Again!

Well, I had a ton more pictures vanish due to a faulty memory card. I still will post some others that I have taken, but the best were lost forever.

Last week there was a dinner at an all you can eat buffet to welcome all the new teachers and say goodbye to all the old ones (whose contracts weren't renewed...strange that none of them showed for the dinner). There was plenty of soju and beer going around and every teacher came by to let me know that 3 of the new teachers are single and female!! They all did this with there broken English and while I was sitting with said girls. I got on the soju train and started taking gobs of pictures but like I said earlier, they're all gone. It was a great time but I had more planned for the evening so I headed out early.

My friends Dave, Julie and Steve all came to visit so we had a good time at a decent beer bar and chatted up a storm. The next day we all recovered and headed out to a temple that was recommended to us by one of Dave's students. It turned out to be another temple that nobody had heard of and we had a tough time getting there with our taxi driver jumping out at one point to ask other drivers if they knew of it. Once we finally got there it was hard to imagine that our driver didn't know of it since it was packed with people. It felt more like Disneyland than a Buddhist temple. The next day there was "yellow dust" from China and there were warnings everywhere to stay inside due to record setting levels. It looks like yellow fog and it is nasty.

This week was the grand opening of the schools tennis courts and I was invited to the ceremony in which it appeared women were not allowed. It started off normally with a ribbon cutting but then things became interesting. In the middle of the courts was a pig's head (minus the body) and a few bottles of rice wine sitting on a table. Then the principal went and offered the pig some wine and then stuffed money into its gaping mouth. Almost everyone there did this (some stuffing envelopes full of cash) and it was very interesting. I even got into the mood and tossed 10,000 won in. Not sure where the money goes, my friend suggested it might go towards a room salon (like a geisha room but hookers, not geisha) and he is probably correct. The pig below in a before and after.

The rest of the week was pretty boring and typical.