Visiting a Korean Kindergarten

About a month ago, Sasha got to visit a Korean Kindergarten class with her Year One gang.
They didn't need parent volunteers so I didn't get to go, but I gave her my camera (after massive promises not to drop it, or leave it behind) and she took it with her and took all these amazing shots, or handed it to a teacher to get some great shots. What an awesome little journalist! They were told to dress up nicely the way they would in their home country or to wear their school uniform. This is the last picture I took of Amarachi, Naomi, and Sasha in the school courtyard before I took off.

So Sasha is the "guest blogger" today. She will dictate to me and I will write it all down:
Here's Sasha:
This is a picture I took of Marco and Quinn. Marco is dressed in a traditional Croatian outfit and Quinn is dressed in Korean "Hanbok".

This is a picture I took on the bus of my friends Sanjana (left) and Soobin. We were driving to the Korean School. We were excited!

Here I am waiting for a performance to begin. The Korean kids put on a show for us!

The first group: They did a dance and hit little drums with sticks.

 Another shot:

Here are the kids from the Hyundai Foreign School being a good audience!

Here is the next group: They did a really great performance. It was a drumming and singing and dancing performance!

Then the kids from our school sang the Korean kids a traditional song that we had learned in Korean!

Then the Korean children were a great audience for us!

You can see me singing in this picture:

Here's me after all the performances. We were waiting our turn to play some traditional Korean games.

This beautiful Korean girl is just my age and I really liked her Hanbok.

I got to try this game:

You have to balance a beanbag on your head and then let it fall and knock a block down. It's harder than it looks!

This is another cool thing I got to try. It's like a small teeter-totter. Someone sits in the middle and then a person on the end jumps and makes the other person go up. It was crazy!

I had such a good field trip. I was glad I got to take the camera with me. It was really difficult being there in some ways just because I couldn't talk to the Korean kids and I couldn't understand them. The games were hard too because it was the first time for me trying Korean games. I liked the performances and I liked giving a performance. They also gave us some little Korean treats. One looked like a waffle but it was shaped like a stop-sign. I didn't like it. Then they gave us a Capri-Sun and a little round cookie and I like both of those. I would rather go to my school than a Korean school because everyone at my school speaks English!

Whew! What a Week!

What a Week! I know you had to wait a little longer for this one, but you get 3, count 'em 3 video links so no wingeing.  That's pronounced Win-jing, and it's an Aussie term that means to whine and complain. Integrate it into your vocab, it's my favorite new term. 

So first of all it turns out that we left the kids pillows (with their blankies and animals inside) in Goseung. TEDDY'S BLANKIE. WAS LEFT. E-P-I-C!!! Of course we panicked and called Edan who's first words were "You lost your CHILDREN?!?!" and we had to tell him no, no -we lost the Children's PILLOWS. Ahh the language barrier. So that was the comedy routine of the week. Either Jeff or myself would just bust out "You lost your CHILDREN?!?!"and then start laughing like mad. I mean, c'mon the poor man must have had like a nano second of stark, raving terror. Can you imagine his thoughts? 

"These flippin' wegugins lose their kids and drive all the way back to ULSAN before they call me and now I have to find missing wegugin midgets. Who to call first? The dinosaur museum people? The cops? What if I can't get 'em back?"

But then he realized it was just the pillows and in true Edan miracle fashion, he showed up with the pillows on Wednesday. When we came I told Jeff that we were going to have to get him something really nice from the states and then a few weeks into it I said Ok, like we have to get him an engraved iPod, but I'm thinking that by the time we leave we'll pretty much owe him a BMW. So the picture above is Teddy reunited with his blankie seconds after Edan brought it back to us. Laaaaaa!

Teddy's class had a bake sale this week. They sang to the year above them and all the Moms and then sold their goods. Here he is all ready to sing. Sooo excited!

 

I didn't get video of the group routine, but I did get the solo version the night before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGoFhPIBh18

Here's the whole group:

He was at a table with his BFF Ryota (more about that later) and Shreyan:

They were awesome little salesmen and sold out of all their stuff. Quite proud!

