horn.  Needless to say our group was not bright eyed and bushy tailed the next morning. But we pushed on and went on a morning walking tour of the city of Tongyeong.  We started out stopping by some replicas of turtle ships.  These are thought to be the first armored ships and Korea is very proud of these ships.

After checking out the ships we checked out the mural village.

I wish you could zoom in on my face because I have the most beautiful expression.

At the top of the hill was an adorable Anne of Green Gables cafe.

The Korean Tourism Board markets Tongyeong as the Napoli of Korea, I think that is a bit of a stretch but it was a nice town.

After  our nice morning stroll we were onto the next stop of our weekend, the luge!!!!

This involved taking a ski lift up a mountain and driving a little go-kart down.

It was basically like playing a live action version of Mario Kart! It was so much fun and I wish I could have gone down another 20 times.

We then drove to Geoje Island and hiked to a beautiful lookout point!

There is something so magical about islands jutting out of the sea.

Its Korea, so of course there were giant picture frames on top of the mountain.

The whole point of the weekend was to attend the Holi Hai festival.  Holi is a festival from India celebrating spring.  

Holi involves packets of colored powder that you throw at each other and it is amazing fun.

After 2 hours of throwing powerdered paint this is what you look like.

This pictures are out of order but Saturday night involved gold face paint and fireworks on the beach, along with me being an old lady and going to bed at 10:00.

The festival was so much fun and such a great start to warmer weather and the start of spring!

Olympics, round two....

"Disability is the inability to see ability."

-Vikas Khanna

A lot has happened in the last month.  Two weeks after I went to the Olympics, our kindergarten had their graduation. My kids did amazing and I really hope to have the video of it soon.  I am so proud of them and even started to cry on stage during my speech to the parents.   But there is no time to dwell on last year, our new school year has started with a bang.  I have a new class of 10 students.  This year I have 6 boys and 4 girls.  Along with the new class we have 4 new foreign teachers and 4 new Korean teachers.  The new group of foreign teachers is great! I did not get along very well with some of my previous co-workers, its so nice to enjoy your co-workers.  

Because our new co-workers missed out on the Olympics, we decided on a whim to go to the Paralympics one Saturday.  It was so much fun to go back and visit the sponsor's Pavilions again.  We got to try even more virtual reality.  This one was VR Luge.  

There was also an  area set up to simulate the different sports and try out Samsung's fitness tracker.  Lindsey and I raced each other in cross country skiing.  This is the first and only time I will ever beat Lindsey at anything athletic. 

We attended a paralympic hockey game that was Canada vs. Italy.  I really knew nothing about the Paralympics going in to this game and I had to do a lot of googling once I got home.  The process of how the paralympians are classified is very complicated and very interesting.  If you would like to know how they split up the different classifications it is laid our here.   I was also curious how many of the Paralympic Athletes were Veterans.  Out of the 74 person American team, 18 of the athletes are veterans.  

 When we attended the events for the regular Olympics, the crowd was not very excited and there was not a whole lot of cheering.  The Paralympics were the complete opposite.  There was an entire section of the rink that was filled with people decked out for Canada and cheering the whole time.

Lindsey and I decided to really embrace this best friend thing and buy matching Olympic sweatshirts.

Canada won the game 10-0 but in a twist the US took the gold medal home beating Canada the following week 1-2.  

The craziest thing about Paralympic hockey is that these men are balancing and moving on a basically a single ice skate under their butts.  They all have incredible core strength!

After the game was finished we went back to the Samsung pavilion to continue trying out their awesome technology.  This was a room full of curved TVs, tablets, and phones that your instagram photos were projected on!  It was so cool to see a never ending tower of my memories!

 Our crew for the day was Mitch, a new teacher at my school, Lindsey, Me, Crystal-Day (Lindsey met her while living in Turkey and now she lives about 20 minutes from us in Korea!) and Megan, another new co-worker.

If we had a band this would be our album cover.

 I am so glad that I got to go back and just live in the Olympic magic for one more day!

I've discovered a setting on my phone that makes videos out of my photos and videos from the day and it makes everything I do seem epic!