In Sickness and in Health...

Sometime around Tuesday, we began our THIRD year of marriage. Can you belive it? It doesn't seem that long ago that Ben convinced me that he needed to learn how to use his new camera. I fell for it--it was a disposable. Needless to say, two years after our beautiful wedding, we are still going strong.

Well, sort of. We've actually been quite sick this week, which put a bit of a damper on our anniversary. On Sunday, before we felt too bad to do anything but sleep and work, Ben took me out for dinner to celebrate. We were both in for a delicious treat!

We went to a fancy Italian restaurant, where we almost forgot that we were in Korea. The meal was delicious...

all five courses of it!


The only thing that seemed Korean was the portions of some of the dishes. Koreans usually have a lot of food, but it is mostly small side dishes. Perhaps it was the gourmet look they were going for with this spaghetti.

But, they made up for it with the STEAK...yum!

So, we had a 'real' Italian meal, with 'real' coffee and something like Tirimisu at the end.

It was great...and then we went home and got some much needed sleep.
After having some peanut M&Ms sent from home.


The good news: we FINALLY went to the doctor on Saturday, after a week of teaching with a sore throat and, for Ben, with no voice. If we would have known that the price of going to the doctor's office was going to cost us about $3 each, we would have gone a lot sooner. And, we each got medicine (15 pills a day for 5 days) that cost $5 each. Yes, that is right, we paid about $16 for walking right in to a doctor's office to see an English-speaking doctor, who gave us a prescription all within a half hour. I am now a believer in good National Healthcare Systems--wow!

The Holidays

Here is a quick glance at the last month...

We had a fun and exciting Christmas party with our students. They played games, decorated cupcakes (which were actually cups that had cake in them...), and watched a Christmas Disney cartoon.


Here are some of our great students!


One of Ben's students usually comes to class wearing this:


Ben reviewing Christmas words. The hat added to Ben's likeness to Santa. The kids think that because he has a beard, he is, or should at least be called, Santa.



We had a staff Christmas Party just before our New Year's Eve break.
With gifts...


Games...
The person to our right had to draw us for a 'contest'. Though Ben and I were at opposite ends of the table, we each had the honor of being drawn by the owner of our school and his wife. The owner apparently thinks I look like one famous character from Charlie Brown...

Peppermint Patty, anyone???

And the wife, along with every other Japanese teacher at our school, thinks that Ben looks like the Japanese baseball player named Ichiro Suzuki. Thus, the baseball bat.

Do you see the...resemblance?


And, of course, Karaoke.



The ladies of LMC School had a cooking and baking extravaganza. While the boss was out of town, our director's wife, Miya, had us over to her very nice, and big, apartment for a delicious meal. It was amazing food! This fish was absolutely delightful!




I taught some of the girls how to bake muffins and cookies. This is Xhen Ju making muffins...


And Noriko mashing the Bananas for the muffins...


And Noriko and I showing off the finished product!


Delicious!