The Graduates

(a lovely bunch of coconuts, here they are all standing in a row)

The school year runs a little differently in Korea. Instead of changing grade levels over a long summer vacation, Koreans graduate in February, and start their new classes in March. More than a moot curiousity, that actually means that my Kindergarteners are swimming up. Incidentally, they're swimming up to their second year of Kindergarten, which will also be taught by me, but that doesn't make occasion any less auspicious.

The graduation ceremony was this week, and it was a strange but adorable event. Take all the awkwardness of six and seven-year-olds having to speak in front of their parents, then multiply it by whatever the stress level speaking in a language other than your own. Mind you, these kids are quite good at it, but still nowhere near as comfortable as they are with Korean.

Then there's the wonderfully adorable and delightfully strange performances themselves. They had a few typical (and atypical) songs and dances that make you go "damn those kids're cute".

A video of a couple of those can be seen here.
(the first two performances here are from my students, the Coconut class).

But then there were the plays. First, the older kids (some of whom I taught) put off a musical version of Snow White. The real entertainment value there came from the songs and performances. Strange singing, weird pronunciation, curious actions and completely fucking odd songs made the whole show quite watchable in a curious way.

There's a short montage of some of the funniest parts here.

But then there was the copyright-infringing surrealist take on the Peter Pan play. This one was performed by the younger classes, so a fair number of them were from my Coconut class. This was a pretty standard Peter Pan story. Oh, with Batman, Spiderman, the themes from Rocky and Mission Impossible, and a scene where hunters brandish machine guns.

Check out the insanity here.

It was all quite adorable, though. Next month, my class is split into two and I'm teaching fewer kids at once more often. Plus I've got a couple of new ones transferring from another school. I hope they've got as much personality as the nutcases I teach now.

Speaking of nutcases, I had a decent weekend. Me and Ben met up around his new place in Guro. We drank mircobrewed beer from strange jugs, listened to an awful Korean singer named 'Sweet Chocolate' (she was neither sweet nor very chocolaty), then headed to Hongdae to meet Trevor and some people.

Trevor's cohorts were an alright gang. Several were even from Newfoundland. Like always when you meet people from 'home', it only took us a few moments to figure out someone we knew in common. We sat in Brixx and had some hookah and some Korean girl was scooping fish from an on-the-floor aquarium tank and then we left the strangeness.

Well, I guess there's never a complete shortage of strangeness wandering around Korea. Nor is there ever any shortage of strangeness when drinking with a group of people. At some point it seemed a good idea for Trevor and a couple of other guys to try and stack on top of each other in vaguely homoerotic poses.

After we lost the group to whatever it is that separates groups of drunks, Ben and I went to Route 66 and played made-up-on-the-spot dart games for 10,000won per game. I lost virtually every one (except for distance darts and the first round of backwards darts) and Ben went home with a bunch of my money.

But Ben's not the only one calling Korea home for a second time. Mike came back this week, too. He was too jetlagged to hang out much this weekend, but the former Sillim Musketeers are now all back in Seoul (not that we ever titled ourselves, I'm just trying to impart the fact that we were three friends living in the same area). Even if I'm the only one still in the Sillim area. I guess that makes us the Subway Line Number Two Crew instead.

Changes have been underway in Sillim too, though. The sofa I got back in October was actually procured from outside a building being renovated. Those renovations are finally complete, and what was once a nondescript Korean building with an unwanted sofa is now a Seven Eleven. And so, to close this week I present a quick tour of the average Korean convenience store.



First, notice that outside there lies patio furniture. Practically all stores have these so you can go in, grab a beer, and get drunk outside the store. Repeat ad nausium. Also notice the flowery wreaths outside the store. That's what every new Korean business does. I think it's some charm or omen to wish good fortune on the new establishment.

Next, see the noodle section and notice that it's actually about one quarter of the whole store. Koreans love noodles, and I love Korean noodles. So nothing to really make fun of there without being a hypocrite.

Then see the dried squid section and notice that... notice that there's a whole fucking section dedicated to dried squid.

Finally take a peek at the seemingly innocuous chip aisle and think 'hmmm, which of the many varieties and flavours of shrimp-flavoured corn chip snacks should I get today?'

I'm not sure if I could follow-up a comment about shrimp-flavoured snacks even if I wanted to.