Halloween.................in Korea

This past weekend was Halloween, and I honestly didn't think that I would celebrate it in Korea. My co-teachers had mention to me how the students know about Halloween, therefore, they would be expecting me to dress up sooo I called my mother up and asked her to mail me my Halloween costume from my freshmen year at Bonas. But she took it upon herself to donate that $50 cosutme. I only wore it once, and I had the intention of wearing it again, like now in Korea. So I went online and orderd a new costume off of Ebay , and it was another witch costume. I didn't expect my school to care that much about Halloween. All I planned to do was talk about Halloween in my classes and give out candy and then for my after-school class I would look for Coraline or The Nightmare Before Christmas to watch with them. Well the principal had another idea, he decided that he wanted to have this Halloween celebration for two days with the 4th through 6th graders. So the school gave my co-teachers and I 500,000 Won which is the equivalent to like $450. We went shopping the next day and we were able to find some Halloween decorations, and the rest of the decorations we created on our own. We decorated the whole English center with pumpkins, and skeltons, and tons of Halloween stuff. The classrooms in the English Center, which has four different rooms would be used for the students to rotate to the Game, Activity, Story, and Song Room.

My room was the " Story Zone" so I created a short powerpoint presentation about Halloween and I prepard to show the first four mins of " The Nightmare Before Christmas" because they sing " This is Halloween" . My co-teacher found the " The Nightmare Before Christmas" with Korean subtitle , on this popular Korean website. So the school's computer tech burned to a disc for me.

The day of the Halloween celeberation, I was shocked to see that almost every student wore a costume and created ' Trick or Treat " Bags. It was great !!!!! I never cared too much about Halloween when I was in America, but for some reason while in Korea, I started to care a whole lot about it ,and I was starting to miss celebrating it at home. Later that day after the tenth group , I was starting to get sick of the " This is Halloween" song. It was a great day and the students loved it.

Day 2 of the Halloween celebration was a lot of fun because I wore my costume to school, and all the students were FREAKING out!!! I was the only teacher who got dressed up, I tried to convince my co-teachers to dress up but they refused. So I wore my costume and proceeded to do another day of showing my powerpoint presentation and showing " The Nightmare Before Christmas". This day was more fun because the all the students were very excited and into the movie. They really enjoyed the song, " This is Halloween" . This day was shorter and I was finally exhausted, but I was so happy that my school embraced the halloween celebration with so much passion. I think the only reason they wanted a Native speaker was so they had an excuse to celebrate Halloween. lol


That night after all of the Halloween celebration at my school, I went to an opera with a few of my friends to see " Carmen" . The last time time I saw Carmen, was on a PBS special when I was 11, and it was with Dorthy Dandridge. I assumed that the play was going to be in Korean, but it was French, with Korean and English Subtitles, and the singing and acting , was very nice. It was worht the $30 to go see it.


HALLOWEEN DAY...........I decided to make the trip to Seoul with a couple of my freinds to go out to a club and celebrate Halloween with other foreigners.
We spent most of the day shopping with the intentions of going to the club later, but we became very tired and instead went out for dinner. After dinner we decided to relax in our motel room and then maybe go out for a drinks. So later that night even though we didnt really want to, we decided we would just go to a bar and have some drinks and then call it a night, ( how lame of us ), so we went to the W.A (western style bar) and as usally we were the only foreigners lol. We stayed there for while and had two pitchers of beer and some snacks. We were so tired we decided to call it a night and head back home to go to sleep, however that changed because on our way back we noticed that the malls were opend til 6am, and it was only 12am. SOOOO we first decided to go into one store, so we could look at some of their shoes, but then that turned into 5 hours of shopping. It was great because I was able to find the boots that I wanted, and everyone else was able to buy something that they had wanted as well. After that we decided to FINALLY go back to our motels. And then the next morning I took the train back home $200 poorer, lol.

This past Halloween weekend was better then I had expected it to be, and I am so glad it turned out to be a lot of fun BUT it really made me miss Halloween in America so next year when Im back home I will be sure to really get into the spirit.

^^