Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Halloween in Korea

Happy Halloween!  It is not a holiday that is celebrated by anyone but the foreigners in Korea.  And the English academies.  All of our kindergartners came to school in costumes today and we got to have a Halloween party with them.  My "costume" was an athlete/coach, or an excuse to wear sweats to work.  Each class went to the different classrooms to go "trick-or-treating" and we all went to the playground where the kids got to have a scavenger hunt to find the candy.  The English academy is the only place the kids will get to do trick-or-treating though.  They will not go knocking on every door in their 34 floor apartment buildings while wearing their costumes tonight.  There was a small section advertising Halloween candy when we went to the store last night, but I must say it was significantly smaller than the section advertising Spam gift sets during the Korean holiday Chuseok last month!  But the kids seemed to have a lot of fun dressing up and getting A LOT of candy at school today.  Of course my class had to be the ones to discover that it was much easier to enjoy the candy without the vampire teeth in their mouth.  The elementary students that we teach in the afternoon were definitely disappointed that they did not get to dress up and go trick-or-treating, especially the ones that remembered it from kindergarten last year.  Fortunately, all the teachers still had some candy leftover for them to have (if they said "trick-or-treat").  

Side note:  Our landlord is actually a taxi driver on the Yongsan Military Base here.  He has started bringing us a copy of the newspaper that is available on the base which was advertising A LOT of trick-or-treating, haunted houses, pumpkin carving activities for the families that live on base.  We sure wish we could have taken the little kids out for some real trick-or-treating or pumpkin carving!  But I guess Halloween, like many other "American" things, is a holiday that hasn't spread very far off of the military base area.

Here are a few pictures from kindergarten...
 
 A princess and a devil (Elizabeth and Jayden)

 We decided that if Jacob had some glasses he would look just like an Asian Harry Potter!

 Eric Teacher and his class

 Trick-or-treating at school

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