Salon Du Deliciousness

Another week to update you on! It has still been freezing here though no more snow yet which is a lovely gift from the sky. I don't know how many more times I can push my luck at not falling down on my way to work before I dramatically wipe out on a patch of 3 inch thick ice... At the moment I am still accident free!

This past week was a bit of a whirlwind. On Friday I had my open class so naturally the Korean teachers were doing what they do best and running around all flustered about things being perfect as I try to keep out of their way. They feel a lot of pressure from the parents to have a perfect lesson and presentation overall on open house day. The students would complete a lesson with me, then present their speeches about their favorite animals, and lastly they show their jazz dance that they have been working on with the yoga/dance teacher.

Not only did we practice my lesson 4 times that week before Friday so the kids would be like robots on the actual day of open class, they also recited their speech 5 too many times on that Friday morning before their parents arrived! Talk about a bit of over kill but that is just the way they do things here. I decided to take on the roll of stress reliever throughout the week. Instead of lessons, sometimes I would just have the kids do silly dances or sing songs to have them act their age. Several of my students broke down in tears when they forgot their speech for a split second while reciting it to me. Needless to say I became a giver-of-hugs-and-love for those in need, and even those not in need.

The stage for open class dances

On the day I was feeling a little more nervous, but only because I would have my 10 students, their parents and siblings, my co-teacher, and both of my bosses watching and video taping the lesson. After being a little shaky writing the date on the board I controlled myself and completed a great lesson on past tense verbs. My students were wonderful and completed their speeches as well as their dances perfectly! Side note- their costumes for the jazz dance must have been made by a blind relative of Richard Simmons after drinking 10 cups of coffee...

Yikes...

Overall the dance was entertaining. It was to "Moves Like Jagger" which is one of those songs that have the annoying quality of getting stuck in your head even after just thinking of the title (sorry...)

After open class was finally over it was time for some fun and games. Kids have to be kids afterall.

super cute Jane

My version of apples to apples

After we packed the kindergarteners home, it was time to prepare for Market day with the Elementary students. Over the past 6 months the students have been collecting points from various contests and teachers to use on this day. Each class was transformed into a different themed area for students to use their points. This included a game room, snack bar, stationary store, sweets store, toy store, and olympics game room.

Alex setting up the Toy Store

Head of the Stationary Store

I was in charge of the game room!

This CD has brought me through my childhood. Time to spread the love!

Snack bar- popcorn/hot dogs/dukbokki/paninis

Two of my favorites, Mable and Jenny, enjoying their snack

The whole Market Day was a blur of students coming in and out each room spending points and filling their bags with trinkets and snacks. By the time all of the students left I wanted to lay on the floor and sleep. No time for that of course- Katrina, Shanna, Amanda, Tina and I were off to Alex's for a night of yummy food and good company!

We made our way to Alex's apartment where one of the first things I noticed was the fact that she has two fridges...One is a kimchi fridge! I had heard about them but have never seen one. As I opened each drawer, they were stocked to the brim with Tupperware filled with kimchi. One drawer was cabbage kimchi from last year, another was cabbage kimchi from this year, and the last was raddish kimchi. Now...there was enough kimchi in there to feed a small country for a year. Alex informed me that her mother-in-law kept them well stocked. The understatement of the century.

Dinner time! Alex went all out and prepared an amazing spread of fillings for our rice paper wraps. As she set each new plate on the table the pools of drool collected on our plates (not really, that's actually kind of gross). When we finally tucked in, the table wasn't visible under all of the plates of veggies, egg, noodles, duck, chicken, shrimp and several sauces to combine together into our own wrap creations. This dinner just proves the theory that a colorful dinner is a healthy dinner. I think every color was represented!

duck, pineapple, sprouts, egg

all wrapped and ready to eat!

Tina enjoying the noodles!

After we were all sufficiently stuffed full of food and wine, what better way to work it all off than Fruit Ninja Kinect competitions? If you aren't familiar with fruit ninja, the goal is to slice up as much fruit as you can as it is tossed up in front of you. Some good clean fun! An excellent arm workout as well!

Shanna and Tina battling it out

The night was so much fun! We played kinect as well as a horrible card game called Take-6 which I am officially the most terrible player on the planet. We decided it was the chair I was sitting in...thanks for trying to make me feel better guys! I am going to miss Shanna, Tina, and Alex as they are ALL leaving in March leaving Katrina and I to fend for ourselves! Hopefully we will have another one of these nights before that happens!

Saturday it was the day of the Chocolate festival in Seoul! Shanna and I made our way to the COEX Mall which is a few stops past Gangnam (obviously we had to stop in the Gangnam subway station to get a picture with the sign). This mall is about 5 times the size of the biggest mall you can think of...the Chocolate festival was on the 4th floor in a giant convention all filled with booths and displays of endless chocolate. The show "Salon Du Chocolat" tours the world sharing new chocolate companies and other art forms to whoever wants to explore the festival. We not only tasted all sorts of chocolate, we saw a few demos of French chefs making some chocolate creations, heard a few bands play some great renditions of "Dancing Queen" and "You Raise Me Up". The best chocolate I tried all day had to be the camel-milk chocolate from a company in Dubai. We struck up a conversation with one of the creators who invited us for a tasting with a Korean blogger and her translator. Honestly, I think he was just excited to explain his chocolate to English speakers who seemed genuinely interested in the camel-milking process. The chocolate was much lighter than others as the camel milk is more watery than cow milk. While the company couldn't sell their chocolate due to immigration laws, they could hand it out with donations...a W2,000 donation would get you a small bar and a W10,000 donation gets you a large bar. Gotta love loop holes! Especially now that I have a bar of orange macadamia nut camel-milk chocolate in my fridge right now...it's calling me.

 

 

Teasing

 

What we were really waiting for was the chocolate fashion show at the end of the festival. I think in our heads we had this vision of girls wearing entire outfits made out of chocolate. While chocolate was involved in the outfits, some just looked like they were given a bag of dove heart chocolate and a hot glue gun.

Still an entertaining show. The random performances during the show included a 3 second magic show with a girl pulling flowers out of the air, a rapper...and two hippies with headbands and a guitar. After several raised eyebrows, Shanna and I left the festival with several chocolate bars and our sweet teeth satisfied for about a month.

Shanna and her shoes

 As for new news here, I splurged a bit on myself and bought Rosetta Stone level 1 to really focus on my Korean language acquisition. While I love my lessons with Tina, learning a little bit of Korean once a week wasn't going to get me where I want to go. I really want to be able to hold a conversation with my co-teachers as well as other Koreans I meet throughout my time here. Going through the first few units, the things I have learned before have really helped me understanding new concepts and grammar. I will keep you all posted on my progress!

Korean phrase of the post (one of my first Korean sentences from Rosetta Stone)
여자아이가 물을 마서다요
(yawja-a-ee-ga mool-eul ma-shee-da-yo)
 "The girl drinks water"

xoxoxo Anyeonhikaysayo!