Smog Blog

January is now over, which means we have been in Dongtan for over 3 months. It's amazing how comfortable we are here, and how much it already feels like home.

January was a less eventful month, but still had some pretty solid highlights, including a Warhol exhibit, a pretty rad shisha bar, the discovery of Costco, a school field trip, and a sick snowboarding extravaganza.

First up was our school's field trip, which sounds lame, but was actually a ridiculous amount of fun. We took the whole school to a massive indoor playground, and for once, got to go crazy with the kids. Ahh, the perks of being an elementary school teacher.







Next up is our friend Chelsea's b-day. About 15 of us headed into Gangnam for some Mexican food, a shisha bar, and an American classic rock bar. The shisha bar was what I imagine being in Thailand on acid would be like, in a positive way of course. Solid times were had indeed.

We also discovered Costco, which was an event in itself. We ended up leaving with an unmentionable amount of cheese and ground beef, which are rarities in this neck of the Asian woods. Koreans love Costco too, so you gotta be fierce in order to survive it. Bryan's mild temperament landed him in the situation below. Ah, he has so much still to learn.

We booked in January with a snowboarding extravaganza, Korean style. Bryan, our co-teacher Brent, and our 2 desk guys (Ruy-Oh and Frank) took off Friday night after work. It was definitely Korean style, which included night snowboarding from midnight til 4:30am. Afterwards, we went home, pounding some beers and crashed by 6:30. The next morning we woke up, had some Ramyen for breakfast and headed to a jimjilbong, which is a Korean bathhouse. The hot springs and jets were incredible after a whole night of snowboarding. Bathhouses are negatory on the clothes-atory, but I'm oddly comfortable being naked around others. When in Rome, baby.

That's it for now. Still loving it, still happy, still game to see what's coming next.

LotsofLove from SK,

-Selina