Where Have We Been?

It has been more than a year since we've posted on our blog. That is a sad realization. For that, we apologize.

But now we figured it was about time to tell you where we are now, and how we got there since our last blog post. Well, actually that would take too long, so here's a quick summary of January 2012 to September 2012:

We loved Korea! We traveled around it and had kinds of adventures. We enjoyed teaching those darn cute kids, and wish we were still there. To see some videos of our adventures, CLICK HERE. Otherwise, keep reading...

That didn't take as long as I expected. Anyway, our last day of school came. Emily and I cried, a lot. (There will be a blog post about that story later.) But then we set out on our wonderful trip to Europe.

It was amazing. We traveled through Italy, France, England, and then took a cruise, stopping in Spain and the Azores. Here are some pictures:

Emily at the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

 The two of us in Florence in front of the Duomo.

Emily in front of the Colosseum.

In short, the trip was amazing. It spanned over 4 weeks where we experienced things we thought we would never see. 

Since then, we have spent time with family and took a job in Omaha working with youth in a home. We live with five teenage boys. I'm not going to lie. It's rough. And it's a big change from living in Korea. 

I Korea, if we had tough kids, it made our day difficult. Here, if we have a difficult day, you spend hours and hours with a kid cussing at you, calling  you all kinds of names. It's a very interesting environment to live in. Can't say we've made the best choice in the world. Actually, the longer we are here, the more we wish we were back in Korea. 

It will take a lot to go back. We'd have to go through the whole process of getting our FBI checks and then the process of actually finding jobs over there with the uncertainty of getting a job/apartment that we could enjoy. There are a few gambles of going back, but I think we would be even more prepared to go this time than the first time. We would know what to look for.

We miss the videos. We miss the adventure. We miss the life. 

We miss Korea. 

Are we going back? Time will tell. Personally, I hope so. Emily does too. There's just a lot to consider.  

But don't worry. We have more stories to tell, and we will be sure to write it all down and let you read them if you want. We'll try not to make it a year before we make another post. 

If you're interested in seeing any of our videos about Europe, you can check out the videos below. 

If you want to see our farewell video to Korea, it's video #5 at the bottom of the post.

Enjoy.

When In Rome

When In Rome Part 2

Florence, Italy

Venice, Italy

Goodbye Korea

Jason's Birfday...

Well, I had a great birthday. It was fun. I got a new Kindle Touch, which is SOOOOO amazing! Also, I got a really cool leather jacket. My wife pretty much made it the best day ever. We celebrated at Kraze Burger and it was delicious as usual.

We started my birthday by starting our vacation and we don't go back to school until Wednesday, which is nice. Tomorrow I'm getting LASEK surgery. That's different than LASIK, but it does essentially the same thing. We'll be sure to post about that.

Anyway, here's a video taken on my birthday. Enjoy!

Welcome to 2012! We're sure glad to be here. Being January means that we only have 9 more months in our contract with the Hagwon. That's crazy! Although we often have to remind ourselves that 9 months is still a really long time. So, I guess that means making more videos, writing more blog posts and trying as hard as we can to enjoy our job and the life we are living.

Emily and I both have a hard time around the holidays away from our families. It's good to be over the hump, but we still miss everyone back home. Talks of a third year for us are still up in the air. The thing is, we could come home completely debt free from our student loans and with a decent amount of money for a down payment on a house if we stayed third year. It's tough to decide. We would hate to miss the holidays again, but that can't be our deciding factor. (Although it still plays a part, no matter how mush we say it doesn't.)

In other news, school is, well, school. It's day-after-day, class-after-class. It seems like every day we get a class added to our schedule. Emily gets it more than I do. I had one student from our last job at Songwon tracked me down so she could have a private class with me at our Hagwon. That's all well and good, flattering really, but because of this student I start my classes at 3:30 instead of 4:00. That pushes one class I have into my break, cutting it in half. It stinks, but I guess the day goes by faster. I've really got no room to complain. The teachers think Emily's class is too big with 10 students or so, so they took away one of her breaks and split the class into two classes to make it "easier" for her.

