Wedding Planning News

So today ended up being quite an exciting day on the wedding planning front.

I woke up to three emails. The first was from my mom, who has been regularly sending pictures of flower arrangements that she gets at her office for inspiration. Always good. The second email was from Quyen, the awesome woman who co-owns Q Bridal with her sister.

So when my mom decided to fly all the way to Southeast Asia to help me with a wedding dress, I spent countless, stressful hours trying to find a reputable tailor. When most people think of Vietnamese or Thai tailors, they probably don't think of high quality. The area is more well known for their fabrics and CHEAP tailoring. I was not after a cheap tailor who could whip up a dress in a matter of days and have it fall apart while walking down the aisle.

So after awhile, I started to panic. I read about horror stories of women flying to Asia only to have the dress not fit right no matter how many adjustments. I read about how the mis communication that comes with the language barrier was just too much, and ended in disaster.

Right when I was questioning whether or not to have my mom buy an expensive plane ticket to Thailand, I came across Q Bridal. It is in Ho Chi Minh City and is owned by two Vietnamese sisters, one of which spends half of her time in the States. I was so thrilled when I found their website, and clicked on a link to their Facebook page. They seemed legit. Like, really good. They had albums for the dresses they have done in the past, including albums titled "Vera Wang Dresses" and "USA designers". I was so happy when the majority of dresses I looked through were in style and simply gorgeous.

I have been speaking with Quyen, who lives in Rhode Island for half of the year, frequently for the past few months, trying to hash out a design.

This morning I got an email from her that made me so happy. She had taken the two dress designs that I had really liked, consulted with her sister, and had come up with a design based off of a Judd Waddell dress. I was absolutely blown away with her and her sister's plans. I am obviously not going to post the picture on here for everyone to see, but you can Google his name for examples.

Smiling from ear to ear, I checked the third and final email, which was from Father Roger, my childhood priest. I had contacted him a few days ago to ask if he would perform the wedding, even though I assumed it would be a long shot. He is now retired and lives in Farmington, a 2 hour drive from home. But luckily, he agreed, and was honored to come back down to Yarmouth and perform the ceremony. How AWESOME!

Two huge weights have been lifted off my shoulders. My dress design is pretty much decided, and we have a priest for our wedding!

CHECK and CHECK!

This week is looking a lot better! :)

Motivation Needed

The apartment needs to be deep cleaned. I need to increase my exercise routine. Lessons need to be planned. Native teacher training materials have to be pulled together for next week’s orientation. Our Krazy for Korea website needs to be updated with all of our summer blogs. Save the Date stationary needs to be ordered. It seems like these past 2 weeks have slipped away from me.

They say that in the stages of living abroad, homesickness comes after the honeymoon stage, about 3-4 months in. Considering this didn’t really happen to me last year, I figured I had fortunately skipped over that ugly beast. From what I have heard from new teachers here from last February’s orientation, falling into the slump can be extremely rough.

I think that I have hit the halfway slump. Last year I was so psyched to be here, and even though I went through small 1-2 day bouts, I was usually super excited and loving every moment.

Although I am not a complete wreck, I am definitely noticing a change in my attitude lately, and it’s not for the better. I am a little more irritable. I am failing to find motivation to do all of the things on my to-do list. I find myself constantly thinking about what is in store for us after we’re done here. As bad as this may be, I am glad that none of it directly has to do with Korea. A lot of people go through a stage where they hate everything about this country. For me, it’s not that I am getting annoyed with Korea, it’s just that I have started to be a lot more into what comes next.

That wouldn’t be that bad if I was done in 6 months, but I’m not.

With some positive reinforcement from Matt, I think that this week is going to be much better than last, but we’ll see.

On a positive note, two weeks from now is Chuseok, Korea’s “thanksgiving”. We have a 4 day weekend and fortunately have nothing planned. I am looking forward to relaxing, while the rest of the country is traveling. We plan on going hiking in the nearby national park, but besides that, it’s going to be pretty low key. Hopefully the weather will be nice so we can picnic on the river.

Day by day, things will get better. It’s hard to stay grumpy for too long before you realize how you have nothing to complain about. I should be singing Korea’s praises and staying optimistic about the next 18 months. I have a job that I like, a (free) roof over my head and the opportunity to save money. More than I could have said 18 months ago.

Bring it on, Monday. I’m (relatively) ready. :)

Heck Yes!

I just got some big news today, right as I was sitting down in my chair after lunch getting ready for my 80 minutes of chill time. My main co-teacher, (who is also my closest Korean friend), mentioned to me that the English teachers had a meeting yesterday afternoon in which I was not invited to. This doesn’t offend me, those meetings are so boring and once they realize how useless it is for me to sit there, they have stopped making me go. Anyways, during this meeting they discussed my classes. They came to a consensus that the book material that I am asked to cover (the most monotonous English dialogues you’ve ever seen), is too boring for me to teach. They all agreed that my strongest point is my creativity, which they’ve witnessed in all of my camp books that I made from scratch and in a few fun filler lessons at the end of each term. Because of this, they decided that I should only spend the first ten minutes of class covering the book materials, and should spend the rest of the time doing fun, off-topic lessons.

