The greatest marketing scheme of all time: create your own holiday for buying and giving your product as gifts to loved ones. Today is Peparo Day here in South Korea. Peparo Day was started in 1984 by the Peparo-making company, "Lotte." Peparos are cracker sticks dipped in chocolate, then sometimes covered in sprinkles or nuts. Papero Day is always on November 11th because all those 1's in the date look like chocolate sticks. Every street corner or store window display this week has been filled with fancy boxes of this chocolate snack. Since Peparo Day landed on a Sunday this year, many of our kids brought us boxes on Friday. Some wrapped them up in fancy paper, but most just gave them to us in the box. I came home from work with Peparos overflowing out of my purse! It was a great way to end out a busy week. Today we have had fun giving out boxes of Peparos to our Taxi drivers. We have heard rumor of another chocolate "holiday" coming in March called White Day. Similar to Peparo day, but with white chocolate this time....I'm already looking forward to this one!

In addition to eating tons of chocolate, we have had a nice, relaxing weekend. Yesterday I started my Korean class. We learned all the letter sounds and how to put together words. It was actually really fun to be on the other side of the classroom for a while. The class is at The Gwangju International Center. By joining the class I became a member. They have an English library and lots of resources for foreigners. They also put out a monthly magazine and organize trips for members. I was scoping out prospects for new friends, so we'll see what happens! We usually go all week without seeing any other westerners, so it was really nice to be in a classroom full of them!

Ethan went out with his boss and coworkers to an ancient Buddhist temple yesterday. He had a great time. We're having some problems with Flicker, so we'll get those pictures up as soon as possible.

After my class, (which is right downtown), I decided to check out the shops a little. I have to tell you, it is very fun to shop for clothes here because they are so cute, and so cheap. One of the best things to buy are the shirts with silly things written in English on them. Koreans love the look of English writing, but most don't know any English, so the result is lots of really, really funny shirts. I got a long sleeved t-shirt yesterday with a picture of a penguin driving a car on the front with the words "penguin's going out," on the back it says, "penguin's very fun because he's going out to draving" (it means driving). Haha! These crazy shirts are everywhere. They crack us up.

Today I cleaned the apartment and did some laundry while Ethan played soccer. He got a little bruised up today. I don't think those boys have to play so rough! Tonight we went to Whit and Lindsay's apartment. They live about 15 minutes from us, and it was our first time to see where we live. They live a bit out from the city in a really nice area. We ate at a GREAT vegetarian restaurant. I want to eat there every day! We had a great time hanging out with them as always. They are becoming our great friends.

I think Ethan's planning on waking up at 4am or something crazy to try to get his brother to set his computer to a webcam and watch some football game. So, if you read this, Cole, be aware!

I hope you all are doing wonderfully. We think about our family and our friends all the time. I hope you all have an exciting week. Don't forget to vote...so far the friends have the lead. Nelson's lets get it back to a tie with E's family please!

Happy Peparo day!