CAMP!

The rest of my week at camp was awesome. I was worried, because I had been told that the students were very low level, but we had no problems. I couldn’t believe how good the kids were, actually. They were so well behaved, and they managed to, for the most part, keep up a pretty good level of enthusiasm.
Our team, the red mailboxes, actually swept most of the events. I actually started to feel bad towards the end, because every time there was a group event, they would win. I was worried that the other groups might just give up. Then we got to the skit competitions on the last night, and the yellow team (Golden Stars), who had been shy all weak crawled out of their shells and blew everyone else away.
The kids did a great job of our skit, but there wasn't too much to do with it, it was not funny or anything. But man, that yellow group rocked theirs. They even had the Canadians laughing right out loud. Of course, a couple of the kids blanked on their lines - maybe our time would have been better spent practicing than playing games together.
I really got lucky... I had such a good group. Another Canadian, Chris, had a problem with his guys forming a little posse, and Steve had a problem with his kids being so shy. I had a good group of outgoing kids, although I'd like to think that the old don-training had something to do with the "team unity" that he developed. Our team was always cheering and helping eachother. Even in the single-person games, they refused to go after their team members.
One of the best parts was the time hanging out with the other Canadian and Korean teachers. I really notice just how isolated I have been in Yeongam when I start talking to other people who understand me. I just giggle like crazy and blather on for hours.
I don't know if I mentioned this in my last e-mail - but the showers were cold. The whole camp had no hot water. At all. This meant that I spent a bunch of my personal time in the shower room simultaneously chasing myself around the shower room with the shower head in my hand and running around and arching my back in crazy ways to avoid the stream. It's so weird because I want to rinse myself, but my body just says "No, I'm having none of it." I also found myself strangely intrigued with the full length mirror in the shower, especially considering the temperature of the water...
On Friday we had a field trip to the Mokpo Natural History Museum. It was great! I mean, I couldn't read anything, but I had fun anwyays, I mean, I knew what most of the displays were between my obsessive reading of a book on dinosaurs as a child and my university study of various geographical phenomena, and my post-university study of all sorts of biological things. So I had fun trying to explain to the kids all the different things that they were looking at in really basic English. I had quite a group though! They didn't seem too bored either, in fact they hung on my words, which was pretty great after a year of teaching kids who couldn't follow anything that I said.
I found out after that some of the kids had abandoned their groups to join me. Chris told me that the reason he was given was "So Cuuute!". SO yeah, maybe I wasn't so interesting after all.
After we walked through the museum, the kids watched a movie in the theatre there, and the teachers went over to the art museum next door. That was really neat too. I'm falling in love with the Korean water colour on ink painting style. Actually, I guess it's Chinese.
Mrs Min, the head teacher at the camp, who was awesome and took good care of all the children (including the three Canadian teachers) said that I would really enjoy living in Gwangju next year because it is trying to become the art capital of Korea and that I would have lots of art to look at whenever I wanted to.
The kids had to ask us each 30 questions for a bonus mark, and I got sat next to a kid on the bus who was SO shy! He was really struggling to come up with my questions, and he was too shy to pick up on the hints that I was giving him.
"Who are your favourite Korean singers?" I would ask him.
"I don't know." he would say, before returning to his notebook.

Anyways, I'll write more about camp as it comes to me, but I think that pictures are the best way to do it.













So here's two shots of my team. The first is us on the first day with our team poster (which won first place) and our slogan ("English from around the world is in the mailbox"). The second picture is the team cheering after they had won the english relay race, where they all had to run, read a sentence, and then communicate it to the team secretary. The guy in the yellow shirt won the prize for the top student for the week. The girl in the middle was really smart, but always seemed to blank whenever she would have gotten points. It was funny, because she would basically dominate the team events and win them for our team almost singlehandedly, but then fall out of the individual competitions really early.






So one strange thing about this camp was that the students had to cook for themselves! The teachers ate take-out almost every meal, including breakfast. But the students had to cook, and it was part of their lessons! What a great ting for them, to get at least a little experience cooking. Now this is a picture of only girls, but the guys cooked too, just none of those pictures turned out.