We've been getting lazier and lazier with this blog recently. I am finding it easy to be distracted by Joe and his continual adventures - today he discovered how delicious sand is, a consolation to the unhappy fact that his friends at Lotte Mart (an aquarium full of squids) had all been eaten (raw, still writhing, but with spicy paste) and were no longer there to greet him when he walked through the door. Well, Superstore has the All-Beef hotdog stand (a real stomach-turner if you happen to be Hindu), and Lotte Mart has the raw squid stand, so there's not that much of a difference. One of my students responded eloquently when I told him that many people in Canada would never eat the squid: "Why? It's delicious! Have confidence!!" How true, but not enough for me to taste it.

We've also been distracted by preparing our place for my dad's visit, an event Joe has been looking forward to for the past month or more.

Joe has been counting down the days until his Grandpa arrives (he gets here on Sunday evening). We have been madly organizing, dusting, cleaning, arranging, and all the while I become increasingly amazed at the vast amount of SH*T we've accumulated in the almost 8 months since we've been here.

As homework assignments, I've been giving my intermediate students instructions to make a list of places we should take Dad, and why. We've come up with a few good ideas - Suwon's Fortress Wall, a folk village near our city (known by foreigners as "the Fork Village" due to a humourous misprint on its sign), the many temples, palaces and parks scattered liberally throughout Seoul, a few mountain hikes, Namdaemun and possibly Dongdaemun Market.