**Please note that this post is littered with links to youtube videos. If you do nothing else, PLEASE watch these videos. They sum up every minute of my life in Korea pretty thoroughly**
Thursday was Sports Day at my school. I figured I could post some pictures from that for your viewing pleasure. Sports Day is supposed to be a Korean equivalent to American Field Day. Naturally, it's just a bit different to better fit Korean culture and expectations. So, at an all-girls school such as mine, Sports Day is more like "dance" day in that the majority of the activities are choreographed dances to various Korean songs. My co-teacher, Hye-sun told me that this year's sports day was scaled back significantly due to Swine Flu. I'm not entirely clear why swine flu would necessitate the minimizing of an outdoor, healthy activity, but whatever. So, the day went more or less like this:
1. Opening Ceremony type thing: The head gym teacher spoke, the principal spoke. Some students spoke. I understood nothing. Par for the course. The students sang the national anthem (I think), then they sang the school song (I think). One of the girls lead the singing like a conductor, which was interesting. I don't know if she was doing it right, but it seemed like a completely arbitrary hand waving. Then the fun stuff began.
2. Relay races. Like 4x4 relay races. On a NOT track. I don't know exactly what to call their play yard. It's mostly clay, packed tightly, and extremely dusty with a negative amount of traction. Now, regarding the races themselves, each grade has 6 classes, so each grade had two heats that were like semis or something, so grade 1, classes 1-3 raced, and then 4-6. Then grade 2, classes 1-3, 4-6, etc. Then later at the end of the day, the top two from each heat in each grade raced for grade championships (I think). Keep in mind that no one spoke any English during any event, and no one explained anything that was happening. Now how each class chose the students is a mystery to me. Only 4 students in each class of 30-38 raced, naturally, and you would think that each class would send their 4 fastest students. However, the runners in most of the races were REALLY slow. Part of this is due, in my opinion, to the utter repulsion that Korean girls typically feel towards any kind of sport-like physical activity. I also think that the girls that ran are probably just the four girls who were least shy, because, in my experience, only the 5-8 most outgoing girls participate in anything that isn't giggling and whispering. The last oddity is that in one heat, all the girls ran barefoot. I think thy believed that running barefoot would benefit them. I don't know why. Additionally, they still wore their socks. It was completely bizarre.
3. DANCING. This was by far the best part of sports day as almost all of the classes choreographed and performed a dance to a Korean song. All the grade ones performed, 5/6 of
grade 2s and half the grade 3s. They all chose really popular Kpop songs, which obviously worked perfectly for me. Some of the classes had really really really impressively well choreographed dances. My favorites were a grade 1 class that had two really great dancers for a
2ne1 song,
where they perfectly mimicked parts of the dances; a grade 2 class that did G-Dragon's
Heartbreaker (one of my top 5 kpop songs currently; WATCH THE VIDEO NOW) and had two girls who practice Hapkido (Korean martial arts). Every girl had a cane that is sometimes used in Hapkido as a weapon, and danced with that, and for certain parts, everyone squatted down while the two girls did hapkido moves, and flips and shit. IT WAS SO
COOL. I almost peed my pants. Those two girls are super badass. They are also two of the most athletic people at my school, bar none. My other favorite was a grade 2 class that did a dance to not a kpop song. Instead it was a big band/swing type song and the girls were dressed to the nines, with black pants, and huge black bow ties and painted on suspenders on white shirts and also had little canes/walking sticks that they used as props. Also, that class's homeroom teacher danced with them, which is super cool.
3. Jump Rope. Instead of individual jumping rope, each class did it individually. So basically, two girls would spin the rope, and everyone would line up and jump once and then out. I guess they were counting who had the most jumps completed in a certain amount of time, but each girl only got to jump once, and then got back in line on the other side and jumped through again. It was weird.
4. TUG OF WAR. In Korean, i guess it's called a lover's pull (or something like that), which I think is just precious. Again, they did it in rounds. Plus the teachers competed against parents of students (I don't know why but there were a LOT of parents there watching). The teachers lost, but I think there were fewer teachers than parents participating, and so the numbers weren't even. That, or the teachers SUCK. That was really fun.
5. Finals of Relay Races. Same slow running. There was one really quick girl who was really short, but the rest of the girls on her team SUCKED at running, and so she was the last leg and had so much ground to make up and couldn't. sad face.
6. Bonus dance performance from the best dancers. SUPER JUNIOR-
SORRY SORRY DANCE. Oh my god, so amazing(please focus on 2:33 of the video). Plus
10 out of 10 by 2pm. It was so goooooooood. It was a compilation of those two songs plus I think 3 more, and they absolutely rocked it. They were awesome.
7. Closing ceremonies.
Now for various other pictures:
Grade 3, Class 2
Grade 2, Class 3- Note how many students are hiding. This is typical.
Grade 1, Class 1 dancing- The girl in the middle was really good at dancing. She, along with the girl in the red shorts and the girl nest to her (our right) are the biggest troublemakers I have)
Grade 3s HILARIOUS- The girls to the left is a total clown.
Yu Eun-Bin- She comes in to talk to me everyday and is really funny. She wants to be a comedy actress when she grows up. I think she can do it.
My troublemakers hard at work, acting like cats, haha. As annoying as they can be in class, they are adorable.
Da-Eun asked if I could give her a ride. I basically do everything my students tell me to do. I dance a lot, sing a lot, look at lots of kpop group pictures AND....
let my students paint my face with hearts, take compulsory Korean posey self portraits, and then walk home having forgotten about the hearts and buy stuff from the convenience store and have people look at me like I am actually crazy. Good times.
Then it was lunch time, and we had a delicious lunch with lots of fruit and ddok (korean sweet rice cake which is somehow both too chewy and too dry for my liking, but it super popular here). Then I practiced my dance for the English festival with my students until 3, when I went to the
new gym that was just built to play volleyball with the teachers against the teachers of the boy's school next door. There was another American English teacher there who was almost as tall as me, which is unfair since he is a dude, and thus clearly going to wreck me at volleyball. I dove a lot to get to the ball (because it was going all over the place due to the teachers generally being not great at volleyball) and I got holes in the knees of my pants because I had no knee pads. :-( Also, lots of bruises on my knees. No good. We ended up losing, but it was close (went to 3 games) and the last was a tight match. After that, we went back to the boys school cafeteria for AMERICAN STYLE BARBECUE. oh my god, talk about the perfect finish to the perfect day. Smoked pork with american barbecue sauce. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. No one except me ate the american bbq sauce and instead went with the gochujjang, which is spicy pepper sauce. This is good because I single handedly finished off all the american bbq sauce in sight. Now if only we could get some mac&cheese to this country, my life could really be perfect and happy here.
Also, I want to let everyone know about one other amazing amazing amazing Korean song that I am currently OBSESSED with. SHINee's
Ring Ding Dong. And yes, it is based/ripped/borrowed from Dr. Dre's
Ring Ding Dong from the 90s
