dongdaemun market is one of korea's famous and larget markets. there's streets lined with vendors, four gigantic shopping malls and underground passageways to more vendors and stores. the shoe-district was closing so we made our way to one of the 24-hour shopping malls and got harrassed by a ton of vendors who wanted to haggle. it was sensory overload. but we ended the night at pizza hut, which somehow made us all feel better.

birthday celebrations at yeondeungpo como's place. she made us myuk-guk (seaweed soup), a traditional birthday meal. minne cousin's son, taegyu, was entertaining us all day....although he was a little skeptical of zachary's beard. 

to feel at home and to spend time with family...it all made for an excellent birthday in korea.

we live close to a fake river that leads to korea's han river. we spend a lot of time on this river.

the workout stations are setup along the fake river. the area is usually packed with halmonis (grandmothers), doing morning stretches and sharing daily gossip. the upside-down apparatus is by far, our favorite.

our apartment is on a quiet street, up a small hill off the main road in one of the two buildings that all the foreign teachers live in. our landlord is a crazy "halmoni" who has the most deafening, high-pitch scream we have ever heard.  our stairs are lined with pots of artificial flowers that i seem to knock over at least once a week. and the mailboxes are shoved with junk mail on a daily basis. i love yeonhui-dong, the neighborhood we live in. every day feels more and more like home.

the back porch/laundry room:

our porch is butted up against a stone & cement wall. there's no moment in the day where we see a titch of sunlight in our apartment because of that wall. but i can't complain. we have a washer. and that's more than i've ever had in any previous apartment. the porch floor was covered with 2-inches of nastiness. in fact, we didn't even know the tiles were red. i'm very proud of that picture.

the apartment:

we have a kitchen, a bedroom, even an office area/media center in the corner! our room is accented all over with various shades of seafoam green.  the principal of our school even bought us matching seafoam green bedding with pillows that say "blue cence". it's weird to wake up in the morning without sunlight, but a whole lot of seafoam green.

our wallpaper:

we covered the dirty walls with old national geographics from a used bookstore. 

the bathroom:

i've somehow come to love this bathroom. but it didn't start off as a love story. we had to spend the first 2 days bleaching, scrubbing and bleaching some more. the way korean bathrooms work is that you basically stand in front of the sink to take a shower. afterwards, you hose down the entire bathroom and then squeegee it. 

a very long night out in kangnam with a few of the teachers. jimmy (fellow on the right) came a day after us and has had an interesting time, to say the least. the morning of his first day of classes, he woke up and realized he was sleeping in a no-rae-bang (karaoke bar), and couldn't get out. he spent 30 minutes in pitch-black darkness, "feeling" his way to the exit. he also has been living with a colony of ants in his apartment and has yet to clean up the mess. i sometimes wonder what an all-american guy like jimmy really thinks of korea. but i wonder even more what korea really thinks of jimmy.

the subways.

"kimbop heaven" is korea's fast food joint. and it is delicious. this is where i come almost everyday for kimbop or a bubbling-hot bowl of tubu-doen-jang-ji-gae (soybean stew with tofu). they also have a dish for foreigners that has become very popular with the other teachers, called cheesy dunkas....a porkchop with a "mysterious" cheese injected into the middle of it. we're keeping our distance from the dunkas.

a truck full of amazing (and highly flammable) knickknacks.  we weren't sure if any of the items were for sale. the owner of the truck was reclined on a chair, sleeping.