I'm (Slightly) Famous

While shopping at my neighborhood convenience store last week, the clerk informed me that he is a newspaper columnist. He asked me if I would be interested in doing an interview and taking a few pictures with my students. I said OK, of course, so the man visited my school during lunch last thursday and conducted the interview.

I have a link to the online version of the article here, just click on the paper with a picture of a boat on the cover and go to page 24. It's also available in print, so if you are currently in Seosan just go to a paper box and pick up a free copy of 'Go Cha Ro Plus'.

He asked me maybe 7 or 8 questions, and he seemed interested in whether I would be willing to marry a Korean woman, have kids, and raise them here. I told them I am open the that possibility but I wouldn't want to raise a kid here. The school system is a little too ridiculous. He also knew I was a musician, so I told him about our band Iron Kimchee and how we have a show in a few weeks.

One thing I maybe shouldn't have said was when he asked me what is different about Korea and USA. I was on the spot and couldn't think of many things, and I told him that it's dirtier here. It got printed. Oops, sorry Korea.

Please, Stop that Racket

We have this interesting problem at school: a shop two doors down is having some kind of amazing sale, and to promote it they are blasting ridiculous and loud dance music during my entire afternoon schedule. It is loud enough that we can hear every word of every song clear as day inside of my classroom. To make things worse (maybe better?) there are two girls who dance on platforms in front of traffic right in front of the store. All of the time it's either two girls dancing to music, or sometimes one of the girls picks up a microphone and starts yapping about the sale they are having. I went and took some video with my camera:

In the video I'm not sure if the girls just don't want me taking pictures of them, or if it's illegal or something, but I don't really care.

Today I was giving my fourth and fifth grade class a test, which is supposed to be silent. The whole time the music is just blaring, and I'm singing along in my head to Lil' John while he sings "shots shots shots...shots shots shots shots shots...everybody....etc." Please make it stop. Please.

It was a Monster Mash

Following the children's Halloween party was a more grown up party for the near-adults that live in Seosan. We all went to the beach, this place called Mallipo which is about 45 minutes away by bus. It took place in what is called a pension. This is where a room can be rented with a kitchen and a bunch of blankets and stuff for sleeping. We slept about 20 crazy drunk people in the room.

The night included a lot of drinking and a lot of cool costumes. It was also the going away party for a popular foreigner in Seosan named Sam. I tried to load a video onto here, but it ended up being about 1 gigabyte of data, so sorry about that. I do have picture of some of the cooler costumes, so enjoy:

Terry as Aburahame Lincoen.

Jake in the tracksuit from Kill Bill and a crazy mask, with Jordy as a Scotsman.

Here is the beach and a beautiful sunset.

A very Harry Potter sunset with Kinsey and Larry

Joe as an Indian call center employee

Skeleton Kelsey and Sam as Kelly Kapowski

Megan and Rob as Luke and Leia

Michael as Santa and Wil as an Ahjuma

Jordy played a bagpipe concert for us outside of the room, which I'm sure the neighbors loved

Megan, Kelsey, and me as Zombie John Lennon

So those are the best costumes that I took pictures of, there were actually a lot of other cool ones that I didn't have my camera around for. The highlight of the night was when Kelsey kept getting texts from a Korean guy in Seoul, and then kept calling. We had Joe answer the phone as Indian call center guy, and had a conversation with him for about 10 minutes. I have about 4 mintues of HD video of it, but it's too big to fit on the site, so sorry.

That's it for Halloween, but I'm going to try to do a lot of blogging soon to clear out my backlog. Keep reading!

A Happy Halloween

I figure I better use up the material I have from Halloween since I don't want it to become stale and its already a week past the holiday. Anyway, for those who don't know, Halloween is the biggest holiday of the year at my school. The school is decorated starting in October, then the week of more decorations come in, and then the day of it gets ridiculous. All of the windows are blacked out, a haunted house is made in our computer lab, and all of the kids dress up in costumes.

I'll get to some of the costumes first, and then more on the haunted house later. Here is probably my favorite costume of all the kids. This is a 5 year old named William as a vampire:

Here is 6 year old Martin as a Batman Zoro hybrid I think:

Tom, 7, as some kind of masked vampire (Rex is in the back picking his nose):

This kid as a toy soldier is Kevin, but I usually call him Candy to rile him up:

Lucy as something. Maybe a witch?

So now the haunted house. The kids brought in loads of boxes to make kind of a maze inside of our biggest room. We had about 150 boxes which were stacked to form the walls of the maze, then black plastic wrap is put over all of them. There are a few other decorations inside, including this fortune teller's head inside of a bubble that you can see below:

Anyway, for the haunted house, all of the lights are turned off and the kids are sent to crawl under table thing. Then waiting around a corner was Kelsey who jumped out and scared them. Then they came to the next corner and I jumped out to get them, and they had to go back and go past Kelsey. Then another teacher chased them around the rest of the maze, including one part where I could reach my hand through a hole in the boxes and grab at their legs.

So every kid in the school was forced to go through this thing, which I found somewhat terrifying myself. I would say over half of the kindergarteners cried for their mommies, but it didn't matter if they cried because they were forced to finish the rest of the haunted house. Here is a picture of Joseph while I am scaring him:

Most of the 6 and 7 year olds calmed down, but for some reason the teachers kept going with terrorizing the 5 year olds. One teacher ran into their room in a goblin mask to frighten them while Kelsey was trying to calm them. This went on for minutes, and Kelsey claimed that by the time they finally left them alone, her pants were soaked in tears. Soaked in tears.

So I'm going to leave on a happy note, anyway. My second favorite costume is this kid Alex who went as a male policeman stripper: