You Can Call me Moses

This weekend Aaron and I decided that since we were paid some of what is owed to us we could experience a little more of Korea. We decided to go to the Jindo Sea Festival. Our plans to wake up  and catch an early bus were thwarted when A) we had to work until 9 on Friday night so we were utterly spent and B) the buses were all full for the morning and we couldn't get on one until 12:10.

Let me back track to staying until 9:00 on a Friday night. Working in a kindergarten for 8.5 hours a day is enough to exhaust anyone, especially Aaron and I who have become accustomed to the life of the unemployed. With that said, no matter how much we love our jobs, come Friday at 5:30 we are ready to run out the doors, forget all of our cute "learn English songs", and have a relaxing weekend. This week, however, we had to stay put due to an open house for our Schule parents. I don't know if I have mentioned the fact that Koreans LOVE awkward situations....but they do. Since Aaron and I have white skin, we automatically fall into the freak show category. Our boss loves to parade her white people around, and this week she had us stand up in front of the parents to teach them the god forsaken Alpha Friends song. I also would like to mention the fact that Aaron and I have been brought up to eat three meals a day (weird, right?), but when we asked if we would be able to get dinner sometime in our 4 hours of overtime, we were met with some animosity. Apparently dinner was too much to ask for, but our boss did begrudgingly provide us with a kid's meal consisting of 10 cold, stale "chicken nuggets" and half a glass of orange juice for us to share. Bleh. Another strange thing that happened was Mrs. Jeong (boss lady) asked us to hug the parents on the way out... hugging adult strangers (not to mention ones who can't understand anything we are saying) is not really our thing so we settled for hugging the kids, although it earned us some dirty looks.

So on Saturday we took a two hour bus to Jindo, a small town in the southern part of the country. Once a year the sea levels are low enough that a sand-bar magically appears and it is possible to walk some 2.8 kilometers out to an island. As Aaron so admirably put it, "it really isn't all that miraculous, it is just tide fluctuations." It was honestly pretty cool to see though. We purchased some styling thigh high boots, made some new friends, and walked on water (or a sand-bar). The walking part actually proved to be quite dangerous as small Korean women were ferociously digging for clams and leaving holes open for the poor, unsuspecting foreigners to fall into. We all agreed that the clams were just an added bonus for the comic relief they got out of watching the havoc their holes wrecked on the population. I briefly mentioned the lack of respect for personal space in a previous blog, but it really surfaced when we were surrounded by thousands of neon clad Koreans pushing us violently aside in order to walk in front of us then stop dead in their tracks, thus starting the elbow dance all over again. After being thoroughly jostled around, having our ear drums molested by traditional singing, and experiencing a true Korean festival, we bought waffles filled with cream and jogged with them in hand to catch a late bus home.

Pastries filled with bean paste, it is growing on me.

Street meat.

Jindo dogs famous in this region.

Colorful.

Before the sea parted.

I don't think that guy with the gun was part of the parade.

So many people!

Some smart ass dressed as Moses. I have no idea what the sign says, hopefully not "I am an ignorant American."

One good looking couple.

This little boy and his scythe.

I kept them.

Sneaky hole making lady.

Being a smart ass myself and pretending to walk on water.

And the parting.

Parade.

Korean mask.

 Upon our arrival in Gwangju we decided to settle for a cheap $17 dollar personal pizza from Papa Johns and then made our way to a popular foreigner hangout, the German Bar. The owner was so friendly that it almost made up for the fact that the beer tasted like a Pabst flavored with maple syrup and Alicia Keys music videos were the entertainment of choice. We had a few good giggles about it all and then called it a night. All in all it was a pretty successful weekend.