Well, now that I'm done with the complaining paragraph, we can move on to the good stuff coming up in January. This January is going to be nice. My wife has given me one of the best gifts I could have ever asked for. Winter vacation is coming up, which means our school lets the school off for a whole day! Then it's a national holiday on a Monday and Tuesday, so we are getting three days off from work. This is nice. But what Emily did for me was even better. She went down and asked for Wednesday January 18th, (my birthday) and Thursday off, meaning we are going to have seven strait days of no school! I cannot describe how excited that makes me. We don't have any big plans. It's cold out there and we've done the winter Seoul thing. It's no fun. Oh, and by the way, Emily had to fight for those two days off, even though they are in our contract. We have to fight for any day off here for some reason. Truth is, they don't want to give you your days off, they just want you to use it at the end of your contract, so you don't get to miss any classes. Well, sorry. That's not how we do it in the Morrow clan. So, we'll be doing this again in the summer for sure!

Also in January, I'll be getting lasek eye surgery, so I won't have to wear these darn glasses anymore! WOOT! That'll be awesome. We'll be sure to post a video about it when the time comes. Speaking of videos!

We're in the process of producing some videos for you and they will be out soon! We've been really really busy with other things like keeping warm and drinking hot drinks and watching Home Improvement, but we promise to get serious with those videos. We know you want them!

So, what about you? What are some of your New Year's Resolutions? We'd love to hear from you!

Working out...Will it every go away?

I'm sitting on the couch and my wife is across from me, old reruns of Home Improvement blaring through the television. I don't know why, it just is. I bring the sandwich loaded with mayonnaise and various types of meat to my mouth. It's sure to kill me in the next five years or so.
"We need to join the gym," Emily says.
"What do you mean by that?"
She shrugs. "I don't know. I just want to work out. I'm sick of just sitting around this tiny apartment."
It's my turn to shrug. "Ok."
The next day we take our money, our sneakers and gym clothes to the gym just down the road. We've psyched ourselves out for this. We can do it. I mean, this gym has a professional trainer! We'll be motivated to workout with someone next to us telling us how it's done, right?
Well....
Our first day is riddled with confusion. We live in South Korea and we haven't taken the time to learn the language. We're English teachers in an immersion-based classroom. What time is there to learn a language? So, we sit with our trainer typing back and forth on Google Translate. We all communicate surprisingly well. He shows us what to do, how to do each exercise. He tells us what to do on Mondays, Tuesdays and then the same rotation. Awesome. This is our key to full fitness.
Nah.
We come in the next day, our trainer's sleeping in his office. We get to the machines and some questions arise. (We aren't experts here.) I want to ask him something about a stretch...but I don't want to wake him.
It goes on like this for weeks. We're tired and we don't like spending two hours in the gym every morning. The diet plan he gave us included Emily eating three and me eating five eggs every morning. Boiled, scrambled, it didn't matter, they just have to be the whites. I could stand it for about two weeks. I hate eggs now.
We stop going. We go back. We stop going. Time it running out on our membership. What do we do? We pull out the Insanity DVD's. We take them to the gym and work out in front of a screen.
It's meant for doing it at home. The gym is fine, but why pay for the gym when you can do it at home? Frustrating.
How many of you are like us? How many of you hate working out because it takes up too much of your time and you never feel like there are any results? It may sound like I'm about to pitch you a product or something, but no. This is pretty much it.

Here's a video you can watch about us going to the gym. We think it's pretty funny. Hope you do too.
 

