Friday tour of Seoul, and our new apartment

Friday around Seoul, with our tour guide Asst.Principal Garman. He relished the opportunity to show people around the neighborhood, and guided us to the office of Santa Fe Relocation – the company shipping our household goods from Saudi and from Ossining – so we could sign the papers. Then a walk down InSaDong shopping street, an upscale pedestrian mall of art galleries, handicrafts, and street vendors. We watched young vendors demonstrate the making of spun-honey sweets, called Dragon's Beard. They were very cute, so we bought a 7-dollar box of sweets, not that delicious, but it was a great performance!

He also took us to our new apartment: 3 (small) bedrooms, 1 and a half bathrooms, a tiny laundry room, and a large central kitchen/family space. It is a "floor-through" apartment, with glassed-in balconies on both sides so we get good cross-ventilation. The weather is pretty hot and sticky these days. We will move in tomorrow.

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Where we are working now

ISG Jubail School is the Anglo-American school for this area: Jubail is one of two planned industrial cities in Saudi Arabia, given a special royal commission for development and planning. Our district, the seven schools of International Schools Group, runs the school in the other industrial city -- Yanbu -- as well. Jubail is on the east coast, between Dhahran and Kuwait. Our nearby "big city" is the tri-city metropolis of Dhahran-Khobar-Dammam, where all the big shopping malls and quaint old markets are, along with the central 3 schools of our district, where Coleman attends high school. ISG Jubail has 410 students -- an average of 2 homerooms for each grade, K-10. Class size varies, up to 22. I have 12 in my required course "Computers & Information Management"; Barb has 12 students in her first-grade class. Most of the teaching staff come from the U.S., some from the Commonwealth. Several teachers are wives of engineers an...

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