Everytime I get on the train and head to Suwon, my stomach is in knots and I'm just a mess inside. Suwon is where I had my surgery, and even when we go for a fun day trip, I always relive the whole hand thing in my head.

We went to Suwon to go see Hwaseong Fortress again and to do some Christmas shopping. (We are so behind. Liam and my mom are halfway done.. Everyone else has nada. Oops) Whenever we go to Suwon, we always have a strict agenda. Like a doctor's appointment or a trip to the Fortress; we never just hang out and walk around. So. That's what we did yesterday.

Got to the train station and went straight to the Food Hall. It's this giant food court type place in the train station. Only, Korean food courts are 100 times better than American food courts. They have things other than fast food chains! Like sushi bars, gourmet cupcakes and other sweets, and delicious "fast food". We weren't hungry, but we of course had to get a bubble tea.

We kept walking and just looking at everything. And then. We saw the most amazing thing so far in Korea....

No it wasn't a temple or a monument or anything like that.

It was... Wait for it...

GOODWILL. Oh my gosh. Goodwill is already amazing. But a KOREAN GOODWILL?! It was as if I'd died and gone to heaven. Of course I made Drew backtrack with me so we could cross the street and go in!

It was a major disappointment inside. I thought for sure we would find awesome Christmas presents for Isabel and Liam, avid Goodwill shoppers ;), but no such luck. It was pretty crummy. We did buy some Cass beer mugs and a pitcher to make our own Soju Iced Tea at home and feel like we are at Think. Other than that, lamest Goodwill trip I've ever been on. Still I can't believe it exists in Korea. I will probably, absolutely go back.

After Goodwill, we kept walking and ended up on a street FULL of pet stores. There are pet stores all over Korea. I see them everywhere we go. They have all these precious little puppies in the window and it makes me want to skip down the street singing, "how much is the doggy in the windowwwwwww?" I always see the puppies while we zoom by on our scooter though, and I never get a close look. This time I told Drew we were going inside ONE pet shop and I got to look at ALL THE PUPPIES from the outside haha. And that's just what I did.

I want all the Korean puppies. HOW DO THEY MAKE THEM SO TINY?! Ugh. If only I wasn't holding out for another German Shorthaired Pointer when we get to Virginia. Somehow, I think Rooney would prefer a brother his own size haha.

After the pet shops, and right before the Fortress, I found this lovely little doctor's office...

And that was about it. We ended up finding one gift for Liam and the rest was stuff for ourselves! Oops. It was a fun day together. We don't get many of those, one a week to be exact, so it was very nice.



In other news. Here are a bunch of random pictures from the past week. They don't require much of an explanation, so here ya go.

These first ones are from our trip to Emart (Korean Target basically) last Tuesday.

Here are some pictures of the adorable kittens I helped save.  For any of you that don't know (so probably newer friends / Drew's family)  I am completely 100% obsessed with animals.  Since I can remember I have wanted to save every injured, stray, or baby animal EVER.  No matter what kind.  I caught ALL the baby turtles I could find when I was little.  We had 2 or 3 baby Wood Ducks, a gosling, two baby humming birds... I remember holding a baby squirrel in a cup, baby rabbits, I probably even tried to save baby mice.  I also tried to save every stray dog we found.  There was a Golden Retriever, two beagles, tons of animals.  I would have opened my own zoo if my parents would have let me.  Nothing has changed since then.  I still love all animals, and Korea is not the place to be a softie for strays.  There are like 3 animals a day that I want to save; horses, cows, cats, dogs... a lizard!  I have a problem, but I can't help it!  I love animals!  Who knows why I didn't go to school to work with them forever...?
Anyway.. these kitties were living in our garage.  I had seen the momma cat tons of times, and the other night I had a dream she had kittens with her.  Yesterday, before work, I let Rooney out to pee.  He ran behind the garage to do his business, momma cat ran off, and I saw a little kitty head peaking over a pile of blankets in the garage.  After work, I went back to look for it, but there were no kitties.  Once it got dark, I checked again.  TWO kitties!  One ran away, but I was able to catch this little babe.

Turns out, our neighbor Sara had found one of these kitties last night and brought it inside.  She took kitty number 2 and reunited them.

When I took Rooney out one last time before bed, I was able to catch kitty number 3!  Now they are all together, warm inside!  Poor momma was watching me the whole time, but her babies will have much better lives!  If I could catch her, I would try to get her a new home too!  I actually cried last night because I felt bad for taking the kitties away from their momma.  Ugh.  I'm such a sucker.

Yesterday was our much anticipated trip with our realty family to Mt. Palgong in Daegu! Any time our realty family gets together, lots of fun (and drinking) takes place, so we were very excited. If you remember, we hiked a different mountain in July, so we were expecting another fun hike like that!

