DoGae School Festival

Last Friday my school had a festival! The video above is of my students practicing for their dance. These are middle schoolers. I worry about some of their dance moves, lol.

For this festival I was required to make an English trivia style game for the students to participate in. Basically we started with Yes or No questions, such as "Texas is the biggest state in America? Yes or no?" Then they had to run to either the X side or the O side. This narrowed the group down to ten students eventually, who then had to answer questions on a dry-erase board. We gave prizes to the winning students then moved on to the opening ceremony which consisted of many balloons.

Considering my school always complains that they have low funding, they sure were able to put on one hell of a festival with fire, bubbles, and smoke coming from the stage lol. The entertainment portion began with performances from "Daegu University" students. The put on a musical, danced, sang, brought out some random animals, performed a magic show & did some taekwondo. The monkeys were my favorite. When the announcer said "anyanghaseo" (hello) the monkeys all bowed at the same time. :)

After their performances it was time for our own students to start what I call their version of a "talent show." During the prior weeks I had seen some of my classes practicing their dances (like the first video on here), so I was excited to see the final product. There were about 20 performances, but my camera battery decided to die about half way through it. I mainly got pictures/videos of the middle school students. Wish I could have captured all of them because the high school students did great as well. Here are the ones I did manage to take videos of:

Middle School Grade 3

There are no words for this student lol (Middle School Grade 3)

Middle School Grade 1

High School Grade 2

I just realized that Blogger now allows me to upload pics very fast! It used to take hours to upload videos. In summary of the festival, it was highly entertaining. Like I said, some of their dance moves and wardrobe choices frightened me a bit, but it was all in fun! I know they enjoyed it considering they are studying half of their lives at school.

Tomorrow I will venture to Tongyeong, a city towards to southern part of South Korea for a field trip with the company I work for, EPIK. Two days off of work and all we have to do in return is write an essay about our trip! Works for me! :)

XOXO,

Amanda

Halloween - Korean Style!

With the massive population of foreigners in Korea, of course everyone decided to dress up & show the Koreans what Halloween is all about! A couple weeks ago I even did an entire lesson about Halloween for my students, lol. My mother also managed to send me some candy for a few of my classes, which I gave them last week. It was funny to see their faces when they tried some of the different candies like candy corn & "super bubble" bubble gum :)

My group of friends had originally planned on doing a group costume, but each of us live in different cities so it was hard to have time to prepare. Three of the girls ended up going as rock,paper, scissors...which is funny because that's how Koreans solve all their problems, with that game!

Kristin, Whitney, & Sophia

I had no idea what to be and considering the lack of readily available supplies in Korea, it wasn't that easy to just whip up a costume! Finally I decided to take Kristin's idea of simply being a "road." Yes, a road. Now there were many options of what kinda road to be, but I settled on the NON "sexual innuendo" road of "Road to Success" lol. The only tricky part of the costume was making my yellow "road stripes" stay on my black dress. Once I figured that out, all that was left to do was make signs to go with it. A friend gave me the idea of a "curves ahead" sign and a "toll booth ahead" sign. Considering we were in bars, the appropriate toll fee on my sign was 1 drink.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, we spent Friday night working on our costumes, went paragliding Saturday morning/day, then came back to Daegu to finish the costumes for Saturday night. Of course we pre-drank a bit and had fun getting ready.

Our Daria looks a bit like Thelma here, 

Amy busting out some dance moves

 Scissors kill Paper!!

Maggie all dressed up

Most of our group

Eventually we made it downtown. It was so much fun to see what kind of costumes people were able to come up with! The following pictures are random interesting costumes that I stumbled upon.

An entire box of crayons

 Soju...Korea's infamous alcholic drink

 I found a penguin!

 Nicely done party guy!

 Well, it's obvious, one of us is gonna have to change! LOL

Two boys from the movie UP!

 ANGRY BIRDS!! They had the whole group behind them

 Another appropriate Korea costume...FAN DEATH!

And here are some pictures from the randomness of the night:

Ladybug Maggie & El Dia De Los Muertos Jinae

 I found more roads!!

 Was going for the "rocky road" theme picture, 

but creepy clown joined the pic

 Paper Kristin & her best friends...crayons!

So, what was the result of such a busy weekend? Well, here's a picture of exactly how tired the road was around 4am. Sadly I was not passed out from being drunk...just from tiredness, lol. 

XOXO,

Amanda

Birthdays & Paragliding

The weekend after the song festival was spent in Busan. I took it easy Friday night for once, then headed to Busan on Saturday to hang out with my friends. I actually got lucky and ran into quite a few different groups of friends at the bar we went to in Busan. It was nice to briefly catch up with everyone.

