Has it really been a month? I wasn't really planning on writing anything until I could take some pictures with my black belt on. But since that hasn't happened yet, I should point out that other things have indeed happened this last month.

Like... um... uh...

Black belt test? Well I suppose so. Yes that did happen. We traveled all the way to Deacheon, and took it with like nine hundred other red and black belts (some of the black belts were testing for their second and third degrees). I was in a gymnasium on a basketball court, the environment where I started Taekwondo, which was nice and mythic for me. We sat for about five hours watching others test before I got to test.

I am not in this picture. This is just some the people there before things really got started.

I think it went well. I was a bit enthusiastic perhaps in my shadow free sparring, they kept on telling me "slow down" but after fifteen years of waiting to get there, I was pretty excited. We still haven't gotten official word yet as to results. But I think all is well and expect to have a black belt around my waist in the next couple of weeks.

What else? We finished a term with the older kids. That was good. Now we have a new schedule with some new books which I like so far and our classes are very small which is great.

Also and perhaps more interestingly we had our English Musical with the kindergartners. I can't believe I didn't mention we were doing this in my last post. What it was, was that we (read Beth) made a play version of the story tree version (you remember storytree right?) of the Shoemaker and the Elves. I think it was one of the six year old classes stories. We had the seven and six years olds act it out (complete with all the dialogue in English) and all the three classes, do various songs and dances from the book and video. We also just for fun, had them all answer questions like "What is your name?" and "Who is in your family?" and "What is the velocity of a unladen swallow?" and we sang "Jesus Loves me" in English. So it started as a simple idea and grew into a extremely complex and involved month and a half long project. I drove all the English teachers crazy except me, who had all ready been through the fire of endless repetition of story tree songs and words over the last four or five months. I ate up getting to teach the seven year olds their lines, and watching the same two minutes of video to teach the five year olds the song and dance was broken up nicely by their acting up and me trying to get them to pay attention at all. Towards the end of it, I had no problem letting the Korean teachers direct, do the music and panic.
Naturally as with most all theater productions with small children it went off quite well and everyone had fun.

This is the kids singing a song.

Well, okay, at least the parents, kids and I did. The other teachers were very glad it was over. One of the students parents took us all out to dinner afterwords and I had some delicious spaghetti.

Other big happenings... Halloween of course! We had a "harvest festival" Halloween afternoon and got the kids to play games, eat food and win prizes. I got to practice my almost nonexistent balloon twisting skills. I didn't dress up for it but I did wear my red hat, and twisted a hat for myself, Mike and James. I also made several swords and a couple of puppies that I gave away. I was great fun, and I got to try a great traditional fried sweet bread made by Soo Min's mother. It was masshita!! (delicious).

Look at all the funness!

No applause. Just throw money.

I also hit Seoul this last weekend and saw a beautiful palace there. These are all pretty self explanatory pictures...



Oh I am planning on hitting the states only for a about a month and then comming back to Korea to teach some more and earn enough money to pay off student loans and get a good start on paying for the Clown Conservatory.

That pretty much covers the month.

Peace!