5x7 Folded Card

Classic Black 5x7 folded card

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5x7 Folded Card

Classic Black 5x7 folded card

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Graduation

My time at Wonderland is quickly coming to a close. I have three more days! On Friday, we had our graduation ceremony for the graduating kindergarten classes. We have been practicing and rehearsing for this day for a little over a month and now its over. They did such a great job and it was really sad to say goodbye to them. They had to learn a couple of songs and say a speech that they have had to memorize. They are did great! Two of our replacement teachers arrived Thursday night so we took them to the ceremony and then to school to shadow us. They are both American and in their early 20s. They moved into my building so for the next few days, I have neighbors! They seem really nice. The other teacher comes on March 1st and hes Irish. We met him briefly last week when he came to our school. Last night, we took the new teachers out to meet all the other foreigners in town. It was pretty good and tonight I head to Seoul to see my friend Melissa and a couple of other people before they leave on March 3rd. I cant believe its been about a year already! Time has flown by so quickly. I feel like Im not ready to leave. Its always so hard at the end. I hate having to say goodbye to everyone. Here are some photos of graduation. I also made two videos that were shown at graduation I will post. They parents loved it! I made DVDS of the videos as well to give to kids for a end of the year present. Some of the parents gave me flowers and presents yesterday too which was really sweet.

roses are red, violets are blue

Another Valentines Day has come and gone. I hope you all had a lovely day. Valentines is not a huge holiday here...but they do celebrate it in three phases. Yesterday was phase one. This is the day that women buy their man something. Then phase two comes in March (white day)...when the men buy their women something. A month later comes phase three (black day) where all the single people wear black and eat black foods. I arrived in Korea just in time for black day last year. I made all my students valentines day cards and in one of my kindy classes we  had a little party. I taped bags to the front of the room with their names on it and they all made cards for each other and put them in the bags. It was not quite the same as I remember it when I was a kid, but it was still fun.

Korean Orphanage

A couple of weekends ago, my friend Brooke and I went to Daejeon to volunteer at an orphanage that a friend of mine from my TEFL course helps at. We spent a couple hours there teaching English. The first group of kids were had were elementary age, between 8-12 and the next group was middle/ high school age, between 15-20. It was a lot of fun. The younger kids were really rowdy and even a bit violet towards each other. The older kids were really into learning about fruit and paying attention to what we were teaching. Much more behaved. We played games with all of them and taught a mini lesson. I dont know too much about the adoption system here but from what I was told, Korean children cannot be adopted after the age of two. Once they past two, they are kept in the orphanages until after high school and when they get a job. Some of the even stay during university. A lot of them have at least one parent who is alive but it just unable to care for their child. They even sometimes let the parent come and take the child on weekends. It is a much different system here than back at home.

My short winter break

Over winter break, I spent a couple of days wondering Seoul solo. Here is the experience told through photos.

they asked me to do an interview about being a foreigner for their school

A Korean Wedding

My co-worker Hannah who is Canadian Korea had her wedding in December on New Years Eve. Korean weddings from what I gathered from this experience are quite different than at home. First off, this wedding was held in a big wedding hall called "Wedding Fiesta" and many weddings take place at the same time but in different rooms. You sit down at big tables and most people were dressed rather informal, some people were even wearing jeans. During the ceremony people were walking in and out of the room and some on their cellphones, talking to each other etc. It seemed really rude but I guess this is just normal. There were multi colored lights they used to light up the room when people walked down the aisle and had these really cheesy light up heart  fixtures people held up as the bride and groom walked under it. This whole ceremony thing took about an hour. Following the ceremony you went upstair to a big buffet dinner thing. There was lots of food and everyone just took food and sat down. During the food time, the bride and groom stood on a small stage and cut the cake. After eating, the bride and groom took off their western style dress and tuxedo and put on their traditional hanboks for another much smaller intimate ceremony held in a small room. I failed to mention us foreigners had a part in this wedding. Hannah wanted us girls to catch her bouquet. (nobody else) This is mainly because there is a tradition that if you catch the bouquet you have to marry in 6 months. Her friends are very superstitious so she had us do it. Natty caught the bouquet. This was all staged. Hannah held the bouquet the slowly threw it as us so Nat could catch it all for photos. We also had to take lots of photos together with Hannah and then the whole wedding party. I have no photos of this but she said hopefully she will have them in about a month. I will post them later. I have a few of my own photos to share.

their baby Jordan