(*singing) I'll be home for ..... no wait

I may only have 1 string of Christmas lights but I use it well. And for those of you who have never lived somewhere where Christmas isn't celebrated, its almost impossible for me to explain just how much I value these simple lights

In case you haven't guessed, I won't be coming home for Christmas this year. In fact I work both Christmas eve and the week after Christmas. This is definitely sad but its part of living abroad.

My consolation is that I get to take a 3 week trip to Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia from late January to early February. This visit promises to be full of tropical weather, spicy food, cheap prices and gorgeous beaches. I am definitely excited. I absolutely love the kids I teach but it'll be nice to get away from school for a couple weeks. My loose plan right now is to fly into Bangkok, look around for a couple days, then fly to Singapore. I'll explore a bit there, then take the train through Malaysia, stopping whenever I feel like it. After that, I'll head up to a couple of the many Thai islands and spend a week or so relaxing and hopefully learning to scuba dive. Finally i'll take the train up to Bangkok and fly back to Jeju. The relaxed pace of this trip should give me plenty of opportunities to explore my chosen destinations.

The view from my apartment building down to the ocean

Other than travel planning my week had 2 small highlights. The first was that I got the entire day off Tuesday to go to a 90 minute meeting :) The second was that I played the boardgame Risk for the first time in my life on Saturday and I managed to completely conquer Asia. Apparently that's not easy to do :) Neither of these sound very important (because they aren't) but I always try to live by Zombieland rule #32: "Enjoy the little things"

Asia conquered!