Shamrachaun

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Hope you all are wearing green and dancing to Irish music!

"Do they celebrate St. Patrick's Day in Korea?" Well now that you ask, yes! While I think it is mainly organized by the Irish expats here rather than the all of the Irish Koreans (...), but celebrations are put on all over the country! Little America, not one to miss out on a holiday, also participates in the festivities. To start our day (Friday) we had a field trip with the kindergarteners to an art center nearby to watch a play.

We settled our kids into their seats along with about 100 other students (younger than our group....) I was hoping this play would be entertaining enough to keep these kids attentions for a long time, because if they start to get restless we might have a problem on our hands. It began well! A silly puppet show about a rabbit and a tiger with a toothache. The students enjoyed it, laughing and participating. Then things turned weird. Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" started playing and the cute fluffy puppets were exchanged for shadow puppets and trippy colored lights. This portion followed a caterpillar being born until turning into a butterfly. While this would have been a very cute idea, the fact that Vivaldi's piece is 45 minutes long and most of the kids in the audience have the attention span of about 45 seconds, I could tell we were going to have some issues. Throughout the shadow puppet caterpillar portion, I think I counted 8 kids leaving in tears in the arms of their teachers. I was wondering if I could cry and get to go play outside of the theater as well, but I didn't test that theory. Keep in mind also that the play was obviously in Korean, so as easy as the story was to follow, some of the intricate plot points were lost on us foreign teachers.

Not really sure why

They even had cute bathroom stalls

Ready to be entertained?

Overall, the kids said they enjoyed it. My girls said the caterpillars and butterflies were "so cute! beautiful" (of course. everything is cute and beautiful).




We made our way back to Little America for lunch and our St. Patrick's Day celebration! The students were all in their green and ready to learn about the history of the holiday from Amanda Teacher. She made a power point with pictures and maps and everything! I am explaining Easter to the students later this month...Amanda set the bar high for my presentations. Maybe I should look into live bunnies or something.

How does he sit like that??

Totally focused on Amanda Teacher

She went through the slides explaining about St. Patrick's life and the different symbols of the holiday. At the end the students answered questions about what they had learned and received candy as their prize. One of my favorite answers had to be to the questions "What is the green plant called with four leaves?"-- "Shamrachaun!" So close. So very close. she got her candy prize despite the invention of an incredible new word. The brand new students to the school worked so hard to raise their hands and say the words aloud (after the answer had been whispered in their ear to remind them). It was really sweet to see how excited they got when they remembered a word though! They are so smart it blows my mind.

Of course we can't just have a power point lesson to celebrate the holiday, we need to make a craft! The students created bright green dunce-cap style hats with pictures of leprechauns and pots of gold. Soon these hats became unicorn horns or in some cases, lances.

 

 

Watch out for this guy!

I love getting to celebrate with the students and teach them about other holidays around the world. While I don't think they really get WHY we wear green and color pictures of small men with beards, they enjoy the fun and games! After a long morning and then a longer afternoon with the elementary students, it was time to do some celebrating of our own! Friday night we stayed local and enjoyed a night of jenga and apples to apples (yes we are super cool, you're jealous) then Saturday we headed to an outdoor festival in Seoul with hundreds of other people! There is a square outside a huge shopping center in Sindorim, and it's here that the various tents for food, clothing, and face painting as well as a stage in the middle was set up. The weather was really nice when the sun came out on our little patch of grass. We enjoyed people watching and listening to some good Irish music. Coming from Bucheon where there are not too many foreigners to a celebration like this with hundreds of people from around the world is fun for a day. I kind of enjoy getting back to my own little town afterwards though. Maybe I'm just a homebody. But anyways, we met some new friends and saw some old friends! 

dancing in the crowd

For dinner we traveled back to Bucheon. I was shown a bar similar to Suzie Q's with a great record collection! Now I know that I don't have to go all the way out to Hongdae when I want to hear some great music. Granted this place is teeeeeny tiny so you can't bring 100 of your closest friends, but for a more intimate group setting it is perfect. The night ended with some drinks, darts, and pool. Such a fun St. Patrick's day!

No it is only 4 DAYS until Mum, Dad, and Edward arrive here!! I am not going to be able to focus on Monday and Tuesday...this will be difficult. My kids all know about them coming though and they use that to get me off topic in class. All they have to say is "When is your family here?" even though they know exactly when they arrive and I go off on a tangent about how excited I am and what we are going to do! I guess these kids aren't too different from mine at home after all haha smart little boogers. 

Anyways- SO excited :) Can't wait to see them! The next blog will be all of our adventures! 

Oh, before I leave off I have to tell you all the story about my Saturday morning. I went to Homeplus (similar to a Walmart with groceries/clothes/appliances/etc.) and was looking for something green to wear for the festival that afternoon. I had about an hour before I needed to meet up with Katrina, Seol, and Kaitie so I didn't have time to wander around. As I went to buy a green scarf I found, I looked in my purse and my wallet was not inside...I tried to remain calm and see if it was in my pockets or had just fallen out, but as I realized it was not anywhere around my location a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach formed. In my wallet is my Alien card, my bank cards, my insurance card, and all the other forms of ID I have. I knew I brought my wallet with me because I had opened it just before at another scarf stand. So it was in Homeplus somewhere. I retraced my steps around the store, asking some shop owners if they had seen it (in my very limited Korean, it basically looked like this- *point to my purse* *make a square with my hands* "brown color(in korean)" *make an x with hands* "don't have (also Korean). Unfortunately this had no effect. When I realized it wasn't anywhere I had walked past yet I went to ask some employees for help. None of them spoke much English. One lady realized what I was talking about and lead me to the section where they sell wallets. While I appreciated it, I was hoping to find my old one before purchasing a new one. 

Using her phone translation we came to an understanding of my situation. At this point my stoic, calm, poker face was slowly melting, realizing that this was going to change the course of the next few days...as I wrote my number down and described what the wallet looked like I was making a plan of action in my head for how to get all new ID cards and explain this to Solomon on Monday. If I was in any other country I know that there would be a possibility of my wallet being stolen, but in Korea that thought honestly wouldn't cross my mind. I know that someone must have picked it up. Just then a woman and her daughter walked up holding something small and brown! She tried to explain in Korean, something about me running and her finding it, I didn't much focus on her explanation. I broke down (sorry to admit that) but the relief of seeing my wallet in her hands was overwhelming. I gave her a huge hug, which I think surprised her, but I don't care. I said thank you about 100 times. I think I scared her young daughter- who is this crazy foreigner crying all over my mom?? But I got my wallet back and left immediately to get ready for the celebrations later that day. Such an emotional roller coaster of a day. Not the best way to spend a morning, but hey it all ended well.

 

xoxo

Korean word of the post: 분실 한 지갑 (boonsheel han jeegap) "A lost wallet"