The Great Indoors

Greetings,

If you were to play the classic Sesame Street game "one of these things is not like the other" with Korean cities the answer would always be Gyeongju . Located just 40 minutes from our bathroom Gyeongju is a rarity in Korea. It's amazingly clean, sparsely populated, and full of temples and relics older than even Jo. In fact, it was the capital of Korea during the Silla kingdom between the 7th and 9th centuries.

It was because of all this that we were really excited when we found out that the next English camp would be held in this beautiful city. As you probably remember from our previous posts, English camps are where we take 10 or so children on a sleep-over in someone's apartment and play games with them for hours on end. Not a bad way to make a living. Usually this takes place place in Ulsan but last weekend our boss rented a couple of condo's in Gyeongju. She also upped the number of children to 18 (dear god) and thankfully added a third english teacher to help us maintain order and the strict discipline that Jo and I are known for. :)

Here's a shot of the condominium resort where we stayed. The complex was massive and contained everything from a waterpark, to a PC room, to a Karaoke bar, to ... well that was about it actually. But the place was really nice and a lot better than our apartment, so it was a good change for a few hours.

We didn't spend that much time inside though, as the bulk of camping entails games and then more games.

Here's a good shot of every fat kid's nightmare in P.E.:

Ahhh, the much feared Duck Duck Goose. A great game to play if you can manage to make it around the circle before your competition. But, for those of us who were a wee bit pudgy in grade school it represents failure...utter and complete failure. Sorry, I lost myself in memories there for a second. Thankfully most of the children loved Duck Duck Goose and manged to avoid killing each other in the process.


We had planned to hand out Mc Chicken burgers but the sponsorship deal fell through and the kids had to settle for oranges.

You might not understand the point of this picture but we included it to show you the student in the pink pants (Jo's note: actually, we included the picture to show my team winning the three-legged race). The poor girl is a magnet for pain and someone managed to get hurt during every game. When we played Red Rover she hurt her wrist when a student ran into her, and then later closelined herself WWF-style trying to break through the opposing side's defenses. Then during soccer she got nailed in the head by a 15 year-old boy who was trying to clear the ball down the field. The poor girl. She even managed to get hurt during the pit fighting and the skydiving too.

One of the perks of "Camp" is giving all of the children English names. It's great. Within seconds Hyun Soo becomes Paul, Young Do becomes Owen, and Che Chong becomes Oprah (just kidding). Usually we name the kids after movie stars, friends, or family. Though we did name the girl in the pink pants Uma. Haha, still laughing about that.

A classic shot of good old fashioned Futbol. Only seconds after this photo was taken little Uma was airlifted to Japan for reconstructive surgery.

Ahh, who doesn't love Red Rover? Well, the boy in the yellow and black shirt didn't. That poor little guy is in middle school and was one of the two older children duped into coming because they thought some other older girls would be there too. Imagine their suprise when they got into the van and realized it was just them with sixteen 10 and 12 year olds, and a full two days of Duck Duck Goose and Red Rover ahead of them. Haha, poor bastards.

Here's little Won Joon. There's no real story behind this picture other than he was one of the cutest kids there and clearly has a future of ultimate fighting ahead of him.

All I can say is thank God for wordsearches. Sweet, sweet, wordsearches. Nothing works as well when you need to kill an hour and calm a brood of rambunctious children.

Another "cute" shot. Here's little Yay Jin. She's only eight but she already speaks better English than I do. In fact, just yesterday she was correcting my use of dangling participles.

Here's Joanna teaching them something or other. The guy in the green t-shirt is Sufwan, a part-time teacher at our academy. He was born in Bangledesh, raised in Australia, and now lives with his father in Ulsan. He's about to head to Texas for a while. One of the cool things about living abroad is you meet so many people that seem to have traveled everywhere. Suddenly my tales of driving to Beaverdel just aren't as cool.

Here's our boss's son being trippled-teamed. I had to help him by running in and whupping some butt in the form of the classic Hulk Hogan Gorilla Press.


Here's a shot of one of the students "camped" out (pardon the pun). Poor little Owen looks like he's about done for.

Anyway, the weekend was pretty cool and it was great to see a little bit of Gyeongju. We're planning to go back at New Years and explore even more.

Alright, so that's what, three or four posts about teaching? I promise that the next post will be about something that doesn't involve singing, Red Rover, Halloween, or World War 2 (just testing your skills at the "one of these things is not like the other" game).

Cheers

Shayne