Sports Day!

I know it doesn't really count, but this is the speed I got from my school :o It's also not relevant to this blog post...

Anyway, SPORTS DAY! :D

The day after the festival came Sports Day... And it was manic. I knew I was in for some trouble when I heard the blowing of horns and chanting as I wandered into school for the day at about 8:15am. In an almost tribal fashion each homeroom class had their own 'uniform' that the kids bought themselves, their own chants, warpaint, and rivals. Also, each class had their own section on the school playing ground to cheer on their team in, I presume to minimize fights.

I chose to stick with my co-teacher's homeroom class - class 1-8 - for the entirety of the chaotic Sports fest. Kitted out in pink t-shirts and animal-ear headbands, we looked pretty badass :P

For the record, I did not wear a pink t-shirt... although I was forced to wear a cat-eared headband for about 10 minutes by one of the more... assertive/scary students :P

This is 'one of the more assertive scary students' leading the tribe:

It's not really surprising that our team won the 'loudest class' award, is it? :o

After a few words from the Principal and the Korean national anthem, the games kicked off. First up!.... jump-rope.

Now, jump-rope is really popular amongst kids in Korea. When I ask questions in class like 'what are you good at?' they often come back with 'jump-rope'. And, yeah, they're pretty good at it.

The kids line up diagonally with two kids working the rope. Then, yeah, they jump over the rope... Tough stuff eh?

Next up was tug-of-war! Apparently, my co-teacher had a lot of confidence in our team. Remember the girl who forced me to wear the headband? Hye Lim her name is, and according to my co-teach she is 'strong' lol.. Needless to say, 1-8 won the tug-of-war, mainly thanks to Hye Lim I'd say. Good times :)

The next event was mental and would definitely be banned under 'health and safety' in the UK.

The game involves all the students in the class. Two students (it helps if they're tall) train another student (it helps if they're small) along an ever replenishing line of students' bent over using their backs as stepping stones for the small kid to run across... I'll just upload another video:

And then after this an even more mental game reared it's head! I'm not sure what it's called, but I'm gonna call it 'Charge at your friends and get rope burn game'...

One kid actually got rope burn and he wandered off crying while the chaos continued... :o Genuinely looked liked amazing fun though...

After this there was what I consider to be 'real' sports: relay race and... er thats it. So plenty of tug of war, rope based games then but a cheeky bit of shot put or high jump is out of the question :'( Ah well, it was better than any sports day I've ever had on all accounts.

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My otherworldly net connection

Just because :)

Go to www.speedtest.net and test to see how yours compares to my beast of a net connection here in Incheon, South Korea :P

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School Festival!!

School festival day was a couple of weeks back now - I've just been too busy to whack up a blog about it... Well, let's say a mixture of lazy and busy. Anyway, the school festival is when each homeroom class ('tutor group' in the UK) sort out a theme for their homeroom and kids can go in and out of each room and check out what they're friends are up to. It was really fun :) Unfortunately, I couldn't really wander the classrooms myself as I had to do my own theme game! I called it 'Lee's Treasure Hunt' but the Korean teachers changed it to 'MISSION' 'cause apparently the student know what this means - you have to say it in a Korean accent though otherwise they won't understand (roughly said like 'Mee-shun').

Basically, what the 'mission' involved was the students running around the school looking for clues and each clue would then lead them onto another clue. Each clue sheet had a letter written on it. Once they had collected all of the letters and worked out the anagram that the letters formed, then they had completed the mission! I thought only a handful of students would try it and then I could pack up early and wander around the school enjoying the festival with the kids... However, tons of students turned up and, to my surprise, actually worked out the clues quite quickly - a lot of the clues weren't easy, for example 'look underneath the staircase to the first floor' requires a bit of work for some of the less able kids. The prizes were pens that one of my co-teachers gave me to give away. I think one guy thought he was going to get candy or something really special because he was away for ages and when he finally came back with the answer and I gave him the pen as a reward he looked like a man who'd just been ripped off at the bookies :P Like he was gonna give me a 'piece of his mind'...

These are some students who took part in the mission:

They completed it pretty sharpish.

Class 1-7 had a cool game room going. Needless to say, this was my favourite room. I turned up and a couple of girls were dressed in cool costumes, there was music blaring, and it was packed full of kids getting keen about games like Jenga and Chess :) Great fun.

I played (and won) a game of Jenga versus this girl hehe >:P Owned her.

(Of course) There was a Starcraft tournament in the computer room. Again, packed full of kids. They were clicking the mouse faster than I could do with my elderly 23 year-old fingers...

A selection of creepy masks that the students made for the festival :)

Next up: Sports Day! :o

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Korea F1

This weekend just gone me, Sarah, Chris and Amy (two mates from England who came over for the race and a holiday) all went down to Mokpo to watch the F1. Took the KTX, which was hassle free, played Trivial Pursuit on the way down on Sarah's iPod touch and slept on the way back because it was gone midnight... We turned up at the race track after a great night at the hotel with the friendliest hotel manager in the world (he had a small Paris Baguette cake waiting for us when we turned up, gave us a lift to the shuttle bus AND when Sarah left her phone at the hotel he posted it to her a couple of days later... great bloke) at around 11am ready for the Hyundai series race an hour or so later.

This is when things started to go wrong.

It had rained quite hard the night before so it was all muddy. Very muddy. We had to buy cheap plastic ponchos because there was a constant light rain that wasn't going away. There was also a long, arduous walk around the track to do anything, i.e. get the tickets, get food/merchandise etc. But we couldn't get any food in the end because no one was selling any... thousands of people and not ONE food vendor. Apparently, a lot of people had got wind of this and brought their own food (either that or they thought that food would be too expensive and cleverly brought a lunch of their own). So we were starving. And wet.

