Wax Santa English Festival...

For my winter English Festival, I decided to do something special with the 6th graders. Luckily, our budget allowed us to have each student make a wax Santa. It took forty minutes of the students listening to directions to complete it, but it was worth it! The outcome was really quite and it was obvious the kids enjoyed doing it!

Each Santa looked a little different, and I made several to demonstrate that you could alter what the instructions said to personalize your Santa. Of course when you are working with soon-to-be middle schoolers, some of the boys get a little "creative" or perverted...
I really liked lining all of the Santas up at the end of the class to see the final products. There were some amazing ones!

Jinwoo and I made a Santa in our class! He is a great artist!

12 pubs of Christmas...

Last year I would say that the "12 pubs of Christmas" was legend...wait for it.....dary. But this year it was a little different. Not saying that it was bad at all. We had a great time, but this year it was not with my EPIK intake crowd and it was a bit more mellow for Ben and I. I did like the fact that at each pub a photo was taken and also a part of the 12 Days of Christmas song was sung according to the pub number. It really was a nice time!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!- photo session...

Merry Christmas!
So our friend Abbi wanted a picture of some of our friends together, so she organized a Christmas photo shoot. This photography place was located in Bandwaldong station, but I had never seen it before. (Not the most familiar with that station since I am a bus person, not a subway person....)
She had gone in and asked prices and such, and we thought it was a good deal so we went ahead with it. We were in the photo studio for maybe 10 minutes or so, and afterwards got to review our pictures and pick out the ones that we liked.
It was then that we realized that the prices they had quoted Abbi days earlier had quite a few stipulations on them. For instance... every single one of us HAD to buy the same pictures, and we HAD to buy the set of them. Each picture was 8,000. Unfortunately we all spent a bit more than we were planning and expecting!
Now, I know that a business has to make money, but the photo print outs that we got were actually smaller than a 4x6 photo. I have worked at one of those cheap photo studio places, so I know how much printing actually cost. In the end, our group spent over $150 for our photos that took 10 minutes... Gotta love it! It was an experience at least and I got to use my overprices "hand stitched" ugly Christmas sweater! :) Here are the results:

The following are candid pictures that another photographer took of us during our photo shoot. They are kind of funny...

Merry Christmas!

Thanksgiving...

This year, Ben and I had 3 Thanksgiving meals, and two of them were at our house! The first one was on Thursday night and we had Bill & Erin come over. The evening was very chill and we ate and watched TV and talked...

On Saturday, we went to MJ's house, which is always a bit of a hual. MJ lives about as far south of us as possible, so we usually end up taking a taxi when we have food that needs to be warm when we get there. We went last year to MJ's and this year it was a similar crowd of people with just a few changes!For this meal, Ben and I took a massive supply of mashed potatoes, kalico beans (one of Ben's family's recipes), and creamed corn. YUM!

MJ has a special talent in the kitchen so we knew this was going to be a good feast! Like last year we ordered the turkey and people split the cost of it.
The people that bake the turkeys for us seem to make a large profit. We saw turkey's at Costco this year, but the problem is is that no foreigner has an oven big enough to even put the smallest bird. They definitely take advantage of us...

On Sunday we had another Thanksgiving with a different crowd of people at our house. Last year Matt & Maria hosted, but with out large apartment, this year we were asked. I enjoy hosting (even though it is a lot of work for me) and am glad that we got a larger apartment! So far we have no regrets with out place.
Sunday was also full of food, as we ordered another turkey delivery and everyone made sides to go with it. For this day Ben and I made another mountain of mashed potatoes, kalico beans, green bean casserole, and deviled eggs. I've hooked my man on these deviled eggs, which was always my goal...
Ben and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to fit 14 people in our place and be able to set up our table. We ended up abodoning that dream and having people eating on their laps. No one complained and everyone fit in the same room which was very exciting!
For desert we enjoyed pumpkin pie, milk tart (with a great turkey design on it), and some nutella cream cheese bars. So much food was consumed over the 4 days, and we really were so blessed to be surrounded by such great friends!

Multi-Bangin'... (Stef's birthday)

For Stef's birthday we got to go to a multi-bang! I was very excited that this is what she wanted to do because -go to a multi-bang- has been on my bucket list my whole time in Korea, and I still hadn't gone! 
Let me just begin by telling you that "bang" in Korean means "room". So when we go to a Noraebang, we are going to a "singing room", and when we go to a DVD bang we are going to a DVD room. A multi-bang, is a room that you can do all things! It is equipped with singing, gaming, and all sorts. 
While we were there, our group took up 3 rooms, and everyone was doing an assortment of different things. The room I was in started off with some Mario Kart and ended with a long session of Just Dance. Another room I know did a lot of singing as well! 
I made Stefanie an oreo cheesecake for her birthday too! It was yummy!
This multi-bang provided weird wigs and hats to wear while having fun. The best part about Korea, is that you can take your own food and drinks into most places and this was no exception. So while the drinks flowed, the singing got louder... 
And maybe the dancing got better in our room! Who knows?

Ben and Gianni competing...