So that was Thursday. On Friday there was a St. Paddy's day party in the clubhouse and they asked if we would bring the fiddles and bust out a few tunes. I said yes, but remembering that the last time Sasha said she would play in public she ended up crawling into a cabinet and hiding, I was prepared to play solo. The kid stepped right up though, and went for it, playing brilliantly. The proud look on her face when the clubhouse broke out in applause for her was priceless! I forgot to bring the camera, but my friend Aurora saved the day and recorded both tunes on her iphone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83aJtX-6aLU

So then Saturday we had Sasha's birthday party. We did it a week early because next week starts school vacation and a lot of people are taking off so we thought no one would be around. She had a Mom and Daughter Craft/Tea party with a flower, butterfly and bug theme. One of the ladies in the compound is a professional baker and she made these cupcakes for the party. They were AMAZING, and tasted even better than they looked if you can imagine. Click the picture and check out the detail. Totally great - I can't wait to see what she does with Dinosaurs next month!

We made 4 kinds of finger sandwiches and cut them out with heart, flower and butterfly cookie cutters and did a fruit tray, a veggie tray and some other snacks. Here she is with her food table:

We set up the room so there was 4 craft tables and then the rest set up for lunch afterwards. Had to take this picture of the outfit. You can take the girl out of Texas but you can't take Texas out of the girl am I right?

Here's the B-day girl and pals working on butterfly suncatchers:

And a while later...Sasha's at the far table coloring in a fuzzy book mark:

Crafters hard at work:

Here she is opening her presents, in her fluffy skirt, surrounded by wonderful friends and just totally in heaven!

And a little bit later mackin' on a delicious cupcake...

 A b-day vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFMYvPa-udQ

Ingrid got her a Hanbok (Traditional Korean Dress) for the Kit or Emily. Don't know where they got it from, but it's one of those things she will probably pass down to her kids some day. Beautiful!

So that was Saturday. Sunday Team Stolasz was in charge of laying out the Hash route. We did it in Ulgi park - that place with the cool rocks and the bridges and all. We also stashed a geocache out there and sent the hashers after it with 12 clues. It was a big success and the kids loved the treasure hunt aspect of it so that was fun to have our hash so well received. No pictures because I had to run the course 3 times, first to put it all up, then to monitor the process during the hash and then to take it all down so I was super busy (but got a great workout!)

In other news. Teddy has a best friend. His name in Ryota and he is from Japan and might be the cutest, sweetest child on the planet. They are in the middle of a full scale Bromance and literally will both start weeping and wailing at the end of the school day if they have to say goodbye to each other. His big sis Mizuki, is in Sasha's class though and his mom and I have found that if you have to do something with the girls or lunch duty or whatever, that its just way easier to tag team it with T and R, so they get to spend lots of time together. Here they are Monday afternoon because Akie - Ryota's mom had lunch duty.

They have a really sweet friendship, especially since Ryota is as quiet and gentle as Teddy. When they play together there is no running, karate kicks, pig piling or anything - in fact you have to check on them to make sure they are still there! They will play dinos together almost non-verbally with just little quiet comments to each other or work on a puzzle together and silently hand each other the pieces that the other one needs. They're like a pair of 8o year old ladies. It's hysterical! 

We did find out though that life is much easier if we always send our kid to the other one's house with their lunch. Apparently there is no union of the set between what an American kid eats and what a Japanese kid eats and the one day Ryota came without his own food, It took me many tries before I got him something he would eat (Apple with no skin and a noodle cup). That worried me because he is also the lightest almost 4 year old in the world. I once carried him all the way down to the clubhouse and all the way back up the hill to our apt and it was like carrying a loaf of bread. He's tiny! Ted just told me that he did not want to go to school tomorrow and I told him that Ryota will be there and he paused and said. "I want to go then..." It's just adorable and sweet and fun to see Teddy with his very own BFF!

So that's all the news that's fit to print. We have international week this week and then a week off from school (what to do, what to do...) and then Japan! So lots to look forward to. Love to all!

The Korean Dinosaur Museum!!

This weekend we finally managed to get Teddy to the Dinosaur Museum in Goseung, South Korea. This area of the country has mad fossils and tons of footprint sites. It's a huge complex that includes a nice little museum, a dino playground, TONS of really realistic statues, a topiary area, an observatory, a fossilized footprint site, and a hiking path with a really cool suspension bridge. We ran up the hill and into the museum. Here we are in the 3rd gallery which is the first time Teddy would slow down long enough for a picture!

OOOh man, to get into the Cretaceous hall, you had to pass through this tunnel!

