Impromptu Street Party and a Praying Mantis...

We are all divided into classes depending on which city/province we'll be teaching. My class (the Busan group) is the largest with around 70 people. We are all enjoying getting to know one another and decided to all go out for a little "group bonding" last night. We ended up with almost the entire group in front of a convenient store with a few bottles of soju and some Korean beer. The rest is history. I'll post a few pictures...

On the way back to the dorm, I had my first experience with Korean wild life. I was approached by a very large and intimidating praying mantis... he was flying straight at my face and was NOT going to slow down. It forced me to do the duck and dodge technique to avoid being mildly maimed by a bug. And yes, there was a little screaming involved... but not as much as you might think. ha. The picture is blurry and makes my "attacker" look small... BUT he was NOT small... I promise.

Today, we're going on a field trip to a Hanok Village and we've been told they're going to feed us a bathtub-sized vat of bibimpab. I'm going to have to dedicate an entire post to cuisine... that will be later. All I'll say for now is that the food is really good. Spicy. Very spicy. But good!

I'll post field trip pictures and comments later.

Love you all...

I haven't completely figured out this blogging thing... so I'll explain the pictures here.

Pic #1- My friend Claudine. She is from Atlanta via Miami. She's great fun!

Pic #2- My friend Kira. She is from NJ.

Pic #3- Candice from South Africa, Claudine, Paul from Denver, Chigan is one of our class leaders, and Cameron from Denver.

Pic #4- Dinah from Chicago and Paul.

Pic #5- A group of us at the street party. Bee is the guy to the left of me. He's been in SKorea for a while at a language institute and this is his first year with EPIK. He organized the party.

As you can tell... there are LOTS of Americans. In fact, probably about 60% are from the states.