EPIK Workshop

This past week was a short one, we had a manditory 2 day workshop on Thursday and Friday. We left behind schedule Thursday morning on 3 coach busses from the MOE. We arrived at Boseong Dabeach Condo before lunch. The condo was gorgeous! We were on the southern tip of Korea and the beach was beautiful. We had really nice pleasant weather too. The area is known for their green tea, the few cups I had was very good. I ended up buying some for my center school before I left, trying to get some brownie points so I can have my 6 weeks off in January!

The lectures overall were okay. A lot of teachers are in Elementary school because there are so many of them. Most of the material I felt was catered to that level. I was really excited to get more ideas for games/activities but did not really walk away with much unfortunately. Guess I'll just have to get some more ideas off Dave's ESL Cafe.

The meals we had were really good, for dinner Thursday night we had a huge buffet. I knew it was going to be full of good stuff, so I didn't waste precious stomach space with things like salad. Some of my favorites were raw salmon, raw oysters, eel, crab, songpeyong, and beef. Everything was so fresh and unprepared, so the flavor was great.

Most people stayed up late on Thursday night even though we had to wake up early on Friday. It was fun to see everyone in one place again. Our group skipped out on the after dinner activites, and instead watched the Kia Tigers win against the SK Wyverns up on the 6th floor. We had about 30 people in that room and had plenty of refreshments. Then, after the win, we moved down to the Noraebang on the 1st floor. We joined up with Michael, Andrew, Mechele, Amandeep, Miguel, and a few others. It was quite the happening place. Allie, Em, and I did pretty good at singing songs by BSB and NSync. Of course, the classics like Bohemian Raphesody and Somebody Told Me we sung too! I think we were in there for about 3 hours. Quite a good time.

Friday morning, we went to a green tea plantation/bamboo farm in the morning. It was pretty impressive to see all the green tea and how big the bamboo trees were! In the afternoon, we went to a tradtional folk village where people are still living. It wasn't too touristy which was nice. So many of us always talk about how cute the Korean kids are, and there were tons of young kids on field trips.

We made it back to the MOE around 3:45 pm which was good, because we had another 2 days off in front of us and had things to do!