TaLK Camp in Korea, etc,.

:Pictures soon:

For the past 5 days I have been in Middle-of-No-Where (Pyeong Chang) South Korea at an English camp.  The reason I haven't updated the past couple of days is due to the fact that this camp, I'm sure, is part of the .0000001% of Korea that isn't connected to the internet.  There is good reason because the camp doesn't want the little Korean kids to surf on the Korean websites, however, I noticed many of the little kids with cell phones that I'm sure are connected to the internet.  Anyway, we arrived Sunday in the afternoon and were free to check out the campus.  The campus consisted of a forest with many obstacle courses, a rock climbing wall, a huge building for activities, cafeteria and a dorm.  The dorm rooms were much different than our western counterparts.  When I think dorm I usually think bunkbed.  Well in Korea it's a little different.  The room consisted of roughly a 12' by 12' floor, with nothing in it.  There were 10 mats, blankets and pillows and just enough room for our group.  Again it isn't that bad sleeping on the floor with the Korean mat but when you throw ten guys in such a small place sicknesses spread quickly.  I think I was the guy that had a sore throat and beginnings of a cold and passed it on to most the guys in our room.  

Later we met our living breathing Korean child that would be our little student for all of camp.  My little guy, whom I named Moe, was a goofy little kid.  At first, he didn't want to talk much but after doing a bunch of activities he started to show how much English he understood.  I felt bad for some scholars who had kids that rarely talked, cried, said nasty things in English and weren't the best students.  Moe spent most of his time petting my arm and leg hair and playing my muscles.  He learned his manly vocabulary of this is hair, this is muscle, I'm strong and other assorted muscle head talk.  He's set on impressing his little lady friends.

So most of our time in English camp was spent doing predertimined activities with the kids and coming up with our own activities.  A talent show with the kids, drama class, musical class, cultural class, mini-olympics (the best), traditional Korean music class, etc,.  I volunteered to be the group leader (of 10 scholars) ages ago in the beginning of orientation and this is were my duties began to pile up though it didn't help that I had lost my voice the first day of camp due to a sore throat.  But, I lived.  

Today, we had the closing ceremony and yesterday our group coordinator asked me if I wanted to give the thank you speech from all the scholars.  So yesterday, in my dazed medicated state, I came up with a speech and did fairly well in front of the 800 or so people.  Surely I've come out of my shell since coming to Korea.  Also, it was kinda sad to say good-bye to my little Moe, who I'll probably never see again.

Then we spent 2 and a half hours on the bus back to Jochiwon, where our original orientation had taken place.  The talent show was tonight and I had been playing with a group of very talented musicians the past couple of weeks preparing our act.  The song we played was Dancing in the Dark by Solange and we did a really good job considering we found out last minute that there was no piano and we were down to two guitars, a trumpet and a singer.  There were maybe 20 different acts and there were a lot of them that were very good.  A belly-dancer, some singers, dancing acts, skits, guitar/singers and rappers.  We got first place and will perform tomorrow at the closing ceremony for the TaLK orientation, which is really a treat.  I know I should take what I hear with a grain of salt, but someone said that Korean TV will be there.  They were at the opening ceremony so I'm guessing they will be at the closing ceremony too.

Tomorrow we head out to our POE Orientations at around 2pm for another week.  We'll be staying at a hotel in Yang Yang in Gangwon-do, which looks to be pretty nice.  Our POE gave us a schedule and looks to be very relaxing which is highly appreciated with the hectic schedule we've gone through the past couple of weeks.  Next weekend we'll finally be in our apartments and I'm looking forward to some routine though I'll miss a lot of my friends in the other provinces.