City 7 is the best mall I've ever seen! Plus, I have a really bad and a really great class...

Those of you who have known me for a while (as in, more than 3.2 seconds) know that if it doesn't involve cameras, I hate shopping and I really hate malls (unless it's Taco Time with my homies at Mayfair in Victoria!). But, I have been taken the bus past City 7 mall a few times now and it looked cool from the outside, so I decided to check it out yesterday after work (and I bumped into someone I knew...Scott's girlfriend...so surreal that people come up to me randomly in the street and say "Hi, I know you...how are you?").

Back to City 7... I have to say it's an AWESOME mall. I used to live in Edmonton, which has the largest mall in North America (complete with a swimming pool, ice rink, amusement park, sea park with seal shows, etc) and, while West Edmonton Mall has a few cool things, it gets boring fast. But City 7 is awesome, it has the most random architecture of any building I've ever seen.

It's all on purpose, but it's completely random...angles all over the place, overhead walkways out of nowhere, rooftop gardens, fountains, skylights, buildings leaning toward and away from each other, glass walls, a building that looks like a beehive, you name it, it has it. It sounds really thrown-together and stupid, but it works! It's awesome being there, no two square metres are alike! The ground has glowing neons in it, the building materials range from glass and chrome to bare wood, it's just all over the place. Also, it's a half open, half closed mall. I've never seen anything quite like it. It's like a closed mall (certain large sections are completely covered), but then in other sections, there are open skylights, massive chunks of missing walls, etc...it's pretty near.

I just had my cellphone with me (trusty k850!), so the pictures kind of suck, but I'll definitely go back with the real camera another day for more shots...

Statue in front of the mall (they have a ton of similar statues with different poses/balls in a row):

One of the openings and a neighbouring highrise:

A 10-15 shot panorama stitch (again, forgive the quality of the following shots, they're just snapshots with a cellphone):

Inside pano...all the neons constantly change colour (this is I believe a different big opening than the pano above):

Escalators:

View from the rooftop with some highrises around it:

Then I ventured next door, which is the Changwon convention centre...again, an awesome building of steel and glass...to give you an idea of the scale...the little dots in the middle are people....

From the 3rd floor:

Be

Modern art statue (they love them here) between City 7 and the convention centre:

Then I wandered behind the convention centre and found a hiking park! (Definitely going back to explore some more)...the apartments are City 7 apartments, the mall would be just to the right of it.

Well, that's about it...I'm happy to say I found another wicked place to explore some more! Unfortunately, Korea doesn't believe in Daylight Savings Time (insert witty "welcome to the Dark Ages" pun here), so it gets dark pretty early...the things I would do for just one more precious hour of daylight! Oh well...today is my easy day, only 3 classes and my first class was awesome...really enthusiastic and lively and yet quiet when they had to be. Pretty impressive, especially since they're Grade 3s, who are usually the worst. I showered them with praise and games haha. Yesterday's last class, on the other hand, was the opposite. It was the class I referred to as my "hell class" two weeks ago. They topped off a horrible class by stealing my lock. Since I think stealing school property/stuff from my classroom is serious, I confronted them about it and offered a deal. A one-time amnesty. Come clean, and no punishment. Instead of doing that, they banded together and tried to make me look like a liar and that I was just making everything up. At first, the coteacher fell for it, and started questioning me, but thankfully the students were so vehement and talked so much that they ended up contradicting each other's heartfelt testimonies all over the place and the coteacher realized I wasn't full of crap. So, no lock and no games for them for the rest of the semester. Case closed (but not locked).

That's it for me for today...sorry the blog's up a little late today, got caught up talking to some awesome friends from back home :)

Tonight I'm probably going for a run (it just clouded over, so as long as it doesn't rain...) and heading down to Samgye (about 25 min walk from my house) to have dinner with Dawni, Ross and Nicole. I haven't seen Ross and Nicole in a week or so, so really looking forward to it :)

Have a great day, guys...thanks for reading!

T