Off to America

This is my season of travel, as it seems quite never ending (though I say so happily). My last day at Gilju was yesterday, and I packed up my office before coming home to pack my next set of bags for home. For the next two weeks I'll be back in America between Illinois and Michigan, then back to Andong where I'll start my new job at Sung Hee Girl's High School.

This morning we woke up to our third snowfall in Andong at 4:30am, and this time the most accumulation so far with about 3 inches. Luckily, although the streets were nearly empty, a free taxi came rolling past our apartment to scoop up Scott and I. We met Katie at the bus station with about 10 minutes to spare, and after a 5 hour ride, we are now sitting at our terminal at the Incheon airport quite tired and early. Because the Lunar new year is tomorrow, we wanted to give ourselves a lot of time because of the traffic, which did add an extra hour to our commute. However, we are very excited to go home.

Excited too that we are on the same flight as Katie, which happened coincidentally. When we met up with her, we noticed also by coincidence, that we were all wearing our Converse shoes shirts with horizontal strips, and that Katie and I had on our matching blue penguin hats. We've maybe been spending a lot of time together lately.

Now we have the long flight ahead of us, which will land us in Chicago at 4pm on Saturday (and we're leaving Korea at 3pm on Saturday). The jet lag will be serious.

Solar Eclipse

On Wednesday, I got to witness the longest running eclipse this century. Although it was a total solar eclipse over China, it moved just south of South Korea as it got to us, so in Andong we were able to see it as a near-80% eclipse.

I was teaching English camp at Scott's school when it was set to peak around 11 am, and happily the school was enthusiastic about letting everyone out during its six minute span.

The school passed out strips of red filtered paper, as well as strips of film that were taped triple thick to look through. Scott also brought out the crafty shoebox eclipse viewer, which was a clever way to get the students to stop staring at the sun for so long. Anyway, better than my English lecture to please stop staring at it or you'll get permanent retinal damage children.

I just feel very lucky to have miraculously ended up on the other side of the world so I'd be able to witness a historic solar eclipse. It was absolutely incredible- the last time I remember one, I was in Elementary school in the western hemisphere. This time I was teaching Elementary school in the eastern hemisphere, so it all comes full circle.

Here are a few other pictures I took of it:

(Through a dark purple strip of film- a little macabre.)

(Through the orange strip of film- kinda sci-fi.)