A Quiet Fall Weekend

Nothing much to report for this week. It was a quiet week at school, and Milton and I are having a quiet weekend at home too.

The Fall weather continues to be gorgeous here, so we took advantage of the sunshine and spent the day outdoors yesterday.

We started our morning with a quick trip to one of the outdoor gyms that is set up at a park near our apartment. We see these circuits set up all over the place- in every park, and on every mountain - but we hadn't fully tried one out. Well... turns out we weren't missing much! Either we are just to big for the equipment and so nothing worked right, or the stuff was designed by someone who has never worked out a day in his life because the equipment was just ridiculous! Most of it hurt us or would have caused injury if we continued to use it, and the rest of it just didn't really work any muscles! We had fun trying though...

Ooh, feel the burn... NOT!

Somehow, by spinning this wheel I am working the muscles in my back???!

Ok this one may have worked my arms a bit.

As you pull your arms down you lift your body at same time.

The ab workout was pretty hard on your back.

More pain than gain!

I think I've seen this one in an infomercial at home - that guy Tony something with the long hair sells it.

There is no way this one works your obliques -but then again, maybe we are just too tall for it to properly work.

This one would have been good for cardio if the arms and legs moved smoothly together at the same time. A bit rusty I think.

A view of the entire circuit.

My favourite: The twist machine!

Milton's favourite:

The Motorcycle/

Pelvic Thruster

After our tough workout we rested in the sun on a mini golf/driving course in the same park.

I know we stand out like sore thumbs in Korea all the time, but this time it was this man who really didn't seem to belong:

I think he was a Korean spy keeping an eye on us crazy waygooks, but Milton thinks he was just standing in the shade waiting for the bus since Koreans always hide from the sun.

Milton could be right since we've seen this before while waiting for the bus. I'm getting all the sun I can while waiting and these girls are ducking behind tiny bushes to get away from it!

We ended the morning playing badminton in the sun at our usual spot.

We had a lazy afternoon sitting in the sun at a cafe on a little pedestrian road near our place. It was not quite like the cafes in Europe but a good place to spend the afternoon people watching. It was a great fall day in Mokpo!

Imsung Elementary School Festival

Toward the end of the school year, every school in Korea puts on a school "festival". I don't know why they call it a festival - there is no common theme or one particular thing celebrated. It is more like a talent show or assembly where each class prepares a short play, song, or dance. This festival is quite a big to do though and every class rents costumes and the school prints big signs for it and has a background scene printed too.

These were the costumes for the MCs of the festival --- almost like bride and groom attire for kids!

The cutest performances of course were done by the youngest kids wearing incredible costumes and doing dance moves that they probably shouldn't have seen anywhere at there age!

Check out the leopard print hearts on the butts of these boys! I don't know what Koreans are thinking sometimes! - it is perfectly acceptable that five first grade students wear this and perform a routine to some boy band love song. Oh, and just so you get a complete idea of the look they had, the front was bare-chested.

The strangest thing about the festival was that although it showcased the students' talent for playing instruments, doing taekwondo and dancing, there was no singing at all and even the play was recorded on CD rather than spoken live. The playing of instruments was real though, and the drums were most impressive!

I of course wasn't asked to get involved at all and had no idea until the day before the festival that it actually existed. I was happy to see that the grade four class chose some English songs for their performance, but disappointed that they didn't sing. The songs are from the textbook and CD that are used in class and the students know all the words. it doesn't make sense that they would dance and not sing, but nothing ever does make sense in Korea! They are the actual songs that are part of the curriculum for grade 4 English ---it is so embarrassing that this is what I have to teach!

This video is especially for Drew and Denver --- new songs for you to learn and to sing around the house!

(Finally got it to work!!!)

There isn't much more I can say about the festival... just have a look at all the crazy costumes and check out the videos!

This was a grade 3 performance that was done by all the girls in the class, but i guess they were 1 girl short and this poor boy had to fill in with a wig!

