Halloween and other updates

Annyong! I just thought I would give Nadia a break from typing and finally contribute to the blog again. So here’s just a few updates of what we’ve been up to recently. Last week was pretty busy for both of us. On Wednesday Nadia went to an English festival for the elementary schools in our area. She watched her students perform a musical for the other schools. The theme of the festival was school violence and bullying so many of the performances were addressing that issue to some degree. Apparently some students even did a rendition of “Gangnam Style,” where they changed the lyrics to make it an anti-bullying song. I hardly taught any classes last week (you do a lot of desk warming at this job) because my school had their career day on Wednesday, their sports day on Thursday, and their school festival on Friday. This basically meant that I had nothing to do on these days; however, on Thursday, right before I was about to go home, my co-teacher announced to me that I would be dancing with her and some other teachers in the festival the next day. She showed me a youtube video of the dance routine and basically said that I had from then until 2pm the next day to learn the routine. I repeatedly told her that I have two left feet and am a horrible dancer, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. At the festival the next day we rehearsed in the morning, but I had to run an English activity at lunch so I still didn’t know the full dance routine by the time we were about to perform it. We pulled it off in the end (with many mistakes), but it was actually a lot of fun.

            Friday night we had a few of our friends over and then went out in Bupyeong in our first round of Halloween costumes. Nadia and I went as a “mouple” (Korean matching couple); it was sort of a makeshift costume that we threw together right after school. I didn’t stay out late that night because I had to get up really early the next morning for another English festival at a different middle school. At the festival, I helped run an English activity outside under a tent. Regardless of the rain and cold weather, it was still a lot of fun. The activity was simple; I just got Korean students to do funny activities using English like jump up in the air and scream “potato.” I was laughing pretty hard the whole day. That night after the festival Nadia and I went into Hongdae in Seoul with our friends. We had booked a hostel near Hongik University the previous weekend so we just went right there to drop off our stuff and then headed out for the night. On Saturday night we all went out as the six animal cartoon characters from the smart phone game Anipang (a really popular cell phone game in Korea). Needless to say we got a lot of compliments on our costumes by Koreans. I was really tired from the festival, but it was still a lot of fun. It was great to see so many people all dressed up in costumes, because Korea doesn’t really celebrate Halloween.

            On Sunday we just had a relaxing day and got ready for the start of another week. I think were both still a little exhausted from the weekend. My co-teacher even said that my eyes looked tired and droopy this morning (they’re really blunt here). Anyways, we both send our love back home and will keep you updated again soon on our lives in crazy Korea. Everyday brings a new adventure.

The opening act at Nadia's English festival. Apparently they were in grade six and were amazing!

Nadia's students doing their musical performance.

Nadia's students singing songs from "Grease."

Our "mouple" - matching couple Halloween costumes. It was pretty easy to find two matching sweaters. They sell them everywhere!

Our Anipang costume. I was the cat and Nadia was the mouse.

The whole Anipang group!