The Giving of Thanks

Thanksgiving has come and gone and we are preparing our home (and our hearts) for the Christmas season.
I want to give Thanksgiving a well deserved moment. It is just as much a holiday as Christmas.
Last year, I didn't get too worked up about missing out on Thanksgiving/Christmas with my family, so I thought this year would be the same. Boy was I wrong.
I woke up and instantly felt a little blue, but I just suppressed it and tried to go about my day. I was thinking we should try to make the day special even though we had to work and no Korean would know that there was any significance to this day whatsoever. So for our special meal we decided to go to Kraze burger. It's a burger joint here that's pretty good. Their motto is "Well-balanced diet with a healthy burger"…. or something like that. They are quite delicious…but not because they're healthy. I don't think they are any healthier than any other burger. mmm… I love their fries.
But back to the point. What do you do when you want to make yourself feel better about something? Well, here in the Morrow house, we had the "bright" idea of thinking about all the negative things that go along with Thanksgiving that we really won't miss. Bad. Idea. The first thing Jason mentions and I'm in tears thinking "Who cares if I'm 23 and married and I still have to sit at the kids table while younger and/or single/unmarried people get to sit with the adults…I wanna be there". Oops, did I just spill my guts about what we don't like about our Thanksgiving back home… ah well. The thought brought me to tears and I ended up in the ladies room at Kraze burger on Thanksgiving 1 hour before I had to go to work.
I have a confession to make, if I happen to be in a bathroom when I cry I can't help but stare in the mirror when I cry and it makes me cry more, but eventually it turns into laughing because I look ridiculous. Does anyone else ever do this?
After the laughing came I really started to think about not being with my family and all the reasons I'm not with them are reasons I must give thanks for. We have an awesome job, we're making enough money to live comfortably and pay off ours student loans quickly. We ALWAYS have a stocked fridge and cupboard. We have a mode of transportation. We have family that loves us and shows it by sending us care packages. We are able to entertain others with our shenanigans of living in S. Korea. We're getting to experience so much. We have a cozy home. The list goes on and on.Even though our Thursday Thanksgiving wasn't all that special, we got together with some friends on Saturday and gave the good ole American Thanksgiving meal our best shot with the supplies we had here (and some goodies sent by my mom--- Thanks mom!). Take a look. I think we did pretty well.
We're ready to be with family, but we're cherishing all of our days here.
I've been busy making Christmas decorations…I'll post pictures soon. :-)

Geon Chan San Park and other news...

Today, all the employees of our school were required to go on a hiking trip. When we first heard this news we were slightly perturbed that this trip was mandatory for school, but we weren’t being paid for our time. We didn’t like the idea of giving up one of our precious mornings where we get to be productive  in order to go romp around with other people who probably didn’t want to be there either.

When I woke up this morning I had a strange excitement about the trip.  Even though we had to go to a work related activity I thought it might be fun to see what some of our coworkers are like outside of the classroom. It turns out that the place we went to, called Geon Chan San Park, is reeeeaaallly beautiful in autumn. It reminds me a lot of Kentucky autumns and that filled my heart with joy. It was so wonderful to see such beautiful colors occurring in nature. We had a great time hanging out with other expat couples, too. I’m really glad our boss made us go.

Now, I have a confession. Jason and I have been living in Korea for over 1 year and today was the first time we went to a traditional Korean restaurant. We have been to galbi, Korean barbeque, restaurants and everyday at school last year I ate a Korean cafeteria lunch, but we don’t really eat out much, so when we do we always choose something we’re comfortable with.

The restaurant experience was not one that I will ever forget. I probably won’t go to another traditional restaurant because I don’t think my taste buds are wired to enjoy Korean food. I tried my darndest, but it just wasn’t happening. I was actually a little embarrassed because I’m not usually a picky eater.

In other news, we were asked to be on another radio show, but this time it’s an hour-long segment of us talking about music we like. That should be pretty interesting. I hope we don’t freeze up and say something like “Oh, yeah…that song was good” and end it at that. We’ll let you know where and when you can listen to it if you’re interested!

I hope everything is great on the home front. Let us know what's new in your life :) 

P.S. my friend Amber took all of the pictures for this post...she's awesome.

Halloweeeeeen!

Well, it's almost Halloween and we've decided to have some fun with it. Most Koreans do not celebrate Halloween so our decoration options were limited as you can see in the photos below. 

Here we've got our pumpkins.















And here's our creepy skeleton guy. He glows in the dark.







Anyway. It's all good fun. We just wish there was a chance to go door to door and beg for candy, but we don't think that would work out very well for us, so I think we'll watch some cheesy movies instead. Anything to bring us back home for a little bit.

So, in other news, this Saturday we are performing at GIC Day here in Gwangju. This is sort of awkward. We aren't performers in the least bit, but here we are being asked to play our songs at all these events. This will be our third time and our biggest one by far. Pretty interesting. We'll be playing two songs that you all probably know: Hey Korea! and Come Visit Me. Plus we will be playing two new songs that we are sort still in the process of writing right now. Hopefully we won't be a disaster (we haven't been a complete disaster yet). And if we are, that's ok too.

Anyways, hope everything is cool on the home-front. All you guys should send us a message sometime letting us know how things are going. We don't really ever hear from any of you. KEEP IN TOUCH!

Love ya'll.

Jason & Emma.