I have a great story about this kindergarten kid front left... I thought HE was a SHE for the first month of school and it wasn't until we were doing the letter B and words that begin with B that I found out otherwise. I kept pointing to two students in the class saying "boy" and "girl". "Boy starts with the letter B". I pointed to him several times making the comparison between her and the boy next to him. He got all upset a kept saying something in Korean that I didn't understand and finally the teacher explained that "she" was a he!

Here the poor kid has to wear lipstick and pantyhose and as if that weren't bad enough, they told him to pull them up as high as they would go to hold his big belly in!

Above, notice the "slippers" that all the k-3 students wear. Blue for boys and pink for girls. If only I had noticed the slippers before I started pointing out all the boys in the class!!!

Halloween in Korea

Halloween isn't celebrated in Korea, but I did my best to make it happen anyways!
For the entire month of October I did Halloween themed lessons with my kindergarten, grade one and grade two students. I don't think they fully understood how much fun Halloween can be, but they enjoyed the candy I gave them!

I had the most fun with my kindergartens because they are the most adorable and it is so much easier to do stuff with them since there are only seven students in the class. We made flying witch lollipops, and learned a Halloween song that includes actions for Halloween characters, and we did a mummy wrap contest.

Milton and I also celebrated Halloween night by dressing up. Since they don't have many props and costume stuff in Korea we had to get creative. Milton went as Clark Kent and I was the Paper Bag Princess - cheap and easy costumes with things we could find easily in Korea!

Our friends Lisa and Barry (also Guelph natives) joined us for dinner before we all headed to a local bar where all the foreigners hang out and where there was a Halloween party going on. Lisa was dressed as Hell Girl and Barry told us he was a dentist. I think he changed his story when people started asking if he was McDreamy from Grey's anatomy!

The party was a bit of a fundraiser for an orphanage in Mokpo that Lisa and Barry volunteer at. There was a good crowd of foreigners in costume there, but did we ever get some looks from Koreans when we were in the streets making our way to the party! They don't have forks in Korea and they don't know what Halloween is so imagine what they thought when they saw a giant fork walking down the street!

Celeb for a weekend

This weekend was quite a fun one! Milton and I had volunteered to participate in a weekend of cultural exchange with Korean Middle school students from around the province but were told little about it and we didn't imagine we would have as much fun as we did! The camp takes place over three days at this nice little retreat/educational facility in the mountains in Damyang (near Gwangju). This year was the 5th annual Seong-Am International Cultural Awareness Youth Camp to be exact and it is hosted by the International Youth Education Foundation which is a division of UNESCO. The Jeollanamdo office of education is an official sponsor and this is how we found out about the camp and were invited to participate.

It was an early start for Milton and I that morning. We were up at 5am and on the bus to Gwangju by 6:30, at the meeting spot at the National Museum in Gwangju just after 8am, where we were supposed to meet about 25 other volunteers and get on buses at 8:45. It turned out that we actually had to wait until 10am to leave the museum parking lot because the students were at the camp ahead of us and had something planned for our arrival that they scheduled for 10am. It was a bit of a long wait, but well worth it...

When we arrived at the camp all the students were gathered outside holding signs with our names to welcome us. I was the first one off the bus and first to walk through the screaming crowd of kids like i was some sort of famous celebrity. It was the most amazing welcome i have ever received!

Once we got inside we were directed to our seats in the auditorium for the official opening ceremony of the camp. We were each called up on stage one by one and greeted by our 3 students who would be our "buddies" for the weekend. They gave us our name tags and put them around our necks as if the were Olympic medals while all the other kids in the crowd cheered for us. I had two girls and one boy in my group, but you wont see any pictures of the boy because he was super shy and pretty much hid from us all weekend.

Be sure to get a good look at the poster they made me. I love the united Canadian-Korean flag!

