Kitchen

I won't bore you all with a long post, but we got a new kitchen. On Memorial Day, I went to he basement to get the lawnmower and found a bunch of water. After some investigation, I found that the cast iron drain pipe from the kitchen had rusted through and was depositing all of our kitchen water into the wall. It took us a few days to come this this conclusion, but since we had to take the cabinets out anyway, we just decided to re-do the kitchen. We wanted to re-do the kitchen, but that was supposed to be a next summer project. So, over the next 12 weeks our kitchen went from this







to this




Our favorite additions are the new stove, dishwasher, new floors, and counter space. A guy from church made the cabinets, and I am very impressed. This house is nowhere close to level, square, or plumb so it was good to have a pro install the cabinets to overcome those inconsistencies.

Around campus

Here are a few more pictures from my time in South Korea. I'm back home and my computer is working again, so I'll probably be posting a few more posts from my time there. Classes here start Thursday, but until then here are some pictures of the campus I stayed on in Pohang.

On my second day there, my roommate and I hiked behind campus a little bit.

Up the path.

About halfway up.

The view from the top. This isn't the greatest picture of me, but I thought you might appreciate seeing the city of Pohang in the background. Those are apartment buildings, I think.

The view looking the other way. You can see the school's chapel in the distance there.

Seoul

Hi all -- I'm in Seoul now, and will be here for another 24 hours. My computer is still melted (permanently, maybe), so I can't post pictures. We are at the apartment of some Chattanooga friends.
Here's their blog:
http://someoneinseoul.blogspot.com
One of these days I'll figure out how to put proper links on the side of the page, but I don't think today's the day.

kids

Yesterday, I had my youngest kids drawing pictures. In this particular class, the English skills are extremely limited, and so are their attention spans. So, we sang "He's got the whole world in his hands," and then I had them draw pictures of what is in God's hands. Some drew flags of the countries, some drew soccer players, some drew bugs. One child drew a picture of a space shuttle. He showed it to me and said, "Teacher, rocket." I said, "that's great, where is the rocket going?" He said, "Future." "Wow, the future." Then the child wrote J-E-S-U-S on the wings of the rocket. I said, "Jesus is on the rocket to the future?" "Yes." "Really?" Then he looked at me as though I had asked the most obvious question possible. "Is fast." Right.

The other day I was playing a game with the kids called "Back to the Board," where one of them stands with their back to the board, I write a word on the board, and then the class tries to get the one kid to guess the word. They can't make sound effects, say the word in Korean, or say the word itself. It's actually a pretty good game for ESL students. We played for awhile, and then they wanted me to play. They were giving mostly science words, I guess because they had just come from that class. Good words, words like "irrigate," and "vertebrae." I was standing with my back to the board, and they started giving me clues. "Make more, make more of, teacher." "Increase?" No. "No, teacher. Mom, dad, tadpole." Hmm. "populate?" "No, teacher. Make babies, make babies. What is make babies?" Hmm.
"Starts with B."
B?
"Breed!"
phew.

Blog posts

I have so much more to post about. Stories about the kids, photos of my trip to a national park with waterfalls, a visit to one of the oldest temples in Korea in Gyeongju, an evening of fireworks on the beach, and I'm sure there will be more from my last week here. Unfortunately, my computer is in full on melting and smoking mode, so I'm not going to turn it on until I get back home to the states. I might be able to post from a friend's computer, but if you've been enjoying the pictures, just come back in a week.
Sarah