July 19, 2005 Update

July 19^th, 2005

Hello again from Korea!

Jon and I hope that this update finds each one of you well and enjoying summer! We keep track of the weather in Edmonton, and it looks like you are having some great sunny days! Here it continues to be very hot, but the humidity has decreased a little bit. We are definitely out of the rainy season now, so every day there is a beautiful blue sky and the mountains surrounding us are in clear view.

To keep cool, Korean women either use umbrellas (which they use for everything from sunny days to snow apparently!) or these really funny looking visors that are like a big tinted safety shield – looks like something we would have sold at Century Vallen! The umbrellas can be quite annoying at times because Jon and I are both taller than the average Korean so we often get umbrellas in the eye on the crowded streets.

Jon and I had a really great weekend here in Korea. On Friday night we went “downtown” to see the sights, but primarily to go to McDonalds!! Downtown feels like you are stepping right into any movie featuring an Asian city (like Lost in Translation). There are street upon street of stores carrying the hippest most current clothing styles. There are a lot of shirts here with English writing on them, but most of the time the English makes very little sense! Downtown also features the most western selection of stores. There is a Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Burger King, Outback Steakhouse, TGIFridays etc.

On Saturday Mun Hwa, the school Jon teaches for had an event planned to welcome us and another new teacher named Tyrone. Originally we were supposed to go and climb a mountain, as I had mentioned in a previous email, but in typical Korean style plans changed at the last minute. Well actually, we were already driving up the mountain as our plans were changing…It started to rain so the cars just kept driving and driving up and down the mountain apparently waiting for the rain to stop. The rain never did stop so we ended up driving back to the school and eating lunch there. We had an awesome meal of some traditional Korean food and then we headed off to a “singing room”, called a “Nori Bong”.

The singing room was very fun! You basically go into a room with a big screen TV, two mics, and some tambourines and sing karaoke together! Since you are only in the room with the people you came with it’s not as scary as a karaoke bar and you can really let loose! We had a great time building a relationship with the Korean teachers at Jon’s school over this activity!

On Sunday we went to church which was cool. The church itself was HUGE, and their English service was a pretty good size as well. It’s hard though, because the service seemed to really be geared to Koreans who wanted a venue to practice their English rather than for native English speakers. Consequently it’s a lot of SLOW speaking and explaining things, but it was fun anyway! They had a big lunch after the service that they invited us to stay for so that was awesome.

We are starting to experience Korean department stores, which are crazy! The other day we went to an electronics market, which was just huge and packed with every sort of device imaginable. Today we went to “Home Plus” which is kind of like Wal Mart except that it has 5 floors! There they had some western comfort foods like cheese, Campbell’s soup, and tortilla chips.

I am really excited because I have an opportunity to do some volunteer work at a girl’s orphanage starting this weekend. They are looking for an English tutor to work with the girls and I am so juiced about being able to serve in this way. This coming Saturday we are going to a BBQ at the orphanage to meet the director and figure out what days will work. I also may have an opportunity to be an English tutor at a drop in center here in the city, which is also run by the orphanage. God is really opening up doors for me to serve people and I feel very blessed!

Anyway this email is long enough for now, thanks for reading! We would love to hear from all of you and find out how life is “back home!” Any emails we get mean so much to us trust me!

As promised, I have our “snail mail” address now, for now please send any correspondence to Jon’s school, I only have our address in Korean characters!

Jon and Emily Reesor C/O MunHwa Language School

67-14 Jang-Dong Dong Gu

Gwangju 501-060

South Korea