So I found out this weekend that one of my preschool students has the Swine Flu! We got a call from the director of our school and she told us that our school would be closed for a week, without pay. So we had mixed reactions. On one hand: a week off! We only get two weeks off for the whole year so add another one right there. On the other hand: we don't get paid. I wasn't too worried about this, but some of the other teaches are leaving in about a month, so there goes a quarter of what they would be getting for their last paycheck. Basically, we all lay low and hope none of the staff or other kids get it. My worry is how this will effect the school in the long term. The school has already seen a decline in enrolled students in the past few months. Surely we will lose more because of this incident, and I'm worried that our school will have a tainted name. "Don't send your kid to that school, they had Swine Flu there." Here in Korea, Swine Flu is no joke. The other day my director asked me how I was feeling; if I felt cold. I said I was fine and asked why. She said, "Well it's starting to get cold, and when it get's cold... Swine Flu." Thaaaaat's not really how it works, but I just went with it and said I felt fine.
In other news, I attended my first field trip with the preschoolers last Thurday! We went to an amusement park in Daegu called Woobang Tower Land. Named after Woobang Tower which sits on top of a nearby hill and boasts truly amazing views of the valley. Woobang Tower is the highest tower in Asia apparently, and you can jump off it! Unfortunately, we didn't take the preschoolers up there. So I got to work at 9:45 on Thursday morning and got to ride in one of the school vans with some of the kids to the park. They all had their little school jackets on so we could easily identify them. There are about 30 preschool students and we had 8 or 9 teachers there to supervise. When we were lining them up outside the entrance, I looked at Ray and he seemed sad. I tried to ask him what was wrong but he didn't answer. One of the Korean teachers asked him and he said he was hot. She felt his forehead and said, "He has a fever." By the way, Ray was the one with Swine Flu. I wondered why his parents would send him to school with a fever, but I thought he probably just didn't want to miss the field trip. He ended up sitting in the shade with one of the teachers most of the time because he felt so bad. Poor kid.
We took the rest of the kids on three rides and they had lots of fun. When it was time for lunch they all whipped out their little decorated mats to sit on and their little lunch boxes with kimbap (rice and seaweed rolls, kind of looks like sushi) and other goodies. We foreign teachers wandered around and snagged freebies where we could. The kids were quick to offer them up. After some running around, we headed back to school. The kids went home, but we all had to teach the rest of our classes. We were already exhausted, so by the end of the day we were spent.
Jun, Stephanie, and Henry with Woobang Tower in the back.
Andy!
The first non-Western style toilet I found. Looks like a urinal on the floor.
Honey and Tommy! Little geniuses.
Kimbap for lunch! Rice rolled in seaweed with ham, egg, radish, carrot, etc.
Alison, Danni, and Me with our Y1 class. Very smart preschoolers.
To see more pictures of this trip and all of my pictures so far, go here: http://picasaweb.google.com/evan.richards/EvanInKorea#
I have also uploaded a bunch of videos to youtube, so you can check them out here: http://www.youtube.com/user/erichards719
This past weekend I took my first trip outside of Daegu, to another city on the southeast coast called Busan. There was a HUGE fireworks festival that we went to, and saw the best fireworks I can ever remember seeing! I will write about that in the next few days. But if you want to see a video of the fireworks:
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