The track was so sodden with water that the race was delayed by an hour to see if it would dry up. It never really but they started the race anyway, albeit behind the safety car for like 20-odd laps. As soon as the safety car buggered off though the race was awesome :)

Here are some pictures:

Yes, Dad and Ryan, we had a flag :) Were we on telly? I doubt it.. I never saw one TV camera the whole race...

Good close up picture of some of the racers that Sarah took. Alonso looks smug. It's like he already knows he'll win.

Nice picture of me and Sarah in our ponchos and F1 lanyards :)

F1 gets underway!! It was seriously so exciting. Saw a few cool overtaking maneuvers down the straight and saw a couple of crashes and this:

Uh oh... Vettel's out. His car was on fire and after he got out of his car he hopped on the back of a moped and zipped off lol.

This was the view for a long time :P As you can hear the cars are soooooo loud. They gave us ear plugs, which I didn't use because I'd feel lame if I put em in, but they were definitely needed. This video was taken when they were going 'slowly' behind the safety car too, so you can imagine the noise when they are going full throttle... and we were on the huge straight. Great experience it was.

Still, an awesome race weekend at Yeongam, Korea! Let's hope Korea gets it's act properly together for next year and spruce up the place a bit :P

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Sports day preliminaries

Turned up to class today (class 2-5) to find no bugger there and a load of kids shouting at me to go outside and watch the football. This took a while for them to get across because I initially thought that they were winding me up and their English was shocking. I also thought I might've got prior warning that I got to watch football instead of trawl through the textbook with the kids, but this is Korea after all and I've gotten used to it :P

Here's a few pictures I shoddily took of the game:

The kids, and even one of my co-teachers who was sitting next to me, were well keen about the game. My co-teacher kept like slapping me on the back when things happened, cheering really loudly... It was the Final of the group to see who progresses into next weeks Sports Day. Serious stuff.

The game ended in a goalless draw with penalties to come and it was pretty tense, as you can see by all the nail biting going on in the picture above :P

This is our glorious playing field. Almost as dusty as my apartment :P

The game ended 5-4 on penalties with class 2-5 (the team I was cheering on) beating class 2-3.

If this was tense, imagine next weeks Sports Day...

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Cool Korea: Update

I haven't seen the show, but for all you One Piece fans out there (Sarah and Tea Leaf..) here is a particularly time consuming piece of graffiti that I found on one of my students desks:

I asked the girl sitting behind it if she had done it and she sort of nodded sheepishly in that kind of 'I'm gonna be honest in the hope that my honesty saves me from punishment' way. Then I asked her if I could take a photo and her face beamed :)

One of these days I might get around to teaching...

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Cool Korea, Part Three: Stargate and Gorillas

I found the extra pictures that I was going to use for this blog, so here I am writing it as the class I was supposed to teach got cancelled because of Sports Day preliminaries.

Starting off with a mug. No, it's not a picture of myself... It's a mug that I was given in a restaurant months ago that I thought was, and still is, hilarious. I took 4 pictures of the mug from different angles.. Can you spot the odd one out?

They aren't hiring thousands of native English teachers for nothing you know... I wouldn't be surprised if this mug was designed by a native English guy for his own amusement actually.

Coolness rating: 8/10 - I cracked up.

Koreans love their manga (Japanese comic books). I took this photo in a manga rental shop (that also hired out some DVDs). Here they didn't just have the standard shelving to house their massive collection, oh no, they had two extra layers of shelving behind the normal shelves that you could slide away to get to the hidden manga behind it.

Also, it's mostly quiet at lunchtime here at Myeonghyun middle school because there are about 200 kids in the library reading manga... To be honest, I'd be reading it too if it wasn't all in Korean :'(

Coolness rating: 9/10 - there's nothing uncool about a shop full of manga :P

In Korea there are many frilly little, girly places dotted around that you stroll into when your on a date and have some cake, papingsu, and/or coffee. They are essentially desert places where you sit in relative comfort in your own little booth and have a chat with your woman about whatever over desert. This is one we went to in Bucheon. It was larger than most we've been to, looked as girly as ever, cheesecake was nice... Wait a minute... is that a f-ing Stargate?

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Yes. Yes, it was a Stargate. I was sitting there eating cheesecake and sipping at coffee for 20 minutes without realising this pansy-ass place had a bloody Stargate as the entrance. The glass door was even frosted to make it look like the event horizon... I don't know why or how, but it's there.

Coolness rating: 10/10 - Bit of Stargate while I'm having a cheeky coffee never hurts :P

This is my desk at work. I'd like to say that it isn't usually this messy but that would be lying (as I'm writing this blog I have a half eaten ddeok just sitting there in it's packet sitting on top of a pile of lesson plans, my headphones strewn across the desk, and an old newpaper from last week...). Anyway, this picture shows how much they've been plugging Starcraft II over here. I've seen ads everywhere from the side of Lotteria (the Korean equivalent of McDonalds) drinks cups (pictured) to on the side of buses. I've been suckered in and bought the game.. I'm really bad at it :/

Coolness rating: 6/10 - Everytime I ask a student what he did on the weekend 9/10 times the conversation goes like this:

Lee: What did you do on the weekend?

Student: Computer game.

Lee: Which computer game did you play?

Student: Starcraft? (In that 'you probably don't know what game I'm talking about' kind of way)

Lee: Of course you did.

It's starting to get annoying.

Finally, here is a picture of a drunk/crazy guy on the subway. Notice no one is helping him or even looking at him (except us, of course). He was staggering around trying to sit down next to that poor girl in pink but kept falling over. He was shouting at people and ended up emptying out most of carriage :P

Coolness rating: 7/10 - I see it all too often...

And that concludes my lame little series on what I've called 'Cool Korea' :)

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