Aaauuugh, the jaws are closing. The kids wanted to play in this guy's mouth for a while which would have been fine if it wasn't an exhibit entrance. We created a traffic jam at one point...

In the Cretaceous exhibit there are all these animatronic dinosaurs. Teddy was spellbound!

After flying through the exhibits we raced outside to check out the grounds. Here he is shouting "Baryonx! A fish eater!" He's such a dino nerd it's CRAZY!!

Sasha heading down a dino slide:

Pterosaur, one of our family favs since we are hopeless "Dinosaur Train" Junkies....

Here you can see the observatory in the background with some of the hedge creatures. Hedge animals have always freaked me out since I read "The Shining" in middle school. No way you'd catch me out here after dark with these guys around. I'm not even sure I'm talking about the dinosaurs, those creepy kids are waaaay worse....

They played on this playground for a long time and made friends with some Korean kids.

Here is Teddy on a wave cut terrace (Geology!!) where there are some nice dino footprints exposed.

A few fossilized footprints. They are really amazing and I actually got wet-eye thinking about the dinos that made them....guess that makes me a nerd AND a softie.

We went into some sea caves (don't think we were supposed to. Being illiterate has it's advantages) And there were holes through to the other side of the headland. COOL!

Of course we all had to crawl through. So much cooler than going back up the official stairs to get to the other side.

Fossilized trackway. Dope.

We then hiked the rest of the path and went up the suspension bridge and got back up to the museum. I read in the Unofficial Guide to Disney World (ding!) that it's important for toddlers to do things twice because it's only when they know exactly what they are getting into and yet still volunteer to do it that they feel the pride of mastery. I could tell from Ted's insane speed the first time through that he was just taking stock of the place and when we got back up to the museum and asked him if he wanted to start over his answer was a resounding "YES!!". So we started back at the front entrance and did the whole thing a second time at a more leisurely pace which was great. Here is Sasha and her Korean buddy that she made the 2nd time we went to the play area.

I made a video of the trip to the museum. Here is the link. I will try to post all of my vids to youtube because the viewing window for Blogspot is just awful:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y340Bu0kTRI


So that was our exciting weekend.  Next this week, a bake sale for Teddy's class, Sasha's Birthday party on Saturday, and then on Sunday Team Stolasz is in charge of setting the Hash route. So I have one or two things to do this week. Sasha is sooo excited for her party!

She is doing a Mother/Daughter craft and tea party. Hooray for Moms and their girls!

We will let you know how it all goes down!

More Korean Observations.

Man I sure could go for a bowl of Corn Chex right now. Crunchy goodness... so this Sunday's blog will kind of be a fruit salad of little tidbits of info that have been saved up over the last few weeks. I have several Korean Observations (KO's) for those of you who are just joining us, so we'll go back and forth. Sorry if I give you whiplash.
Speaking of food, it's really not that bad here. There is a Costco in Busan and while you may not be able to get the exact type and brand you are used to, you can always find a generic version. So I do miss Corn Chex but I have lots of other cereals to choose from and I have a stash of Rold Golds hidden in the pantry. (I give the kids the generic Korean pretzels, they're too young to have good taste anyway...).  The only exception to this rule is baked goods which I have discussed before - they like to put mysterious centers in their rolls and stuff, and I have now been to several B-day parties and can report that Korean cake tastes like NOTHING. Like a mouthful of packing peanuts lightly sprinkled with sugar. Sooo not worth the calories. But, it makes it easier to do the low-carb thing, so you have to look on the bright side!
KO #1: Koreans eat things that are NOT FOOD. I will give you 2 examples:

