pay fiasco, skiing, skating, Stomp and DMZ

well it's been a bit since i had a chance to sit down and write something.

Thurday was my last day of work at the camp. my kids got third place for our performance at the closing ceremony. i got my class to sing the Grease mega mix and my TA and I made up a dance to it. I stole lots of moves from the Grease movie. It was awsome. I'm so proud. After the ceremony all the kids went home with their parents. That's when all the teachers were to get paid. Turns out our camp made up a phoney "business tax" and deducted 27%. Taxes for teachers in Korea are supposed to be between 3-4%. Those jerks! Some of the teachers had to leave (go back home or catch a flight to Japan for new work Visas) so they just accepted the money and left. but others, like me, stayed to argue. they wanted to hand over 1.45 million won with a receipt that said we were getting 2 million. so ridiculous. about 10 of us stayed the night in the dorms because the guy in charge of the pay said he would take us to a tax office the next day. they turned off all the heat and the water in the dorms. so not cool. so the next day we go to the tax office. what does the guy at the office do?... he calls the university which then give him the same spiel that we had gotten from them! the latest update is that Mr. Jong the guy in charge of the money has to refund us some of it thanks to our many complaints to the Seoul tax office. getting a hold of him to get the money will be another story. hopefully i can.

After that ordeal which took up most of Friday. Leila, Jo and I went to stay with her friend in Suwon. The next day was our ski trip. We decided not to catch the early bus with everyone else and sleep in. We arrived in the evening at the mountain after a much needed rest. I skiied all Sunday afternoon and night for 50,000 won which was great. we got a group rate since there were about 30 of us. The mountain is pretty mediocore with machine made snow but it was still tons of fun.

Monday we decided to check out a temple in the middle of nowhere since Lonely planet said it was good. It ended up being good but not really worth the hassle of getting there and back. The bus to leave never came so Leila got annoyed and managed to hitch us a ride back to the main bus terminal. Who knows if that family was even going that way? It was really nice of them. they offered us cookies too!

Yesterday I got into Seoul and spent the afternoon with Jay. We went ice-skating in Lotte World. That was some mad ice-skating. It was sooooo crowded. It was dangerous to skate. I was constantly dodging people. In the evening we met up with Leila and two of her friends from Suwon and went to see Stomp at the Korean Arts center. it was so good. It took an hour to get back here after. Plus we hadn't eaten dinner yet.

This morning I found my way to Lotte Hotel which managed to be more diffficult then it should have been and went on a tour to the DMZ (the demilitarized zone) between north and south korea. it was really cool and kinda scary at the same time. i got some good shots of the north korean and south korean army guys. i even posed next to one.