Hahahahaha not even close.

The day started at 8am. We loaded up the bus and waited for everyone to arrive. At 9:00 we finally left Songtan and headed for Daegu. Sissy told us it would be about a 3 hour bus ride. Not terrible, but still longer than I enjoy riding in a car. Well, 3 hours came and went. Meanwhile, there are screaming, pooping, and puking babies in the back of the bus. I'm not kidding you, we should have been provided with gas masks. Oh, and ear plugs. Or maybe just some drugs so we could all pass out. I don't know why anyone would want to bring their kids to climb a mountain, let alone their babies that they have to carry up, but whatever. Also, everyone knew the bus ride back would be quite different than normal Sissy bus rides with little babies trying to sleep. (More on that later!) Ugh. Anyway. Back to the real story.

We FINALLY got to the mountain at 1:15! Four hours and fifteen minutes on a bus. Dear lord, let's climb this mountain. So last time, I raced up to the top of Mt. Daedun and even beat Drew. He was impressed because I didn't complain once. This time, I think Drew wanted to push me off the side of the mountain. It. Freaking. Sucked. The whole time. And I'm a complainer. 

We started walking up this terrible hill to a Buddhist temple. 3 minutes in and I was already sweaty. I had only worn a sweatshirt with nothing underneath, so I was quickly regretting that. 

Once we got to the temple, I was fully prepared to go hide somewhere and wait for everyone to come back down haha. Of course, Drew wouldn't let me. We walked around and looked at the temple and drank some water from some fountain and then stopped to take our realty picture!

Now we were ready to get to the top. Lol just kidding. We had to go back down... The highest ordained monk in the area heard we were there and wanted to serve us tea. Sounds cool. How often does that happen in your life? But really, no one wanted to climb down and then climb back up! We went anyway. Not at all what I expected, but it's okay. We got some tea, a book about Buddhism, took some pictures, and hiked BACK up.

We got back to the temple and started our way up the actual mountain. Korea is super cute and they build stairs to climb up mountains. I mean, I guess it's way easier, but still... Imagine climbing the steepest stairs you've ever seen for an hour. So fun! Definitely counted as leg day for the week haha!

We got to what I thought was pretty high up, and the girl in front of me said, "We're at marker #1, there are 20 of them." TWENTY?! Good lord!

So we kept on climbing. And I kept on complaining. And Drew kept on wanting to murder me. But, we all kept going.

When we were ALMOST to the top, Drew and some other guys went off in another direction to do some ropes course thing. So I beat him to the top once again! Haha.

When we finally made it to the top, I guess you could say it was all worth it for this view.

After some makgeolii and Korean pancakes, we made our way back down. Holy calves and glutes. OH MY GOSH. We basically jogged the whole way down because it was so steep, that was the easiest way to do things.

You should have seen our legs shaking when we stood still. It was hilarious. I tried to take this picture, and it was so hard to steady my camera because my legs were so shaky!

AT LAST, we made it back to the bottom and it was time to eat, drink, and annoy the heck out of the parents in the crowd.

Side note: I learned on this trip that I am not at all ready to be a parent. Also, you would have thought I was trying to give these kids drugs or alcohol when I simply tried to sing Frozen karaoke with them. Yeah, I'll just enjoy being a nanny and have the ability to give the kids back at the end of the day ;)

Anyway. Back to eating and drinking.

After dinner, it was back to the bus for some more drinking and Karaoke!

Liz and I were the stars of the show basically. Not shocking since a Philipino band wants us to join ;)

We had so much fun singing and dancing. I love our realty family. Well, except for the buzzkills that made us completely shut off Karaoke because their precious spawns needed to sleep. (Insert eye rolling emoji here) Give me a break. These people were no fun. We listened to your kid scream the whole way here, your kid can listen to us sing the whole way home. Thank you very much. Plus, have you never met Sissy before? I'm pretty sure you can guess what a Sissy trip will be like just by meeting her once. How about no kids allowed next time unless you're Jeff and Sara or Sharon. Those are parents who are doing things right ;)

Anyway. Here are some wonderful videos of all of the Karaoke fun. Keep in mind these are heavily influenced by soju and beer. Also, I'm really sad because I don't have videos of Drew rapping Eminem or me rapping Nikki Minaj. I know how much you'd all love to see that! hahaha

If you only watch one of these videos, make it this one.  And if you can't seem to make yourself watch a 3 minute, 28 second video, fast forward to one minute left.