Now up to this past weekend. Since Jinae and Kristin both had birthday in October, Jinae arranged for us girls to go paragliding for their birthday celebration. Even though it was a bit pricey, I am always willing to try something new & exciting. Now it wasn't as risky as skydiving or anything, but it was still flying in the sky which sounded awesome to me!

Here are some pics from Kristin's b-day dinner this past Tuesday. Since Gumi is only a 30 minute train ride from Daegu I joined everyone for dinner. 

So, back to the paragliding story. We had to wake up super early Saturday morning to make sure we got seats on the 7am bus to the town about 2 hours from Daegu. That Friday night we spent just taking it easy and working on our Halloween costumes for Saturday evening. 

Once we got to Mungyeong it had started to drizzle rain. Luckily it never fully rained so we were still able to do our jumps. There were 13 of us along with another group of foreigners and a Korean family. So with three groups we had a bit of down time waiting for our turn. We broke our group up into 2 jumps. I went with the first group :) 

We rode in this massive truck that took us up the winding mountain to the top. The fall foliage and mountain scenery was beautiful, despite the rain and clouds. Once we arrived to the top it was time to get suited up in our gear.

After we were suited up, our instructor attached themselves to our backs. That was when he said "Ok, 1, 2, 3, run off the mountain!" It took a couple tries to get the parachute up and going, but finally we were in the air! I took my camera with me, with it tied tightly to my wrist of course, so I managed to take a video and some pictures of my own. Not sure how high we were up in the air, but it felt amazing!

Since we had such a big group going, we asked for a discount. The guy said he couldn't give us a discount, but he would include video and pictures for everyone. So here are a couple of the pics from the camera they provided:

After our group's jump we went back to the waiting area. Actually while waiting for the second group to go (due to the rain) all of us decided to play with our cash that we had brought to pay with. Since it was 110,000WON per person we decided to "make it rain" with our stack of WON. The video's we took are priceless! We even managed to find some music to match the occasion. I'm sure the Koreans watching from outside were highly entertained. Here are a couple pics from our silliness:

Of course, picking up the money off the ground wasn't as much fun as throwing it in the air and dancing under it, lol. Still a fun time! Finally the rain let up enough for the other half of girls to do their jump. Afterwards we snapped a group pic & then headed back to Daegu to get ready for the Halloween festivities. 

XOXO,

Amanda

Asia Song Festival

Free VIP tickets to the Asia song festival? Sure, why not?! I had heard about this K-pop concert awhile back but didn't think much of it until my friends said they were going. Daegu seemed to be handing out tickets for free, not sure if it was just for foreigners or not, but we managed to get our names on the list.

However, we almost didn't make it due to the bright idea of going out downtown the night before. We had the bright idea to save money and pre-drink at Kristin's house. Well I'm sure you can guess the result of that. The next afternoon we were dragging as we attempted to get some food & head across town for the concert. By the time we got there we were somewhat re-charged.

OUR GROUP

The stadium was slowly filling up as we found our seats on the grass field. At this point the weather was amazing. It was a little cold, but not bad. Once the concert started the screams began. There were three young Korean girls behind us who had deafening screams, especially when the more popular groups were performing.

BEAST FANS

BEAST

G.NA & DANCERS

G.NA

We also made a friend. This cute little boy kept wanting his picture taken & eventually he insisted on taking our pictures. About 2 or 3 hours (felt like it atleast) we were starting to get ready for the main performance, which was Girls Generation. It's a group composed of like 9 girls. All of these K-Pop groups remind me of our phase of boy bands in the 90's lol.

OUR FRIEND THE PHOTOGRAPHER

So just as we think it's getting near time for them to perform, it starts drizzling. The stadium did not have a roof & of course none of us had brought umbrellas because the weather was so nice that day. Finally we decided to run off the field. I didn't mind a little rain, but my camera and phone are not quite waterproof! So we ran & huddled under the covered part of the stadium where an old man was "oh so conveniently" selling ponchos. We grabbed our $2 ponchos & decided it was best to leave since there was such a big crowd leaving. Of course, we take a few steps back outside & the rain had already let up. By this point we were just ready to leave. Overall, the music was enjoyable & the dancing was entertaining. Even though we didn't know enough of the lyrics to sing along lol.

We finished our night by going downtown once again. However, the lack of energy from everyone turned it into an earlier night than the one before.

XOXO,
Amanda