Back to the PCbang!

It's Saturday morning, it's raining outside and it smells of the rain at home! The weather is changing and the mornings and evenings are now quite chilly, but the sun has been shining most days. It's still flip flop and shorts weather :) I think this is the longest time i've been able to leave the house not even thinking about a whether or not I need a jumper, an umbrella etc since I left Kenya. It's been nearly 4 months! Brilliant! I could get used to this ;) (the winter is supposed to be unbelievably cold though... apparently if you go hiking, you aren't allowed through the gates if you don't have crampons!)

The last month has been a busy one. I've had to write tests for all my kids, then get all the marking done and write reports on them too. The reports was the hardest bit because I don't really know the kids well enough - i'd only taught one lesson to some of them at the time so I ended up just writing reports for the kids i'd had more teaching time with.

It's now the new term, lots of new students in. We had James' leaving do last night (hence why I am sat here now rather than doing anything too active! Ha ha!). Shame he is going but luckily he is only leaving the school after his year contract and not Korea. He has a one month old baby - beautiful girl! - so is taking some time out to spend with the family. We did have a new teacher supposed to be arriving next week but he wrote us an email two days ago to say he wasn't coming.... Arggghgh! I now have to cover all of James' lessons including his extra ones and start teaching new material from Monday onwards - makes for a fun weekend preparing! And some longer days too... My boss will be taking over some of my lessons and we'll just have to split the workload until we get someone new... Hey ho.

I've been asked to take a training course - when I say take it, I mean teach it. There will be about 200 local and foreign (I still hate that word!) elementary teachers taking a teachers training course over a 13week period. Eeeek! I'm a new teacher and some people on the course will have been teaching for a lot longer than me... They are all teachers in the area who will come in for 2hour long lessons. I think it is 3 times a week that I have to do it. Luckily a friend of mine does the same thing as a full time job at a university so he's going to give me hand with everything... I am being paid extra to do this so that's definitely a bonus!

hmmmm, think it'll be a long couple of weeks to Christmas! Or, it'll fly because it is so busy. Who knows?!

I've joined a cricket team called Pacific Storm. There is a league with 10 teams - each team is generally made up of people from the same country e.g. Australia, Korea, Pakistan, New Zealand, India, England.. Our team is however a good ol' mix :) We have Koreans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, Pakistanis and Indians. We also have the only girls in the league :) Me, and a Korean woman who is completely new to cricket! It has been great fun so far :) We beat the Pakistani team who were runner's up last year and have a cricket's 6s tournament coming up in 2 weeks to look forward to.

The pitch at SKK University:

Pacific Storm with some players from the Pakistani team taken after the match.

Went on a really good climbing trip last weekend. Absolutely fantastic!! It was my first real climb on rocks and I was really chuffed with my climbs :) I even managed a small overhang! On these weekends there are usually about 10 people who go, but for some reason, more and more people kept arriving! It was a few people's birthdays, and there was nearly 40 of us celebrating at the campsite on Saturday night! The place we went to is called Ganhyun and it's about 1.5hrs east of Seoul. Beautiful place. The rockface is just by the river and the river is so clear you can see straight to the bottom of it. We had a few swims inbetween climbs to cool off. There was also sand on the river shore so that was the tents went up :) Here are some piccies!

The view from the tent:

The first climb:

The view from the top of my second climb:

Third and last climb - coming up to the overhang:

Navigating the overhang...

Whoop!! I did it! near the top!

The train ride back:

Am still managing the hikes and rides before work in the morning. I have also found a POOL!! Extremely happy about the find, however... it is extremely busy. And its a half an hour away which isn't great.... But, I can still get there and back before 9am and it's just good to get in the water again.

Only a few more chances to go to the lake to wakeboard before it gets too cold. My good mate Victoria is coming up from Gunsan tonight and we are heading out there tomorrow. One of the blokes from climbing lives very close to the lake so he is going to join us too.

And that is me for now! Will put up some random pictures in a minute. Then, i'm off to cricket training :)

Bye for now!