I'm so glad it is almost the end of May. This past month has been the busiest since my whole time in Korea. I mentioned we had to decorate our classrooms, which had to be done by May 11th. It was a competition and I ended up getting second place, for 20,000W (twenty bucks) but that about averaged out to 1 dollar an hour for the extra time I put in.... but it actually turned out pretty cool.
This is the main wall for my Zoo theme. Luckily, I have one of the smaller classrooms, the only time this was a benefit!
I won't bore you with most of the details but May is the month for "Open Class" which is when all the children's moms come in and watch your class for an hour or so. This wouldn't seem so bad but a lot of stuff in Korea is for show, so instead of them coming to watch a regular day, we basically have all this fake stuff, that we never really do, but we do it for open class. In order to get the kids ready we have rehearsals... of course we don't tell the moms that! So on top of all the work that we have to finish each week, we've had to use any spare time to practice the games that we will play, the expressions that we'll be "learning" that day, except that they've gone over them 40 times before that... Anyway, it's the most important event all year, even bigger than Graduation was and about 10 times more stressful. My open class actually happens to be this morning, mine and Nico Teacher kick it off this morning and everyone else has theirs the rest of this week and next week. It will be really nice to get it over with but I'm still pretty nervous, hence why I'm up this early and have time to blog before work! After today it should be pretty nice, but then I have two birthday parties this week in my class which means getting NO work done at all! Not only does it take a long time to actually have the party, the kids have so much sugar in their system it's basically impossible to be productive after that! Then this week we also have to finish Progress Reports, which go out every 3 months to the kindergartners parents. We have to write 3 mini paragraphs about each kid (strengths, areas for improvement, and what the parents can do at home to help). It wasn't so bad when I only had 6 kids but 9 takes a lot longer!
So there is the month of May at work. Decorating, Open Class, and Progress Reports... June can't come soon enough.
On the up side, May has been a pretty exciting month for the weekends at least. Two weekends ago, May 12th and May 13th I got to visit one of my best friends from college and my old roommate Kayla in the city of Daegu! She came to Korea in February and this was the first time I got to see her. We had a lot of fun and it was great to see a familiar face from home! Rachel came with me, and we left Friday night and almost missed our train actually due to some misguided bus information, but luckily we made it just in time after running through the train station, budging in the check out line, and running to the platform. We had about 5 minutes to spare at the platform but better safe than sorry.
This past weekend was also really fun. I didn't do much Friday because work has been so exhausting lately and Saturday we were planning on going hiking. The weather has been in the high 70s, low 80s so it's been really nice (except for my classroom turning into a sauna). So Rachel (Canadian Rachel, one of the new people), Christine and I went hiking. We took a wrong bus though and ended up at a different starting point than we ususally do. We figured it must connect somewhere but it never did, so we ended up in Suwon (a neighboring city) and had to take a bus and a taxi back home! haha oh well... That night we went into Seoul because there was a parade going on to kick off Buddha's Birthday. Christianity is actually the main religion here but Buddhism is second. Buddha's Birthday is May 28th but the parade sort of kicked off the whole week and warning off evil spirits or something along those lines? It was a fun parade though, there was lots of cool lanterns, some people playing instruments, the usual. There wasn't any candy being thrown which was quite disappointing though!
Sunday we went to the Korean amusement park Everland! Almost every week I have a student that says they're going to go to Everland that weekend, or went to Everland. Everland, Everland, Everland. I decided it was being added to my list of things to do. It's definitely not as big as Disneyworld by any means, but maybe a bigger version of Valleyfair? Maybe the same size? I'm bad at estimating those types of things... But we got there at 9:30, the opening time, (after an hour bus ride) and the line for the Safari Tour was already 50 minutes. I thought it was worth it though because we got pretty close to the lions, white tigers, bears, AND a LIGER! Yes, a mix between a lion and a tiger that I thought was a fake combination made up in Napolean Dynamite.
http://s1068.photobucket.com/albums/u451/mfaricy2/
Well, have a great week everyone! It's my brother Ryan's birthday May 23rd and mine and Danny's anniversary on May 24th, so good thing this week is busy so I won't be so homesick! I need to go get ready for work. Wish me luck on my open class!
Love, Meghan
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