jimi and yoona, two of the assistants in our classroom. so wonderful and so kind! they've really made me feel at home here. we are out for lunch here--they tried their best to find me food that is "aneyo meoon." (not spicy)










we had tuna kimbap--tuna sushi basically, and oudoo (no idea how to spell it) soup and some sort of broth drink and some fried pork with cheese and rice. all the food goes in the middle and then we all dig in with our chopsticks. it's my kind of eating. our family was always big into sharing our meals anyway.









me and yoona!











it's really hard to capture feel of ilsan. but here's an example of the buildings--lots of bright colors and signs and lights.











sorry this one is sideways. there's markets all over where i live. one in my building in fact on the bottom floor. they put all their produce outside. this is one of my favorite parts of living here! i love fresh food!



this is my favorite--if you look close enough right in the middle there's Jesus with his arms spread out. apparently the Korean Christ has bright purple robes and long green hair and a big green beard.

watch out korea! i've arrived.

after a 14 hour plane ride filled with too many "are we there yet" moments and a stressful journey through customs, i found myself being driven through korea in the middle of the night to my little apartment in ilsan. i like my apartment a lot--it's a loft style with stairs going up to a place with a mattress where i sleep and a downstairs area to do everything else. apparently it's a mansion compared to the holes that other english teachers get stuck with so i guess i'm lucky. the couch that came with it, however, is detestable. it's this pastel suede purple color that looks like bad bridesmaids dresses from 10 years ago. a couch cover is on the top of my "to get" list (which is about 2 full pages). since i've been here--which is almost 48 hours now, i've slept about 7. holy jet leg! this morning i woke up at about 5:45 am as though someone had just yelled "A BOMB IS HEADED STRAIGHT THROUGH YOUR KITCHEN!" and that was the end of my sleeping for the night. so i got up and spent and had some quiet time and then ventured into the rain for a run and got thoroughly lost. i ended up gesturing to several non-english speaking koreans on the street that i was lost and just said "byzantium byzantium where?" cuz that's the building i live in. not like i needed to do anything to attract more attention to myself--i don't think i've seen another blonde in ilsan yet. everywhere i go, there are little eyes following every move of my bright blonde hair. and at school today one of the little kids pointed to my eyes and said "BLUE!" like i was an alien. it's really funny. so today i started teaching--well, watching the 3 other teachers--and my idea that asian kids sit quietly and obey every word of their teacher came crashing down within the first 2 minutes of the first morning class. they were running in and out of the classroom to their moms, hitting each other, pushing the drawing boards over, licking the pages of the book the teacher was reading on bears...it was quite a spectacle. needless, to say i was--am--overwhelmed. hopefully more sleep will help. after we got done today, charlie our director took all 4 of us teachers (they're all from canada) and some of the staff out for what i think was a japanese place. we sat on the floor on little cushions and they kept bringing more and more and more food and raw fish and whole fish and fried fish and sushi and pumpkin and fried sesame leaves and some seaweed sort of thing and i seriously never thought the food would stop. or the liquor. apparently it's quite thing for the boss and all the workers to go out after work and drink. a lot. last night josh de groot came up from seoul and we ate at a little korean barbeque place across the street from where i live. it's pretty cool--there's a little bbq in the middle of the table you they just bring you a bunch of raw meat and you cook it yourself. but everything is SOOOO spicy. i feel like i am burning a hole through my stomach. this morning i looked in my little korean dictionary for how to say "no spicy." a-neeyo meoon. i think i'll be using that a lot.

i'll try to take some pictures tomorrow of ilsan to put up here.

goodbye chicago

tonight i said goodbye to chicago. i fly to seoul, south korea at 8 pm tomorrow night and arrive at 11:40 pm Saturday Korea time, 9:40 am Saturday morning Chicago time. from there i go up to my loft apartment in ilsan, just a little north of seoul. a wretched 14 hour fly to listen to sad music on my ipod and think about all the people i'm leaving behind. tonight the power on our whole block went out for a good 4 hours from one of the biggest storms i've ever seen. so we ordered thai food and sat on our floor with candals in our empty apartment surrounded in packed boxes and ate our food in the dark. it was an appropriate way to say goodbye. i'll really miss chicago and all the people i love here.

I leave for Seoul, South Korea in 6 days, 3 hours, and 9 minutes. Wohoooo!

Life has been full of traveling the past few weeks. After the family reunion, i helped katie t move into her quaint hippy house in grand rapids, then spent a day at home in chicago, then flew to vegas, spent a night there, and took off with terri for a 2 day road trip through nevada, arizona, new mexico, and ended in midland, texas. that's where terri lives. i stayed there a few days, flew back to chicago for a day, and now i'm in iowa saying goodbye to the folks and the little bro. i feel like a nomad. here's some pics from my trip with terri:




















a little windy!!!





