Halloween and World Fair Madness

well this has been a long week, especially these past two days! I wish I had more of a weekend to rest...oh well. Friday, obviously, was halloween. They don't really celebrate halloween in korea, but the english department of my school did! Everybody wore costumes, teachers and students. I was a doll cause. I didn't want to buy a costume so I just wore a skirt, curled my hair, and put pink circles on my cheeks. Natalia was a pumpkin (which I got to be today, more on that later) and Michael had a pair of glasses with eyes that pop out on slinky things. Here's a picture of some of the kids plus Natalia and Eunice.

So what did we do to celebrate halloween? It was slightly unorganized. There was a schedule (for the afternoon kids anyway), but I believe we have already established that schedule-making is not one of my school's strong points. Anyway, first we went trick or treating to the other classes in the school. It was kinda bad cause those classes weren't having a party or anything, so they just watched our kids having fun and getting candy. Then we had crafts, cooking, and games, so the kids were split into 3 groups. The crafts for the morning kids were decorating pumpkins and coloring ghosts. To decorate the pumpkins they glued on leaves, pom pom balls, and little bits of paper to mini green pumpkins. Kinda strange, but cute.

For the afternoon kids, they made "candy bags", which were really little paper cups with string tied on for the handle. These are 2 of the girls from my pre-k class. Don't let their sweet and innocent faces fool you.

They also made cat masks which were really cute.

For cooking, they didn't actually cook. They made ghosts out of marshmellows and silly face cookies with peanut butter, strawberry jam, raisens, fruit loops, and nuts (pretty disgusting). Not many of the kids seemed to like them either. When they made looks of disgust after trying them, Elissa said, "In Korea, we don't usually eat peanut butter and jam together." I told her that in the US we only do that on sandwiches, not on cookies with raisens and fruit loops.

I don't really know what all they did for games because I didn't ever help with that. So yeah, that was pretty much it.

After the kids left was when the real fun began. We kinda expected that as soon as school was over we would get started with getting everything ready for the world fair cause we kinda had a lot to do, but it didn't really happen like that. Nobody seemed to really know exactly what we were doing. It was very, very unorganized. I don't know how many times they told us to do something, which we did, and then they changed their minds. They said that the desks and everything needed to be moved out of the classrooms we were using for the world fair and into the classrooms we weren't using, so we did that, but then they decided to move some of them back. They said to put the maps the kids made all over the room, but low enough for the kids to see them, so we did. Then they decided to move them all to one wall and make a collage. It was pretty much like that all night. They weren't exactly great at telling us what to do either. They discussed everything in Korean so we hardly ever knew what was going on. It was around 11 something when we finally left and they still had a lot to do. I think they were there til 3:30am.

We had to be at the school at 9:30 this morning. When we got there, they gave us hotdogs that were cold and had ham, lettuce, cheese, carrot, etc. on them. It was like a hotdog sandwich...for breakfast. Very odd. Anyway, the basic set up was there were different countries in different classrooms. There was also a Halloween room next to the America room. Here's me in the America room.

The kids got passports and when they went to the different classrooms they would be interviewed by the immigration officer and then they would get a stamp in their passport. Eunice wanted Natalia to wear the pumpkin costume and give out candy in the Halloween room, but she didn't really want to wear the costume again so I said I would do it. I wish I had gotten a picture of myself as a pumpkin, but I didn't:( Anyway, they put me in this room by myself and gave me a tiny chair in the corner. Here's the Halloween room:

There was a tv in there playing Charlie Brown The Great Pumpkin over and over again. It didn't actually show the whole thing. Just part of it. I felt like I was being brainwashed. I never want to hear that monster mash song again. Eventually kids did show up and I wasn't in there alone. Most of them were really shy, but I only made one cry. Some of the kids were really greedy and kept coming back for more candy. Some of the parents would send their kids to get candy and then they would eat it themselves. I saw them do it. So that was what I did from 10:00-4:00. I felt really awkward in that pumpkin costume too cause being the day after halloween in a country that doesn't celebrate halloween, I was the only one in a costume. At least I've kinda gotten used to being stared at now.

Anyway, taking everything down and cleaning up wasn't as bad as setting up. When we left, we had gotten most everything moved back and didn't leave them with too much more to do. I got home at about 6 something. Soooo I am really tired now and I think I will go to bed:)