The following 2 side dishes were given to me with a recent meal. Both defy description. The thing on the left is some kind of bright yellow root vegetable with the texture of a water chestnut (yuck) and the flavor of a cleaning product. They have tried to disguise the fact that this is NOT FOOD by putting their omnipresent Korean red sauce on it, but I am not that easy to fool. I was not able to discreetly swallow this item. And I can suck it up and and swallow some weird stuff. Had to spit it into my napkin and rinse my mouth. On a scale of 1 to NOT FOOD, this scores an 11. All I can think is that their ancestors must have been really, REALLY hard up at some point. When we were all in the hunter gatherer stage we tried it and spat it out and said, "Yo, Brak (or Thor, Ubu, insert cave person name of choice...) tried this yellow root, and it's NOT FOOD. It may even be poison Bro..." and then we moved on to potatoes or some other yummy option. The Korean hunter/gatherers however were obviously in a situation where they had to classify as food anything they could physically masticate and swallow without either projectile vomiting or death as a result. Poor, poor bastards....
The item on the right is Kelp. Now I could get this down, but it was nasty, salty, and incredibly, jaw-numbingly hard to chew - and nothing about the experience inspired me to take a second bite. If I was starving on a beach, I would go for it, but to pay for it in a restaurant, and eat it with free will when there are other delicious options??!?! They must be crazy!
   Of course, having been raised by survivalists, I can't help putting the emergency, "end of the world" Y2K, massive volcanic eruption, socio-economic breakdown spin on things, and I have decided that in any of the aforementioned scenarios, the Koreans will really have a huge leg up on the rest of the world. We'll be whining and starving and all out of viable food, and they'll be down at the beach eating kelp and getting along just fine thank-you as they wait for all the wegugin idiots to die off from starvation so they can then eat OUR kelp. When you eat things that are NOT FOOD, you have a whoooole lot more options in a survival situation.
   Example 2. Damn I wish I had a picture of this, but I VOW to get you one folks... We were at Costco and lining up for delicious Costco Dogs and I noticed that many, many people had a big plate of what looked like mustard colored baby poop. Hmm. Checked the menu. Nothing weird on there there that I can see, same old standard Costco choices that you find all over the world. Could it be that there is an offering only written in Korean since they think the Wegugin contingent would never be interested? So I asked my friend Soon about this (she was with me) and she's Korean and gave me the whole scoop. Koreans like Costco dogs and a coke just as much as the next person, but they just can't fathom eating a meal without their multitude of side-dishes. So what do they do? They go over to the hotdog fixins area, get a heaping plate of onions, add ketchup and mustard, mix it all together and... tadaaa! A side dish. Not a topping, mind you - a platter of condiments that they eat by itself with a spoon. I am going to repeat this: They make a dish out of condiments. And eat it. And think it's great. Wow. We do that too, but only if you're the main character in a Lifetime Original Movie, living in a singlewide trailer with 5 kids and your husband has left you and it's the "rock bottom" scene of the film where you cry and vow that you and your children will never have to make a meal out of condiments again.


Moving on:


KO #2: Shopping in Korea. Where oh where do I start on this one? So there is, as I stated in the last blog, an incredible mix of old and new here. We went to Busan last weekend on an organized trip and they had a really nice shopping street with any kind of high-end store you could think of. There was Patagonia, Levi's, designer boutiques, you name it. It was almost a step-up from the Old Mill district in Bend or Market Street in the Woodlands. There were these little golden animals all down the sides of the street, presumably so you could get your bearings or have a place to meet your friends "Meet me at the golden pig at 3 ok?" and such.

If you venture down the narrow, steamy side streets however you get to kick it "old school" and check out all kinds of funky little hole-in-the-wall stores selling everything from clothes to chocolate covered seaweed (an actual item, purchased by yours truly. It was chocolate, so I had to try it right? NAS-TY.) to simmering pots of God knows what. So just within the space of a few city blocks you can mingle with the bold and the beautiful, or go taste adventure (literally) in the alleyways. It's nice to have options.
If you go into the high end shops, you get your own personal stalker. This is a salesperson who comes over, and invades your personal space to the point where you know what they had for lunch and whether or not they have good pores. They follow you around, wipe off or re-fold anything you pick up, and will actually start taking things out of your hands and putting them back for you. At first I was kind of insulted and assumed they thought I was going to shoplift or something. I soon learned that they do this to everyone and consider it being "helpful". Which makes browsing extremely stressful. Last weekend I tried to find hiking shoes. Went to a few places that didn't have any women's shoes big enough for my size 9's. Wow. Went to one store and found a sale pair that was 8 and 1/2 and felt pretty good. The problem was that the sales lady would not sell them to me. I don't speak Korean and she didn't speak English but I guess she got the gist that I am normally a size 9 and that I was going for the smaller pair. I said "It's Ok!, OK, they feel good. This works!" She took the shoes and cluched them to her chest and shook her head and went "No Good! No Good!" And wouldn't give me the damn shoes!! So finally we got some other person with limited English to help out and it turns out that she didn't want me to have them because when you hike you're supposed to get a size larger, and since these were slightly smaller that I normally wear, she was pretty sure that buying them would ruin my life and send me into a downward spiral of drug use and depression. I said that it was no problem, and that that they felt good and my toes had space and everything, and they STILL WOULDN'T GIVE ME THE SHOES! I had the money in my hand and they wouldn't do it. I had to walk away. They take customer service to a whole new level.
   I ended up buying Men's shoes at the 5th store. The lady chased me out of the store and gave me a really nice pair of hiking socks. That's another thing about Korean shopping, it doesn't matter what you buy, they love to throw in a freebie. Even my milk comes with a few yogerts taped to the side, and when you buy cereal, you get anything from free tupperwear to free socks. Don't know what I'm going to do when I get back to the states and my cereal doesn't come with free socks anymore...


