Sunday 2 November 2008

Ghostly Gwangju

We'd been looking forward to Halloween for a while as it meant a day without teaching and an early finish... almost like a three day weekend. Or so we thought.
Our hopes were slightly quashed when we were told that we should come into school an hour early and lug furniture around in preparation for the party, oh and that we should also make at least ten decorations each for the following day. On Friday morning Alan and I got up and covered ourselves in make up. Alan was looking pretty creepy as the joker and I had great hopes that he might walk away with the best costume prize. All the teachers decided to walk to school together for moral support and just to make the Koreans think that white people are a little bit stranger (they're not really familiar with halloween here). The reactions we got were pretty funny. Some people pointed and laughed, some looked completely stunned and others just did their best to pretend that they hadn't noticed.
At school we were each put in charge of a game room. I had the musical chairs room and Alan had some kind of put your hand in the bag and identify the disgusting thing (is it a heart or eyeballs? No, it's a tomato!) room. We had a different party every hour, for four hours and it was actually a lot of fun, although the last set of kids may have had a slightly less enthusiastic group of teachers than the first.
At the end of the evening, we all had to vote for the best teacher's costume and there ended up being six prizes (far more than expected) cash prizes! I got fourth place (70,000 Won) and Alan got second (100,000), so between us we got about £80. A very nice little bonus. We did get to leave school early, so we headed to the pork bone soup restaurant where we got even more attention and scared a few kids (whose parents kept trying to force them to come and get pictures with us. After dinner we went to a bar near our apartment and spent the evening chatting.

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