My jaw dropped. This was the last thing I thought she was going to tell me. I sat in my chair, nervously playing with a pen, expecting her to tell me that I needed to cover more in the book. To my surprise, I am now given the freedom to teach whatever I damn well please….it’s nuts!

With a sudden rush of excitement, came a pause of reflection. This means that I cannot simply resort to altering lessons from last year that I have already used. Those lessons were specifically text book centered, and boring because they had to stick to a certain grammatical point or part of speech. Now I am asked to scrap all of my past plans and come up with completely new, fun material. My teacher suggested I adapt materials from my camp workbooks. It sounds like a good idea, until I realize (after she points this out to me), that the students who attended camp actually wanted to learn English, were higher end students and participated a lot.

So now I have to come up with fun, exciting, creative lessons that are going to involve the entire class (ranging from 20-35 students). The more I think about it, the more I realize how much work I have in store for me.

My co teacher told me I could start in September, so that I had some time to plan. That gives me a week and a half.

Although I am anxious about using creative, out-of-the-box lessons on students who are used to lectures, memorizing and drills, I am so thankful to have been given this opportunity. These past few days have been rough. Getting back to school after a vacation is always tough, but considering my lack of enthusiasm for all things Korean right now, this was just the boost I needed. Thinking about spending the next 3 semesters creating fun activities that engage students instead of put them to sleep has me smiling from ear to ear.

And to think I was planning on a nap after lunch. How my afternoon has changed! I just spent 30 minutes quickly looking over camp materials and searching online for lessons. Hopefully I can come up with a few strong lessons to get me through the first month, then I should be able to get into the swing of things.

Semester # 4

So today was the first day of the second semester. Because Korea schools start each year on March 1^st, around September 1^st summer vacation ends and it’s back to the workbooks full swing. Fortunately I didn’t have any classes today because students were leveled into new English classes according to how they scored on their first semester final exams.

Semester 4 is of special importance to Matt and me because it marks the halfway point of our time in Korea. We have been in Korea for 18 months and have 18 months to go. The number 18 holds so much significance for us. We were engaged on January 18^th, we will be married next August 18^th, and now the real countdown has begun: 18 months to go.

Although it’s a time to celebrate, being halfway through our 3 year contracts is bittersweet. On one hand, I can’t believe we have been living in a foreign country for 18 months, sometimes it doesn’t seem possible. On the other hand, I cringe when I think about how long that time has been, and how I still have another half of it to go. Matt felt these same feelings while hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2009. I was with him when he stepped over the ½ marker on the 2100 mile trail that snakes from Georgia to Maine. I was jumping up and down, hugging and congratulating him for such an accomplishment. He wasn’t all that thrilled. For him, the previous half of his hike was amazing, but incredibly long and arduous. He had already seen so much in the 3 months he had been on the trail. He had already hiked through several states, and sighed when he realized how much further he really had to go.

So here I am, finding myself stuck in the future, stuck in wedding planning and daydreaming of when we get to go home. There. I said it. I want to go home. It’s not like I didn’t want to go home before, I always knew we would find ourselves back in Maine. But recently, in the past few months, our discussions have been less travel-the-world centered and more buy-a-house-raise-a-family centered. I don’t know if my internal, subconscious clock is ticking or what, but both of us are thrilled to go home and try our luck at settling down.

I know that this small bout of homesickness will pass, and that when fall is well under way here I will be excited to see what it has to offer. Last fall in Korea was my favorite season. The weather is just perfect; the leaves don’t change until November leaving us two glorious months of dry, sunny days. We explored a lot last year and plan on doing the same this year. My goal is to enjoy my time here while I am still here, while allowing myself at the same time to daydream about going home.

During our Malaysian vacation Matt and I talked a lot about what we want to do when we’re finished in Korea. Like I have mentioned before, we have plans to travel after our 3^rd year contract is up. Although we are still going to travel, our plans have changed a bit now. I will write in future posts about what that means for us.

Coming up: the start of our adventures into the realm of stationary. We plan on ordering the card stock and materials for our save the dates and invitations within the week, which is exciting and daunting!

Malaysia in Pictures

So, I am back. Actually, I've been back for almost a week, but came home to a dead computer battery and have been trying desperately to start up a routine again only to fail miserably. It seems that I need to be working in order to have some kind of order to my life.

Speaking of work, school starts tomorrow for me. I don't feel ready, but what can you do? At least I will get back into exercising and blogging, at least that's my hope.

Here are some pictures of our amazing vacation in Malaysia. It was all incredibly awesome, except for the 48 hours where I battled the flu-symptoms of what was most likely heat stroke. Not fun, especially since I was on an island paradise and couldn't enjoy it to the fullest. Oh well, you live and you learn.

I will post more tonight or tomorrow about our Malaysian adventure.

Since we've been back, Matt and I have gotten right into wedding planning, since we haven't discussed it much for almost 2 months now. It's crazy how fast time can fly here.

Speaking of time, it's less than a year until our big day! I can't believe it. Sometimes it still feels like 12 months is a long ways away, other times I think about how fast the months fly living here in Korea and it makes me anxious.

I will definitely be blogging a lot in the coming days with wedding stuff!