Halloween

31 October 206

Surprisingly enough one of the big holidays here in Korea that they have adopted from the west is Halloween. Yes the festival of paganism worldwide has become quite the commercial day here in the land of the morning calm.

Last week Yeon-soo came to us, her loving and devoted staff, for ideas for Halloween. As I have done this sort of thing in Korea before I was all about doing the bobbing for apples thing. Messy I know, and kids need to be prodded a little to do it, but if it works, well, they just love it, anyway that was my suggestion.

Kirsty for some reason wanted to get a Mexican influence in the day and chose to make piñatas, why I don’t know but she spent last week getting all of her classes busy smearing balloons with paper maiche and the like to create about forty of the things.

Karen was big on pin the tale on the cat and she made a freakin’ huge black cat that she put on the wall, ready to be stuck by pin after pin as the kids tried to win some candy.

Finally, Wojtek chose to make masks, a thankless task as it turned out as he was forced to dismember about a million paper plates as the majority of our junior achievers lacked sufficient strength and muscle coordination to cut the eyes out of the plates making blind mans masks instead of masks for the visually able.

Finally, today, the big day arrived. We had spent the previous week forcing our kids, with sticks and threats, to decorate the halls and classrooms for the festivities so the halls and rooms were littered with paper pumpkins, signs, bats, and ghosts to impress the parents who would surely arrive with their young hellions in tow.

With a flourish I cleared my room of desks and chairs, leaving only a small table on which to put my bobbing bowl with a towel and a deck of cards (I do know one magic trick) and, armed with a huge sack of candy, I waited for the little terrors to arrive.

With a roar of noise they came tromping up the stairs, ninety kids already heavily dosed on sugar and looking for more. With a fling and a jostle the first gaggle of them came into my room, saw the bag of candy and the bobbing bowl and looked quizzically at me, wondering what in the hell they would have to do to earn their precious lumps of tooth rotter.

I only had to demonstrate once and the kids were on their own. Pushing and shoving me out of the way they scrambled for the bowl and the apples. Time after time I had to dump the water and change the apples but it probably will have turned out for naught. If just one of these kids were sick, well it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we all wound up with a raving case of typhoid.

All in all the day was pretty fun, as was the warm up to it. We, the teachers, got out of doing some real teaching and got to do some arts and crafts, the kids, well, they did not get much out of the thing but they did get a break from the endless, dreary cycle of learning that is the Korean educational system and got to be kids for a little while.

Pictures-

1. This is my classroom all decked out for the holiday.

2. Three boys going head to head for some quality apple bobbing

3. Ben gets his face painted

4. One of the girls, not mine, grabs an apple

5. Jin-ho, always good for a laugh