Sunday, December 21, 2008

It's beginning to feel a lot like christmas

It is a snowy monday after an incredibly warm week and weekend and i know it has been a long time since i wrote. But i have been a busy girl or at least it feels like i have been busy, perhaps it is just the laziness that the cold weather and dark days have brought on. Life has been good and it is slowly starting to feel more and more like christmas. Shortly after halloween the big chain stores all decked their halls with christmas bobbles and slowly the smaller korean stores started to decorate, especially the coffee shops and restaurants. I suppose after about dec 1st things really went crazy, christmas carols in store, people caroling in the streets or main square got all lit up. It was a little shocking at first that people were so into christmas here, but when you think that it has the largest growing population of christians and the three largest churches in the world, i guess it makes sense. Even the word for merry christmas in korean actually translates to christ's birth.

But despite all this it feels sort of surreal, as it is not the usual christmas that i have. No trip to calgary, no family, no real christmas shopping (except for myself :) Fortunately i do have some good friends here and we have been making some effort to keep the yuletide spirit alive. Last week or actually two weeks ago we went to our favourite little tea house and watched It's a wonderful life. I don't really need to emphasize what a great movie that is, although very depressing when you really think about it.

Then this week i began teaching christmas lessonsto my students. We watched mickey's christmas carol and the grinch. I taught them christmas vocab and we played bingo and made christmas cards. All the schools are also preparing their year end concerts and so in the halls of the school you can hear kids playing We wish you a mery christmas and rudolph on their recorders. My main schools concert was this past wednesday and it was awesome. Each grade presented something different. Some kids danced and others sang, there were a few role plays and fun was had by all. It took me down memory lane and i remember singing songs at coronation wearing sunglasses with kitten whiskers painted on my cheeks. The best part of it was that my school afterwards took out all the teachers for dinner and drinking. It was insane, a mad gluttonous feast. My principal went around to all 40+ teachers giving them shots of soju from his own glass. After that the younger teachers all went to another restaurant and at snack food and drank more and finally us really crazy teachers went to the Noraebang and sang until after midnight. It was good times, but as i'm sure you can imagine the teachers were all moving slowly the next day ;)

These riotous shinanigans were followed by the xmas jumper pub crawl this weekend. Which as i'm sure the title indicates we ran around in hideous christmas sweaters convincing the Koreans that yes indeed weiguks are insane. Actually we didn't last with the crawl very long as they were shockingly tame. So we took our jumpers and ran off to the Dome nightclub and started a shoe fire in the midde of the dance floor and then built a six person pyramid. It was very fantastic, especially when the koreans joined us, preventing the bar from kicking us out ;)

I hope you all have a merry christmas and in the words of one of my gr. 5 boys "Jesus I love you!!!"

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