I really loved the catholic church we went to in sante fe.

family reunion '07

I've just returned from the Sybesma family reunion 2007. I swore that this would be the year that I grow up and save myself from the horrific pain of the wild tube rides, the sore muscles, the broken blood vessels from trying to hang on for my life...I thought I was done with that. It sounded less than appealing back in my little apartment in Chicago as I laid in bed stretching my old and tired muscles. Here were the results of my efforts to stay away from the infamous tube rides at the family reunion:
If you'll take a look at the picture in the middle, you'll see Lisa flying up from a wave, soon to land with her knee in my thigh, causing me to fly off the tube in a spread eagle manner and not bend my knee for the next 3 days. I am, as we speak, icing the muscle that became the innocent victim of my reckless tubing excursions. Sigh. NEXT YEAR I swear, it's boat rides, hot tubs, and swimming with the little kids only...

Gotta love the family reunion. It's the most talked about event of the year. Here's some more memories:

rats!!!

i wonder where the phrase "rats!" came from. you know, you miss your bus..."rats!" you lose a game of monopoly..."rats!" you stub your toe on the cupboard..."rats!" it seems like a very comical and not-intense replacement for other 4-letter words that i would probably use instead. rats just doesn't seem like you really mean it. well, speaking of rats, we caught rat #2. after escaping two of the traps we had set up, grant heard him the other night and went to the kitchen just in time to see his head get snapped as the little rodent went for the oh-so-obviously-placed peanut butter. i guess they're getting desperate. anyway, he was not dead, but just alive enough to hurl him, trap and all, under the stove, beyond our reach. so we called harry, our diligent maintenance man, to have him dispose of our little friend in a slightly more humane way than a brick and a shovel. so 2 down, how many to go? i've heard that where there's one rat, there's 10. fabulous. atleast we're moving in a month.

it's the 4th and final week at my music school's summer music festival. out of the 5 classes i'm teaching, i haven't had one white kid yet. i can't explain the agony of trying to pronounce all these names. citlali, naima, valeria, jesus (this one isn't hard to pronounce i guess, just strange to call a growing hormonal adoloscent boy the same name as well, you know, the jesus from the bible), travell, azelle, and the list goes on. so last week we had an intro to the piano class, and this group of kids comes in and in the mix of brown and black faces, there comes this little white face with nearly white hair and freckles covering his cheeks from the sun. he couldn't have looked more like every little dutch boy in every town of northwest iowa. after stumbling through every kids' name and sweating from pronunciation exhaustion, i ask him his name and with a grin he says, "andrew." in the most northwest iowa accent you could find. he was like an exact replica of my little brother 10 years ago. same name and all. strange.

my life the past few days has been as follows: sunday morning, woke up, put on my swimsuit, biked to borders, purchased the new 759 page harry potter book, cramed it into my already overflowing beach bag, biked to my favorite beach, and proceeded to begin, or should i say continue, the beautiful journey of what would be the last leg of my love affair with harry potter. hours later, lake michigan still at my side, the sun starting to droop in the sky, i was fully emerged in the lives of harry, ron, hermione, voldemort (or should i say he-who-must-not-be-named) and the wizarding world. sunday evening, a brief bike ride home, continued reading, a brief break for a jog through the park, more harry potter. i fell asleep with the book at my side. monday--wake up, bike downtown, teach my morning classes, find a patch of grass, read for 4 hours, teach my afternoon classes, get home after hearing overhang play and seeing tricia, read until my eyelids are too heavy. sleep. tuesday--wake up, teach morning classes, read for 4 hours on my break, only stopping to pretend i was interesting in food at the resturaunt nearby so i could then politely decide i wasn't and use their bathroom instead, pop in a beethoven movie for my afternoon class so i didn't have to lesson plan and could read longer, go home, hit up trader joes, sit in my room reading all night, only popping out for food. today--wake up, get on the train to my school, read the whole way, read while i'm walking, (which proved very tricky cuz it's a heavy book and chicago is crowded), teach my morning classes, hurry them out as fast as possible, and retreat, once again to my lovely patch of grass that has become my harry potter haven for 3 days standing. the last 100 pages were a blur. i was eyes were darting from line to line so quickly i could barely take it all in. i laughed, a cried, i laughed through my tears, i was afraid, i felt triumphant, i felt confused--(seriously, did anyone else really catch what exaclty was going on?) and now i feel sad that it's over. i can move on with my life. harry potter will always just be a memory of my childhood. and my 20s i guess. sniffle sniffle.

many have asked about the rat. it remains a mystery. we have cleaned, we have sealed off all possible access to food, we have called the landlords, we have set traps. and now we wait in horrific anticipation as every morning i wake up, poke my head timidly into the kitchen, and pray that i don't see a rat writhing helplessly in the little glue trap with peanut butter plopped in the middle.