KO#3: They love hierarchy, and somebody has to be the low man on the totem pole. We have seen this again and again. In Jeff's company the lowest executive has to scurry around at business meetings, serving everybody tea, coffee or beer depending on the situation. And it's always him, and they just keep him RUNNING! Poor guy must be praying for a new hire so he can move up a notch. Jeff says it's like watching a pledge at a frat party. I got my haircut last week and there was the main guy that cut my hair, and then there was the pledge. He stood next to the main guy and swept up hair. Not when the haircut was over mind you, but all. through. the haircut. He swept up the floor every minute or so, he brushed me off with a little brush all throughout the experience, and when the main dude was doing the front, he actually caught the hair on a little tray so it wouldn't fall in my face. Really! And you could tell that these 2 guys weren't going out for coffee or a couple of beers together after work. It was a master/peon relationship to the nth degree.
  About my haircut. You know in Houston I went for short hair, (which I love) and I went to a nice, high end salon to get it cut the first couple of times. Here's how it goes down when I go to a new place:
Me: "Ok, I like it kind of short and choppy, and layered and I like it to just kind of do it's own thing"
High End Salon Artisan: "And what is your daily regimen?"
Me: "My regimen?"
HESA: "Yes, like what kinds of product do you use and do you curl, blowdry, flat iron or what"
Me: "Um Yeah.... I don't do any of those things."
HESA: "So what can you commit to?"
Me: "On some days it will get combed"
HESA: "What?!?"
Me: "Ok, MOST. On Most days it will get combed"
HESA: "Ok, well I have some wonderful product lines to introduce you to!"
Me: "Hmmm, I don't think I can commit to product."
HESA: "How about blowdrying, can you commit to that?"
Me: "Dude, I would love to make you happy and lie right now, but it's not going to happen. So the parameters for the cut are on most days it will get combed. Do the best you can under those conditions. C'mon I have great hair and it does really interesting things all on it's own. Each day is like a nice little surprise!"
So then the HESA goes into the back and cries for a while but then they get a pep-talk from their fellow HESA's and they re-group and come out and do a great job and charge me $60. So after about 4 times of this, I went to Great Clips after a haircut. Showed the girl my hair and asked her if she could do that. She said she could totally do it. So I went to her. And she gave me the same exact same haircut for $12 in a quarter of the time. I mean the chick was like Edward Scissor Hands. In and out in 15 minutes. No product pitches, no wringing of hands over my inability to commit to "regimes".  I loved that woman - she totally got me.
So now I am in Korea and I figure I will go get it cut once and that will decide whether or not I can continue with short hair or just say "forget it" and grow it out. Ask the girls where to go and they say "Tony and Guy - downtown." Ok, so right away you know that if a salon is featured in Vogue Magazine, I got no business going there, but I put my game face on and in I go.
HESA gives me lots of pictures to look at, none of them are really my cut so I give him my shpiel about just keep it short and cute and let it do it's own thing, and he looks truly frightened. I tell him (via translator) "Just go for it, jump right in - I believe in you!" and he proceeds to give me a great haircut, but with massive, painstaking attention to detail. Took over an hour and I think at some points he was literally cutting it one hair at a time. At the end he did the product, style thing and I felt truly guilty. I'm thinking, "It's windy out, I have no car and this little style thing will be all done within one city block. Don't throw your pearls to swine dude..." but there was no way to tell him that so I just sat and watched the Master/Peon relationship play itself out. At least it was entertaining....