GIC Foreigner Day, September 16

Last week was the big GIC foreigner day. I was the emcee for the first half. I wasn't qualified (they wanted someone who spoke Korean) but I figured that since I was comfortable enough to do it, I should throw my name in in case no-one else signed up. Well, no-one else did, so I won! yay!
What did I win? Well, I won an opportunity to script two and a half hours of banter! Of course, I didn't. hahaha. I told them that I would be very off the cuff, and that I wouldn't have any idea what I would say before-hand. I really didn't. But now they want me to type out what I did say... impossible! hahaha, I'll just give them my notes.
Anyway, it was a horrible day. There was a typhoon passing through, so it was really windy and rainy. I was actually afraid at a few different times because of all the electronics on the stage that someone was going to be electrocuted, and I was more afraid that that somebody might have been me. Because, I'll be honest, I like me.
A lot of the program that I was supposed to be emceeing over was cancelled because of the rain, so my script and notes became largely useless anyway. So my coemcee (Minji) and I zoomed through our part, with many too cheezy jokes from myself, and most useful information coming from her. I was actually a bit bored on stage for a lot of it, so most of the jokes were made just to entertain me. A 30 000 won gift certificate to Shinsaegae (an upscale department store) is way too easy to connect to a joke like "Enjoy the sleeve of your new sweater!" or "Wow, you can buy a napkin holder!" And all the second place prizes were cut out, a decision apparently made by coemcee after each time that I announced who the second prize winner was. So I felt like a jackass more than a couple of times.
When our half of the day was over, the other emcees took over, and they started their program right away, so everything was much earlier than had been scheduled. It seemed really stupid, and frustrated the talent show performers a lot, because everyone had told their friends that they would be performing. They asked me at one point how long my performance would be, and I said ten minutes, just as I had said it would be in the e-mail when they had asked me the same thing a week before. They told me that that was too long, and asked me to cut it to seven minutes. I yelled a bit, I'll admit. It's so terrible to ask people to prepare for a performance and then ask them minutes before they go onstage to cut down their time. Like, what am I going to do? Play the songs faster? People are SO stupid sometimes!
Anyway, there was quite a variety of performances, from highland dancing to Philippino dancing to karaoke to a great performance by the Jordan Emmans Band to close. The judge was BRUTAL though. It's a volunteer talent show. I didn't even know that there were prizes for the performers until I showed up. And I hadn't expected the judge to give individual critiques of all the performances before announcing the winners. And they were really ciritical. He told one girl she was rude for sitting on the floor, he said that one guy's dancing wasn't traditional because he used a pop track (and it was a Nepalese pop tracks, with a definite fusion traditional/pop sound), and he deducted points from one team for having a lyrics sheet while they sang onstage. Okay, these are things you write in your notes for judging, not something you announce to everyone at a talent show that people volunteer for. It was brutal, and it made me really angry. And it's not because he gave me a bad review, I was fine with what he said about mine. He said I did a good job "even though" I didn't play guitar all the time. He also said I was mysterious because I had voices coming when i was not singing, and both those comments just tell me that a) people don't really understand what the looper does, and b), I did a good job of doing it, because a guy sitting five feet away couldn't figure out how I was doing it.
After the talent show, they had some drummers, who were really good. It was like the closing scene of Nanta, minus that amazingly hot woman. haha.
Then they had a raffle. Because of the typhoon, there weren't a whole lot of people out for the day. There must have been around 200 or so throughout the day, because there were about 350 or 400 raffle tickets sold. That meant that the ten tickets that Vanessa and I had had pretty good odds, and they really panned out. We won:
1) a bicycle. The model name, appropriately enough, is "typhoon". We got the man-sized one, and Vanessa is going to inherit my current bike, which is lady-sized.
2) a digital camera. It's a Nikon Coolpix S500. Oddly enough, I was just looking at that exact camera about two weeks ago, and came very close to buying it. It's fun to have a point and shoot again. I really like my SLR, but it's not the most convenient camera for day-to-day use, or just capturing silly little things that I see.
3) A gift certificate. It's for ShinSaeGae, again, but it's only for 10 000 won. Combined with my 10 000 won for performing in the talent show and a trip to the Body Shop, it means that we both smell really nice. Gift certificates are remarkable, you give them away, and they bring in more money. I mean... a 30000 won (about $30) gift certificate for Shinsaegae is like giving someone an obligation to spend a further 100 000. Like at E-Mart, they give away these free fish. Bobby and Meena got some a few weeks ago, and they wound up having to buy a small tank, the stones, and all that other stuff, and then the fish died! So now they had all this stuff, so they wound up going back and buy more fish. Whoever invented free stuff deserves a handshake.
Getting back to my non-tangential run there, it was a pretty good day for us. It was pretty funny that we won the bike though, because apparently Vanessa and Emily had just been having a conversation about how much it would suck to win a bike because you would have to find some way to get it home in the typhoon. We wound up having to pay 15 000 to get a van to bring across town to my apartment, but it was definitely worth it in the end.
That was last weekend. This week, we got a new teacher at Munhwa, Ashlee, who was actually a former coworker of Darren's at ECC. She's been fun to have around, although her stories have reminded me of how awesome Darren (and Mo) was (were) and how much I miss him (them). I think she's going to fit in really well at Munhwa. We have a pretty awesome staff right now, and there is really no drama making things awkward now. Everything is just calm and fun at work.
This weekend is a five-day weekend, because next week is Chuseok, the Korean celebration of harvest and rice-cakes.