Today I have no classes because all of the grade six students are taking exams. Yesterday a bunch of girls were telling me that they have to go straight from Naju E.S. to Hogwans, where they study and take "lots of hard tests" until 9pm. School here is pretty intense. The kids do a lot of fooling around, but the hours are really long!! Kids barely see their parents during the week.
Becuase I'm going to be doing absolutely nothing all day, I've decided to make this my "offical blog update day". Isn't it exciting? First, I'll talk more about my stay in Gwang-ju for Biennale, which is a huge arts festival held every once and a while. I already bitched about my stay at my co-teachers house, so I won't get into that again!! I will just say that my co-teacher is an very kind man, but WAY over-protective!
And so, here are some pictures!!
Okay, these pictures are in no particular order!! I met up with Kristen and Alex and we all went to this restaurant at the festival that had a bit of a "war" theme. Our tables were held up by massive old missiles (which you can kind of see in the background) and our chairs were these futuristic looking stools with glass seats so that you could see the ammunition shells set in resin! So very bizarre... The picture of me is at the HUGE contemporary art show that was at biennale. I'm in front of a really scary collage by a german artist. When I had my picture taken in front of this, I got the weirdest look from my co-teacher. It was pretty funny. I don't know if you can see this because of the flash, but directly to the right there's a drawing of a guy with a gun to his head. I have no idea what the art piece was about. Many of the works were commentaries on the "war on terrorism". Very interesting. The last picture features Ye-Jin, my co-teacher's granddaughter. At Biennale there was a litle amusement park and she made me go on every ride with her. She lives with her grandfather, so I ended up spending the weekend with her as well. Everytime I would go to the bathroom she would bang on the door, wanting in. If she spoke enough English, I would have loved to tell her about the "buffer zone" or that "people in Canada don't usually use the bathroom together". Ack! In South Korea, kids are fond of the "poking adult in the butt" game, and Ye-Jin is no exception!!! Eventually I had to just make sure I was walking behind her so there were no sneak attacks. She, of course, thinks it's all freaking hilarious.
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