Friday, November 5, 2010

Happy Halloween!

It's a little late, but in Korea we are sometimes ahead and sometimes behind the US on certain things like celebrating a holiday that normally occurs on October 31st.

We spent the month of October encouraging our students to draw pictures of pumpkins, zombies and ghosts during any spare time, but the hagwon we teach at is a "serious academy" whose idea of "game day" is to make all of the kids write and memorize a speech and perform it in front of their peers every four weeks. The parents we cater to don't like it when their kids have fun in Englishee class. So we didn't prepare anything for Halloween in our classes and in turn didn't really prepare ourselves for our second favorite holiday of the year.

The weekend of Halloween was spent watching zombie and vampire movies like 28 Days Later and 30 Days of Night. We also put some Alien and Aliens into the PS3 for some nostalgia of the 80s. If we were social people, we might have hit up Seoul for a party, but this was good enough for us.

My mom sent us an Emergency Halloween Care Package from the USA, but it somehow ended up in South Africa instead of Korea so it was late in getting here. It arrived Tuesday afternoon. There was a ton of candy and some pencils and little scary plastic toys so we figured we could make some goodie bags for the kids. I stayed up late evenly distributing the candy and toys into 47 clear plastic fruit waste bags and tied them with yarn that Michael never used when he was crocheting.


We handed them out between classes on Wednesday and Thursday and they went over pretty well. Some excitedly told us thank you as they grabbed their bags and our director told us we spoiled the kids with a "lot of candy!" Most of the kids we just told them we had a surprise for them, but the older kids I told them that it was from my mom. "Eddie" said, "Your mom is very generous!"  A few kids came to class with their newly sharpened pencils and one precocious little girl told us about how her mom played a prank on her with the plastic centipede in her goodie bag. So thanks mom, you made our kids' day!

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