Summer Camps, Beijing and Country-Name-Dropping

Okay, the last couple of weeks have been a little crazy! We're now working through the second week of camps, which have been really awesome; in fact the perfect way to end my teaching year over here! The kids have been enthusiastic and entertaining. We just had a "Hokey Pokey" dance competition before sending them home for the day. So cute! Mrs. Kim's sister brought in her grade one aged daughter and she's not shy about dancing at the front of the class!

This Friday is my last day of classes, then on Saturday I'll be heading out to the Incheon Airport near Seoul and flying to CHINA!!! I couldn't find anyone who's going to be going to Beijing at the same time (most of the expats are either back to Canada for a visit or already off on their travels since school ended a couple of weeks ago), so it's going to be a solo mission, which I'm pretty excited/scared about!

Places on the agenda:

- The Great Wall of China!! Dude! There are several "sites" along the great wall to see, so I plan to go a few times.

- The Forbidden City (not really forbidden, actually a HUGE tourist attraction)

- The Temple of Heaven

- T'iannamen Square (spelling subject to complete wrongness)

- Shopping at Wangfujin, silk street etc. Oh, there will be lots of shopping

- Beijing Contemporary Art Gallery

- Mausoleum of Mao Zedong

- Random wandering and getting completely lost

- Sweating my ass off and evaporating into a dry shrivelled version of myself.

When I found out that I'd be travelling alone I had a moment's thought that maybe I should just skip it, then kicked myself in the head! What if I never come back to Asia and miss my chance to see the Great Wall?? That would be just plain ridiculous! After my week of sweating it out (apparently it's going to be ridiculously HOT) in Beijing, I will fly back to Korea to hang out for a week before heading back to Canada! Less than three weeks from now I'll be back in Ontario. It's a little surreal at this point.

I've really enjoyed my year over here, but at all costs I will try not to talk about it so much that people back home want to kill me. There's nothing worse than having one of those friends that is constantly Country-Name-Dropping. "You think that bathroom is dirty?? When I was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro-- that's in Africa-- I didn't even have toilet paper, and the mosquitos were the size of my head... etc. etc." I will try to only talk about Korea when asked directly and keep it brief!

Now, for your enjoymeant, some summer camp pictures! Well, I guess to be honest it's for my enjoyment. I'm sure no one else will care!

This is from the first week of summer camp. The kids pretended they were chefs on a cooking show and made themselves sandwiches. Korean sandwich combinations are a little scary for me-- egg with ham and cheese and strawberry jam. Seriously! But when I tried to introduce olives into sandwiches, the kids acted like I was crazy; they'd laugh and point when I'd pop one in my mouth.

The ladies of summer camp one. This was after we'd finished our "flea market" class and everyone had all of the fake American dollars. These kids are obsessed with money. Everyone had to fill out an introduction form and under "hobbies" five or six of them wrote "I like money". Little punks.

The second week group. The rest of these pictures will be the kids doing the hokey pokey. It was hilarious.
And I'm spent.