I (Traylor) am writing this on January 29, 2013 (Korea time)
and the last blog that we did was on August. I feel both embarrassed and little
bit of shame for not keeping everyone in the loop of our lives over the
past…sigh… five months. Regardless, that means we have so much to share with
the few people who read our blog.
Since August we have been: persevering through our job at
POLY, had a handful of typhoon scares, had a number of our students leave our
classes, experienced a Korean Christmas, went to the Philippines, made it
safely back from the Philippines, went to an indoor waterpark for kids with an
ice house carved in the outside, and somehow made it to the end of January with
only four or five weeks remaining in our contracts at POLY. Hannah and I agreed
to write different parts of the blog to catch up and I am first up, so I will
talk about our Christmas in Korea.
Our Christmas here really centered on what our school was
doing leading up to the holiday. We get one day off for Christmas ‘vacation’,
and, that day is Christmas Day. Our school has a big Christmas gathering where
our morning students (3-7 year olds) sing songs for their parents and they all
clap and cheer and everything is happy and fun for the parents. On the other
end of that are the Korean teachers and us who started preparing for this forty
minutes of chaos around our American Thanksgiving, so about the third week of
November.
I love everything about the Christmas holiday: the old Perry
Como songs, the lights, the trees, the stockings. I love it all. So, I started
pumping Christmas music into my kids around week three of November. We chose
“Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” to sing and create a dance with and Hannah’s
class sang “Jingle Bells”. My class also sang “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas”
with a dance with the other class their age. Since these kids are on display
for their parents, we both ended up practicing these songs to the point where
my kids were sick of “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” by week two of December.
We ended up persevering through all of the stress that is
put on teachers and kids for perfection (I think kids’ plays are better with a
little ‘goofing around’ and when kids aren’t on-key with their voices, but that
may just be me) and made it through the performance. Thankfully, I have a girl
named ‘Rosie’, who sings her little guts out at everything, carried my class
through the performance. She is, by far, the loudest girl at our school when
she sings, or when she yells at other students. Her mom is a police officer so
I think she gets some of it from her mommy.
We came back from the performance and all of the parents
brought food and we had a little social at our school with all of the teachers
and parents. The moms brought all kinds of food that they thought we would
like: Pizza Hut pizza, fried chicken, cheese, and fruits. They also made a lot
of Korean foods as well: noodles, fish, rice balls, fish balls, and a lot of
kimchee. It was great sitting with our parents and getting to discuss their
kids (in broken English) with them as we rarely get to experience that. The next day we had Santa come to our school. Santa was a
random foreigner who was paid 50 bucks to come and give out presents to our
kids that their moms had bought. Our school really tried to have a ‘western’
Christmas, and, of course, Santa is part of that. It was really special to get
to see our kids opening up gifts for Christmas. A lot of our kids got a stuffed
dog named Brownie (look it up) that is essentially a stuffed blue eyed malamute
that you could win from throwing darts at the fair, but some marketing genius in
Korea has swooned our kids into wanting it, and most of them got it. Legos are
really popular here as well (Ninja-go) as well as Transformers. A lot of our
girls got dresses and things like that; I think I’m ready to be a daddy after
experiencing all of that.
After that we had Christmas Day and we celebrated that by
having a brunch at our friends, Chris and Leah’s apartment. My awesome wife
made some mean hash browns and pancakes with real syrup. Leah made bacon and
eggs. It was one of the most delicious meals I’ve eaten in quite a while. It
made me feel like I was in Wagener with my grandma and the rest of my family.
One of the best things about Christmas was that my friend
Mark came to visit from Africa. He is working for CURE and came and visited his
girlfriend over the break and they also made a stop by Changwon during Christmas,
it was truly a blessing to get to see him for the short amount of time that I
did.
Christmas is Korea is a little different than in America. We
came into Christmas thinking it would be hard to find Christmas lights around
our city and that it would be a dreary place over the holidays. Korea certainly
doesn’t have the ‘magic’ or ‘commercialization’ of Christmas that the states
has, but we were surprised by the amount of decorations we saw. We had a GIANT
Christmas tree in the middle of our city (in the middle of a rotary) that was
always lit up and our local malls had Christmas lights and trees as well so
that was nice. Christmas in Korea seemed like Korea was about 30 years behind
where America is on the holiday and they rapidly threw up some things regarding
Christmas. Some of it was comforting for us and some of it was just comical
(Santa with Angel’s wings).
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| Christmas Lights in Busan |
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Korean Santa
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| Christmas Program |
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| Our favorite 4th graders |
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| Santa comes to Poly |
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| Christmas Day |
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| Marks comes to visit! |
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| Traylor and Mark |
