Coming up Roses

Lance and I have been laying low the last couple of weeks. We're getting our bearings in Seosan and we're adjusting nicely. Things here are calming down. We have big plans in the next coming weeks that include a large camping trip on islands off the southern cost and hopefully a visit to Jeju to see some friends before they head off to teach in Eygpt. Things here are good. We're happy with our job, we've settled into our tiny apartment, and we've come to enjoy the sleepy farming town we live in. We're plenty busy traveling (we booked flight to Thailand for our August vacation!) and studying for the GRE. 

This past weekend we made a trip to Bucheon, a town on the outskirts of Seoul, to visit their rose garden. It was unbelievable. I didn't know roses came in so many colors and sizes. Teacup roses the size of pocket change all the way up to giants the size of my face! It was lovely, but it was also hot and crowded. You take the good with the bad.
From there we ventured into Iteawon (the foreigner neighborhood in Seoul)  to have a mexican lunch. Iteawon is full of delicious western restaurants, yet we can never get passed Taco Amigo for their authentic mexican food. Then we hopped over the What The Book, a fantastic foreign book store, and picked up a travel guide for Thailand. I'm only a few pages in and I'm already so excited!

We finished the night off with a trip to Costco. It was huge, bigger than I remember the big box stores at home being, but maybe I'm forgetting how big everything at home is. It was certainly bigger than anything we're used to seeing in this tightly packed country. There were so many people there it looked like black Friday and Disney World during summer vacation had a ridiculously crowded baby. I was hit by a Korean's cart at least four times. The good news is we were able to find some foreign we haven't had in a while, such as lucky charms, cheddar cheese, sliced turkey, bratwursts and Malibu rum. We were also able to pick up some camping food for next weekend, including some giant marshmallows. All in all we're excited and happy. Things are going just fine for us in the land of the morning calm.