October School Picnic

Thursday was our fall school picnic day. Our school went to Kangjin - about an hour away from Mokpo. The region is known for two reasons: it produces some of the finest pottery in Korea, and it was home to a very important philosopher.

There isn't much to write about. It was a gorgeous fall day and it was fun to be out of school, but I'm not super interested in celadon and not many of the posters at the philosopher's museum where bilingual so I'm not really sure why he was so famous. He did build some sort of pulley system that helped build a bridge/tower in Suwon.

I didn't take many pictures, but here are a few to show you what my day was like:

I hung out with the kindergartens for the morning and we made some mosaics out of some broken pieces of the famous green pottery in the traditional shape known from this region.

The kinder kids are so cute!

The famous pottery:

I had the great fortune of coincidentally running into the students from one of my online classes. Their school left the island for the day to do the same picnic as us. I recognized them first, surprisingly since I was the one that stood out the most among all the people at the museum! They walked right by me while others shouted and pointed at me, and I chased after them to introduce myself. This was very cool because the students live way out in rural areas, mostly on islands in the most southern part of Korea. The only interaction they have ever had with a foreigner is via Internet and I only get to see them online too so it was pretty special to run into them and be able to talk face to face instead of on the computer screen.

After the ceramics museum we did a little hiking at the former residence of the philosopher (I don't even know his name) and his little mountain was quite a nice place to do lots of reading, studying and thinking.

Getting some fresh mountain spring water after the hike up.

So although the venue wasn't super exciting it was a great day and an nice escape from the classroom :)