The feeling of being famous didn't stop at our arrival. I have never received so much attention from people in my life! The entire weekend kids were asking if I wold pose for photos, they all wanted to touch my hair, the girls told be i looked like Barbie, and the boys all shouted "actress" and "movie star" whenever they saw me. My favourite story is that when two students from another group found out that I lived in Mokpo where they live, they screamed and jumped up and down and gave each other double high fives! It was a major ego boosting weekend but that's not the only reason it was so much fun...

The group of teachers was mostly made up of people from Canada and the USA, but a group of foreign university students were also participating in the weekend, and were from Nepal, China, Gabon, and Tanzania. Friday afternoon we all divided into teams to cook and share some food from our native countries. This was a really fun afternoon and such a good meal afterward! Our team made donuts using a traditional Christmas recipe from Quebec. Everyone loved our contribution and the kids loved getting their hands all mucky making them! We also ate some super spicy chicken dishes, tacos, french toast, different rice dishes, and lots other yummy non-Korean food for a change!

After dinner we were treated to a spectacular show! There was a clarinet concert, followed by ballet and modern dance, and then an unbelievable taekwondo performance. The kids doing taekwondo were the most impressive with the long routines they had to learn, the muscle control they demonstrated through the moves, and the height they got for the kicks!

At the end they even did a skipping routine where they had 3 jump ropes going at once, one inside the other!

As if that weren't enough excitement for one day, after the show, they took us all to an observatory that was located at the base of the mountain. We all got to look into the telescope at a star but it was less impressive than it sounds... it looked the same as a star seen with the naked eye, just a small bright dot surrounded by dark sky. It was still cool to see the observatory and how everything worked.



Saturday we started the day with a hike up the mountain. It was a fairly easy hike compared to what Milton and I have hiked here so far. We took this big group shot at the top. It was about a two hour hike and it gave us a good chance to talk and get to know our students better. My students were super shy and it was tough to get them to talk, but lots of other students were around and more eager to talk to me since i was "Barbie".



Saturday afternoon we made Mosaics representing our cultures. They all turned out really nice. we made them out of paper, but we were told that they would serve as the models for the real glass mosaics they would have made to be put on permanent display at the camp.




Saturday night was the big party night. The volunteers from each country were asked to put together a little something and put on a show for the kids. The Canadians played the spoons and sang "the good old hockey game" and the national anthem. There was a dance contest and karaoke afterwards and a big bonfire that was a bit more discomforting than it was warm:


Closing ceremonies were held Sunday morning and we were given time to take a few last photos with our students before lunch.
After lunch we were back on the buses to head the the bamboo museum and then home. the museum was a bit dull, but it was neat to see how much Koran's can do with bamboo - furniture, pipes, huts, baskets, boxes, wine, and more!



Overall it was a fabulous weekend and we can't believe that we were actually given a monetary "gift" for participating. We were happy to volunteer and had a great time hanging out with the other foreigners and with the students that we felt a bit guilty being paid for having so much fun!
We were happy to get home Sunday evening for a nice quiet night after all the excitement and to catch up on rest after all the activity.

Jinju Lantern Festival

How we spent our Thanksgiving weekend...

I found online that there was a big lantern festival going on in Jinju. We had stayed home last weekend, so we figured we deserved a treat this weekend and went to check it out. We hopped on a train Saturday morning and arrived in Jinju early afternoon. It wasn’t hard to find our way to the site as there was huge balloons flying in the sky anchored at the banks of the river where the festival was happening. We quickly found a hotel - a Love Motel, which is exactly what it sounds like! The rooms are often rented out to lovers who are hiding their affairs or young people who need to escape the watchful eyes of their parents. Travellers know though that these are also cheap, clean places to stay since they pretty much consist of no more than a bathroom and a bed. We checked in and dropped our bags and headed out to join the festivities.

The festival is held to commemorate the 70 000 fallen soldiers in a battle with Japan in the 1500’s. Our first few views of the festival were from the palace that sits up on a hill overlooking the river where all the action was. When I say lantern festival, you are probably picturing small paper lanterns lit with candles that light up the night. They did have these, but they also had a most impressive display of colourful floating lanterns. There was also a wall and tunnel of smaller hanging lanterns that we knew would be even more impressive at night. There were small paddle boats that you could rent to get closer to the lanterns and small boat cruises too, but Milton and I stayed onshore and kept busy with other activities.

