A Korean Wedding

Yesterday I went to a wedding for Baron, an American Man, and Hyun-Jun, a Korean woman. It was similar to a wedding back at home in some ways, and different in many ways. It took place in a wedding convention center on the sixth floor of a womens community center. They book one wedding an hour, so it was very in and out. There is no costomizing the flowers or colors or anything like that. When you get there, the bride is sitting in a special room for everyone to come in and take pictures with. Hyun-Jun was wearing a beautiful white wedding dress the same that a bride back at home would wear. You don't give gifts at Korean weddings. You give money in a white envelope, that someone takes and logs at the door. The wedding hall had a beautiful platform aisle that was all sparkley and everything, with a wide strip of crystals hanging from the ceiling above it. The wedding starts with the two moms walking down the aisle together. They were wearing traditional Korean Hamboks, which Baron's mom looked particularly uncomfortable in. They each light a candle on either side of the alter. There are no bridesmaids or groomsmen, so the processional was just the moms, the groom and the bride. When Baron walked down the aisle everyone cheered, much to the dismay of the older, more traditional Koreans. Hyun-Jun of coarse was beautiful coming down the aisle. Our paster gave the talk, with a translater translating everything. Baron gave his vows in English, and Hyun-Jun gave hers in Korean. They then bowed to each set of parents. I don't know if having a wedding cake is normal in Korea, but they had a small cake on big pedistals that they wheel over in the middle of the ceremony for the bride and groom to blow out the candles on, and cut. They then wheeled the cake to the side and forgot about it like it was something they checked off the list. After the ceremony finished (a total of about 40 minutes) they did pictures. They take just a few pictures, including one with all of the family, then some with all of the friends. They did the boquet toss while all the friends are up there for the picture. There is one chosen friend who moves up to stand behind the bride for the rigged toss. I felt kind of jipped at not at least getting a chance.
They then rush everyone out so the next wedding can get in. The "reception" was in a small banquet hall one floor down. They just have a big buffet, and the hall is shared by all of the weddings that are taking place. There is absolutely nothing personal about it. The bride and groom didn't even make it down there for about 45 minutes after Hun-Jun had changed into her Hombok. By then the staff was kind of pushing us out because the next groups were coming down. It was an interesting experience, but I would never want to get married like that.

I have had my new class now for a little over a week. The transition into the new school year was absolutely crazy. I had a lot of orientations to give because we had 4 new teachers, and a lot of lesson plans to write. We had one morning that the kids were not there so we could switch classroom and prepare for the new kids. The classroom that I moved into was left a mess by the previous teacher, so I spent more time cleaning up than I did decorating. It was also kind of hard because I didn't even know the English names for all of my students, so I couldn't label things. In addition, the school is short some basic needs for decorating classrooms, like laminating film, and the Velcro to put posters and stuff on the wall.

My new students are really good kids. Before the school year started, one of my students was described to me by his former teacher as "a super sweet kid, but he has random violent outbreaks that are almost psychopathic." I haven't actually had any problems with him, but it kind of had me scared for a while. I have been sick with some kind of the flu for a week now, so most of the time has been spent just trying to get through. Hopefully the next week will be a little easier, and I will be able to engage with my kids a little more.
It has really started getting warm. A few weekends ago I went running wearing a t-shirt.

Last week though, it randomly started snowing. The next morning was the most beautiful that I have seen since I had been here. The snow was nice and sticky so it stuck to the trees. It stayed on them for over 24 days and was absolutely breathtaking. It seems stupid that I was so awed by the snow. In fact if I were back at home I would be completely sick of it by now. Seeing a mountain full of trees covered with it was something different completely though. This is a sidewalk on my way to school. The left side goes strait up a mountain.

This was the view from the fifth floor staff room at my school. It is a narrow street between buildings, but it is covered in trees, which were then iced with snow.

Love you all, miss home a lot!

Graduation!

It has been quite a week. My kindergartners graduated on Thursday. They all prepared speeches, and performed a play/musical. We have been working on our performances for weeks. We had about ten minutes to practice in the gym where we actually performed it. The mikes didn't really work out, the staging area was smaller than they were used to, and there was no where for them to go "off stage," but overall it went pretty well. My shyest student said a mildly funny line in her speech that the audience laughed at. She didn't know that it was going to be funny, so she thought they were laughing at her. She said about one more sentence then started crying. The good thing was that the sentence that she was able to get out was about missing her friends and teachers, so everyone thought she was crying because she was so sad to leave everyone. Everyone told me that it totally sold the show. I have some partial videos of their play/musical, but a lot of it is cut out. Hopefully I can get a full video of the speeches and show from the school. My kids looked adorable in their caps and gowns, and they all got "diplomas" with class and individual pictures in them.

I will start with a new class this week, in a new classroom. All of the classrooms in the school are city names from the U.S., Canada or Australia. I will be teaching in the Minneapolis classroom from now on! The director didn't even know that's where I am from when she made the assignment. I used to be in Toronto, and I know nothing about Toronto. I am super excited to be able to teach my kids about the classroom that they are in.

I have gotten to see bits and pieces of the Olympics. They showed short track and figure skating events at least 40 times over, and just a few bits of everything else. It was a lot of fun being able to root for two countries. I'm sure that I will get some ribbing from all of my Canadian coworkers tomorrow over the hockey game.

More next week!

Quote of the week: (Students are asked to write vocabulary words in a sentence. One of the words was "undressed." Don't ask me why they have that as a vocabulary word for kindergartners.) "One million years ago people lived undressed."