Pre-Sugar Crash Post (That sounds really confusing...)

I can feel myself getting closer to a sugar crash as I type this, but I feel like this is a good moment to refresh my blog.

Halloween has come and gone in Korea (Or Halloween Day, as my students have called it. I've been trying to correct that.), but it is still October 31st back home. Last year on this very date I was scheduled to have my interview with EPIK. I had to re-schedule, which made me super nervous about the whole thing, but it all worked out in the end.

It's crazy to think how I have come around to this date again. At that time I wasn't sure where I would be going, physically and metaphorically. Occasionally I would think about the possibility of never making it past the interview. All that work to get to that point, it would have been pointless.

I am grateful that I've gotten this far. I'm in a good place, with great people and students who to surprise me.

Happy Halloween, everyone! I REALLY need to go to bed now. Once I've had some sleep, I'm setting aside some time tomorrow to write more.... and probably check this post for typos.

Thanks for reading!

Koreans Are Creepy Too

And I mean that as a compliment.

It's that time of year again! The season I love and the holiday that lets you show a bit of your "weird" side. Halloween! I love the colors, the nights getting longer and the mystery that comes with the holiday.

When I learned that Halloween is a very new concept in Korea, I was a bit sad to be honest. But, I can't expect a holiday like Halloween with its roots in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Germanic tradition and superstition to be the same in an Asian culture. Christmas isn't even the same, which I'll get into for a later post.

But, yes, Halloween is fairly new to Korea. Trick-or-Treating, specifically, was introduced mainly through ESL teachers because that's the simplest and probably most interesting thing to explain to a class of hyper-active kids. Most of the time, however, the Korean students (like many other students of that age) hear CANDY and things go a little mad:

Ok, so this might have been staged, but you get the idea. From what I've gleaned from other English teacher's in Korea, they cover the details of Trick-or-Treating pretty well with their students. What else do they tell their students, though? I loved Trick-or-Treating when I was younger, but it seems like there is so much more to Halloween than that.

There's haunted houses, corn mazes, pumpkins, ghost stories... It's All Hallow's Eve, people! You better be teaching them about the other traditions besides demanding candy from strangers. There's nothing more fascinating, to me, than the old traditions of this day and seeing how they evolved.

Just don't bore your students with complex details, though.

Korea has its own fair share of creepy stories, and they definitely know how to scare people. There are plenty of superstitions in their culture, pretty similar to many other Asian superstitions, and teacher's could spend some great class times swapping stories. It would be a great way to get your students to practice translation and speaking, though this is probably best for more advanced groups.

There are some pretty disturbing Korean horror movies, and then there are the ones that mix humor into them:

Master's Sun (Kdrama about a woman who can see ghosts. She meets a man one day who keeps the ghosts away when she touches him.)

Chilling Romance/Spellbound (A film about a magician who meets a woman who can see ghosts and is haunted by her dead best friend. The woman pushes everyone out of her life because the ghost of her friend terrorizes anyone close to her.)

 These can both be found on Hulu if you are in the US. Spellbound has more of that creepy factor than Master's Sun, but there's humor and romance thrown in there. Just be careful of the ghost scenes if you're not a big fan of shows like The Ring.

Anyways, I'll leave with a Happy Halloween and this creepy Korean song:

Happy Halloween!