Our first bit of fun was had as we dressed up in old traditional Korean costumes. Since we paid as a couple, we were given the couple costume…King and Queen! Milton got dressed first and I thought maybe they had our costumes mixed up because they started dressing him all in pink! Pink pants and a pink shirt, but it was no mistake. The boots were hilarious and so was the head gear. Milton had his turn to laugh too when he saw the hair they had me put on that weighed about 10 pounds. Not sure black hair really suits me ;)

There was a huge market that was said to be a “Korean products market”, which pretty mush meant tons of dried fish and other food vendors, and a few stands selling knock-off sportswear. We didn’t buy anything.

We stepped away from the action for a while to have dinner while we waited for it to get dark and for the fireworks to start. We ate a restaurant that said “country kitchen” on the sign, but that played nice jazz music and served Italian food. An interesting combo, but the food was good.
We quickly headed back to the hotel to get sweaters and then to the bridge over the river where we thought would be the best view of the fireworks. The fireworks were good – I always love fireworks, but I’ve been spoiled by seeing several of the firework competitions held in Montreal every summer and so this display was nothing to brag about. I think we missed the best part from where we were too, because we were on the bridge and couldn’t see at one point when they set off a bunch that were attached to the bottom of the bridge and created like a waterfall of white lights falling into the river (we could only see the reflection).

After the fireworks, we went back down to the tunnel of lanterns to see it all lit up, and also to see the lanterns that were made during the day as one of the festival activities. We also got to “make our own floating lantern” (it was made already but we attached pieces of paper on which we wrote our wishes) and then we sent it down the river.

This was the highlight of the night for us because there were two guys filming us as we wrote our wishes and then found us when we set our lantern afloat and asked if they could interview us. We of course were quick to agree thinking this was our big chance to make it big in Korea (yeah right!) and we did short interviews to speak of our impressions of the festival and they told us it would be on cable. We have no idea what channel or when but we are still saying we are stars! I also felt famous for a moment after that when some man begged me to pose in a photo with his three kids – for some people it is just so rare to see a white person, especially a blond. So see, I told you I am famous – there will be photos of me framed and hanging on the walls in houses all over Korea!

One last stop before we headed back to the hotel, Milton's favourite part of the night... the Princess Hotel cafe. Alright, i had to twist his arm a little bit, but he was a good sport and let me go into this cafe that any girl would love! The best part of it was that if you order a drink you get waffles and ice cream included in the "service". Korean are always giving away free food as part of what they call service, but this was a bit more generous than anything we've ever been given so far (usually its a free drink refill or maybe side dishes). So we paid $8 for my cappuccino and Milt's ice cream parfait, and the waitress brought us this plate of waffles and ice cream for free!

Sunday morning we had breakfast sandwiches at Dunkin’ Donuts (yum! A small taste of home) and then headed back to the grounds of the palace that we hadn’t had a chance to explore on Saturday. I was pretty impressed by how beautiful the grounds were but I think Milton was getting a bit bored. While I was trying to capture some of the beauty on camera this is what he was doing…

…trying to ruin my shots! He says that he felt inspired by the setting and that he was trying to imagine how it would have been to fight the invasion of the Japanese and that this was how he would fight them! We had a really good laugh and then got on our way.

Back home late Sunday afternoon and off to do groceries so we could make a thanksgiving dinner. It was a bit smaller than the meals we missed with our families and a bit quieter too, but it’s the best we could do. A whole roast chicken was stuffed as the substitute for turkey, and I made the Swiss Chalet sauce I’d been saving since we got here, so the meal was pretty darn good! We have no pumpkin pie, but pain perdu dans du crème a sucre is just as good, if not better!

It was a fabulous weekend and we are hoping that all of you are having a great thanksgiving weekend back home too!