Since the last time...

After our trip to the English Village Brandon got pretty sick, he missed a day of work and went to the hospital twice ($35 the first time, $15 the second [total: drugs and doctor visit]). They said he had bronchitis/acute tonsilitis but apparently that's what they tell everybody with a fever. The next weekend we tried to go to a Buttterfly festival a few hours away, but we made the mistake of going on Children's Day so we saw a few hundred thousand people and a dozen or so butterflies. We didn't stay long because the lines to the exhibits were huge and just trying to walk around took a lot of effort and patience.
Last weekend we devoted to Taekwondo and tested for Black Belts. Saturday we trained for three hours, making sure we knew our Poomse (choreographed movements) and sparred for a few minutes. Sunday we started at 10am with more review, then we had lunch and headed to Jinju where the testing was taking place for all of Gyeongnam province. We had to wait our turn amongst the other 6,000 people taking tests so we didn't get in until 5pm. It looked like an army of children in white uniforms. We'll get pictures on a little later. For the test the judges picked one of four Poomse and we had to do it, then we sparred with a partner for about 30 seconds just to prove that we were willing to kick and be kicked. We won't know for sure if we passed for a few weeks but our fingers are crossed. Neither of us really wants to go through that again, it was pretty nerve racking to wait seven hours in anticipation and you can believe we were the only foreigners around so all eyes were on us.
A few more days and then we'll be back in Seoul for Buddha's birthday, there will be a big lantern parade through the streets Sunday evening. A few days later and we'll take a trip down to Jeju-do for an island getaway. We'll be there four days and then come back to Busan to meet our friends Tara and Emily at the airport. They'll be here about 10 days and we'll do our best to give them as complete an overview of Korea as possible.
We've got just two months left before we come home. We'll stopover in Tokyo and look around the largest megalopolis in the world for a week. We've got a visit to Mt Fuji planned and expect to have a very memorable experience. We'll get back to MSP on July 18th and probably be stateside until September, when we'll come back here for another year. So anybody who didn't get the chance to come has another opportunity to expand their horizons. That's all for now, we'll get those pictures on ASAP.