Sports Day and Daejeon's new park

This Saturday my school met up with the other three YBM ECC schools for sports day. I hadn't even met the foreign teachers from two of the other schools before, but they live way across town and off the subway line, so that's not too surprising. Sports day basically consisted of two teams (the hangbok [happiness] team and the love team) facing off doing dances and other party activities at a massive scale and with instructions entirely in Korean. It was raining a bit, so we finished early and the kids didn't have as good of a time as they might have in the sun. Not all of the kids' parents could come, so I ended up being a temporary dad for one of my students, which mostly involved pulling her around a race course in a kiddie pool attached to a rope. Sadly, I was not yet assigned my fatherly position during the 'who can throw their child highest into the air' competition (which would absolutely not fly in the US, or any other litigation happy country). It was generally amusing to see the kids with their parents, and to be perpetually confused about what was going on since nothing was ever explained in English (which is funny, since the event was for four English schools).

We had lunch with our boss afterwards, and then the foreign teachers and the Korean kindergarten teachers went out for icecream and to a great new park downtown.


(Add rose gardens to Daejeon's similarities with Portland.)