Jess and Fran

Greetings! Fran and Jess are sitting in a PC room down the road from Incheon airport. Today we finished packing up our stuff & throwing away the rest before leaving our apartment in HopyeongDong for the last time. Tonight we will stay in a hostel & tomorrow our long-awaited trip begins. It will give us a chance to explore and relax which is exactly what we need after a year in Korea. Some of you have an idea of what we are doing & others might not know much. Here is our current temporary itinerary: *June 23rd - Fly out of Incheon 8am to Tokyo, Narita *June 25th - Fly out of Narita to Hong Kong / Macau *June 29th - Fly from Hong Kong to Bangkok We'll probably spend a day or two in Bangkok ... read more

Hello! Just wanted to share some photos from weekends/holidays in May. We had the 5th off from school as it was Children's Day & that gave us the opportunity to celebrate Cinco de Mayo in Seoul with friends. The weekend of the 15th was the Lotus Lantern Festival which begins the celebrations for Buddha's birthday & Jess attended some of those events. This past weekend we were fortunate to have 3 days off thanks to Buddha & we tried to use them wisely! Friday we went biking along the Han. Saturday, due to the rain we stayed indoors & used some gift certificates given to us by a student's grateful family (for his ability to suddenly communicate in English) to purchase some reading material. Fran is currently digging into The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn & cursing ... read more

Fran and Jess took a long walk around Hopyeong (our town) Saturday. Jess started shooting some photos of the area now that its spring & we thought we'd share them with you. For a long time here (pretty much all 10 months) we have both admired and wondered at the juxtaposition between the old, rundown & ramshackle buildings / homes stood next to the new, sparkling highrise towerblocks. Enjoy! xFran & Jess... read more

Better late than never... Hopyeong - Roxas After four months straight in South Korea Fran & I were very ready to embark on our holidays to the Philippines on December 23rd. We left immediately from school and grabbed our packed bags then hopped in a taxi to Pyeongnae where we waited for the airport bus. We were lucky it wasn't incredibly cold as we knew we were headed for warmer weather and didn't want to take up all the space in our bags with jackets and jumpers. I'm always anxious when going somewhere; Did I bring everything? Are we going to get there on time? Fran remains cool-headed & sometimes I wonder if he's laughing internally, as he reminds me that even if we've forgotten something, we have the essentials & we've made more than ... read more

*Photoblog!* November ~ Just thought we would post some photos of some of our favorite students (yes... we do have them!), mostly from the after school classes as those are the students we actually get to work with for more than 1 week. Also, just some of the funny/random happenings here. This will probably be updated and added to later. January ~ As you can see, this was started a few months ago but never posted. We've added some photos from January for you to see. There will probably be a few more in the next couple days as our winter camp comes to a close. It has been the easiest of all our teaching months here with only 25 lessons/wk. We teach three lessons in the morning (starting @ 9:50am with permission to come in ... read more