Folk Village, Mask Dancing and Survival Korean

It's already Tuesday afternoon here in Korea! Just a week ago I was home enjoying the last taco lunch and pizza dinner I would get for many months. Currently my diet had developed a pattern, as dictated by the dorm food I eat morning, lunch and dinner. It's actually really good, with the never changing staples being white sticky rice, kimchi and some kind of fruit. I've also discovered a very good cold latte drink you can buy from the vending machine, its only about $1. It tastes more like a chocolate milkshake than coffee!

Today we are in lecture all day learning how to teach English in Korea. This is day two of three of lecture. We rotate through classes such as "Active English," "English Fever," "Classroom Management," "Multiple Intelligences," etc. There are four classes a day for 3 days. Plus "Survival Korean" every night. Survival Korean is like an extreme crash course in how to read the alphabet and say basic words. Jason and I were practicing our reading skills last night (we found some signs written in Korean with English translation below so we knew when we were pronouncing things correctly or incorrectly). The language is actually pretty easy to read... well, easy in the sense that once you memorize the vowels and consenets and understand how they combine you could pronounce street signs, texts, etc. Still of course, you don't know what they mean. I'll write more about this later. I still only know how to say hello and thank you, but I'm getting there.

Sunday was a great day! Long and super hot and humid, but tons of fun! We were taken on an all day exercion! We went to a traditional Korean folk village on the outskirts of Seoul. Our tour guide spoke English and had lived in Chicago for 20 years, of which he was very proud and told us some of the history of Korean living; we learned about their air conditioning, their heated floors (ingenious!), farming, storing food, seperate homes for men and women. We also saw a great performance of traditional Korean music. The performers used drums and chimbals, but also wore brightly colored costumes, did amazing turning flips and had these long coords on their hats with ribbon on the end. When they moved their heads in precise ways, the ribbon ripped around them as well making patters (similiar to ribbon dancing) but it was all done with a motion of the head! We also so tight rope walking and a traditional wedding ceremony. At lunch we tried Korean sausage. We didn't like it at all. One of the English people said it was like black porrige, whatever that is.

After that we went to a nearby center for the arts. There we got to learn traditional Korean drumming! It was so fun, we all got individual drums and learned a sequence form a song. It was very cool and everyone loved it. It got us really pumped up which was especially good because we were all drenched in sweat (in our matching EPIK tshirts). Then we learned traditional mask dancing. Our teacher was very funny. We put long plastic gloves over our hands to dance with. Our teacher explained how you would do the dance at a party with your entire village and you would seek out the person you desired during the dance, and then end up in front of them at its end. They would either reject or accept you. Jason was an amazing dancer and everyone loved watching him because he was so funny! He was chosen first as one of the top three male dancers, and then again made it all the way to the top of the class! Our friend from UCI, Scott was chosen as number one male dancer, and Jason was number two!! (From a peer vote!) It was great! Both Scott and Jason were so excited while dancing that they slipped and fell. I think that had something to do with why they got the top vote. LOL.

Lastly we watched a performance called Breakout, featuring both comedy at breakdancing. It was to showcase the modern after we'd just seen so much traditional dance.

Well, its time for class!