Oh let's see...
I'm back to working full days, since the girls' dad left last Thursday.  I have to say, I much prefer working 6:30 am - 4:30 or 5:00 than 9:00 - noon.  Call me crazy.  We get so much more school done, obviously.  AND it allows me to go off on tangents and teach fun things that I think about along the way.  Seriously, it's crazy how much you can get done in 3 hours of homeschooling.  More than a 6-7 hour day at a public school, that's for sure!  
Last week we did a TON of Halloween inspired "science" experiments.  I wish I would've taken more pictures!  Some of the stuff was awesome!  
This is the only picture I have :(  We did the good old fashion soak and egg in vinegar experiment.  Actually, we did it 3 times due to several mishaps, but finally got the shell to dissolve!  After one day in vinegar (or witch's brew) we soaked the egg (eyeball) in corn syrup.  I saw this on Pinterest and didn't read the post, so I had NO idea what was going to happen to the egg.  It was actually really cool.  It turns out that it demonstrates osmosis.  The egg is supposed to shrink since the water diffuses out of the egg and into the syrup, but our egg shriveled up.  Osmosis still happened, but it was all shrively!  After that, we soaked the egg in water over night.  The egg filled back up with water and was like a water balloon!  

We also blew up balloons with vinegar and baking soda!  (Tried that Mentos and coke thing too, but I didn't realize you had to use diet, so it didn't work!

We did lots of other cool experiments all week, and made "blood" on Friday as a Halloween/Body System lesson.  Each week we learn about a new body system and glue body parts on our "Flat Nia" and "Flat Lucia." 

Friday was the circulatory system, so we had to make some blood!  (OF COURSE I DIDN'T TAKE A PICTURE!)  We used red hots for the Red Blood Cells, mini marshmallows for the White Blood Cells, lentils for the Platelets, and Karo for the Plasma.  We poured it all in a plastic bag and had fun squishing it all afternoon.  
The week before this we made lungs!  Oh!  The girls still have them.  I'll get a picture!!

So that's a lung!  It's super cool and I love them!  They demonstrate breathing surprisingly well!  The pop bottle is the inside of the chest.  The straw is the trachea.  The balloon inside is the lung.  The balloon on the bottom is the diaphragm.  To make the lung "breathe" you pull on the diaphragm and it fills the lung with air.  The girls thought these were pretty awesome!  (Clearly, since they still have them two weeks later.)

This week we are learning about the digestive system.  Friday we will be making stomachs and watching them "digest" food!  (Freezer bag- stomach, paper towel roll- throat, Chilsung Cider- stomach acid, and crackers- crackers!)  It's going to be so gross, but whatever.

In other news, Drew is still working Wed - Sat and has Sun - Tues off work.  Last week he had Wednesday off because of a long story that you probably wouldn't understand.  Long story short, he worked on his day off, so they gave him Wednesday off.  I ended up getting done a little early at work (The girls' dad was still there) so we got to go out for a nice lunch together.  Mexican food sounded AMAZING, so we went to a restaurant that we'd heard was about as good as Mexican food gets in Songtan.  It felt weird... Americans eating Mexican in Korea haha!  But it ended up tasting decent.  I can't say I'd go back, but it definitely hit the spot.  

After his entire week on Bay Orderly the week before, and his day off on Wednesday, Drew worked these awful night shifts.. 6:30pm - 4:00am then 9:30pm - 9:00am.  He relied on melatonin.  But it was all worth it since they all got Saturday off!  That meant Drew slept ALL DAY noon - 6 and then I made him get up and go out with me!!  Per usual, we had too much fun with all of our wonderful friends.  I like to think of Korea as my extension to my college years.  Seriously.  If you are child-less and stationed here, it's basically like being in college again.  AND since my senior year was super boring since I had to be studious and graduate, this is like my second chance haha.  You get a free pass and don't have to be a COMPLETELY responsible adult here.  (Don't tell my mom haha)  I wish you could all come visit and experience the craziness that is Korea.  Or the craziness that is going out with our friends.

At curfew we went on base to the Enlisted Club to continue the party.  (And eat ALL the fried food.)  On the way there, we saw a guy get arrested, so that was cool.  Ha ... it was not cool.  It was totally his wife's fault, but whatever.  Long story.

Well, that about covers the last week.  No other adventures.  We've been spending our time playing Monopoly (yes I am serious.) and going to the gym.  This Saturday is our hiking trip to Daegu!  I am SO excited.  Spending time with our realty family is always a blast, so I'm sure Saturday will be so much fun.  Just as long as I can find someone to let Rooney out once or twice while we're gone!  

Speaking of, I don't have any new pictures of him to end my post.  He's been SUPER annoying lately!  RIDICULOUSLY clingy and disobedient!  So I haven't wanted to take any pictures haha.  So instead, I'll end my post with a selfie I found on my phone while I was uploading the rest of these pictures.  
Everyone, I give you Drew and Julia.