A Bonding Experience: Boston Campus Weekend Camp

I was in Korea last year for my first ever celebration of Buddha's Birthday, the national holiday that celebrates the birth of Buddha according to the lunar calendar. This year the day fell on May 28th, the same day as the American Memorial Day. Similarly, I had the day off.

The long weekend started with a work function. I really like my school because the include all of the teachers in functions, not just the Korean teachers. My school has three foreign teachers, including myself. Another from the states, like myself, and one from the Philippines, and we are included in and invited to all of the work functions except work meetings, which we wouldn't be able to understand or have a say in anyway.

This particular function was a camp. After asking if they meant 'camp' as in camping and receiving several 'no' answers, I took it to mean a sort of work bonding thing somewhere. I should have known better. One never gets the whole story in Korea. Things that sound scary and have strings of apprehension attached to them are glossed over with stretching of truths. Welcome to Korea. Have you two been introduced? It turned out to be actual camping. Like, at a campground. Thankfully, tents were not involved as my school rented a large campground house that resembled a small dormitory, complete with many separate rooms roughly the size of my apartment last year (that each slept about 4 or 5 people) and kitchen with dining hall. The majority of time at the camp was spent outside.

Classes ended Friday night at 7pm, at which point all of us teachers were given Boston Campus (the name of my academy) t-shirts to wear (I hate t-shirts), and we were then put into teams. (I'm still not sure how we were supposed to bond with each other by being in competitive teams against each other.) We broke off into our teams and created team names as well as cheers. My team name was 이죽이, or ee juk ee. The literal translation is 'the killing', but it is a phrase that means something like 'do or die'. I can't even begin to tell you what our team cheer was. It was about 8 or 10 words long, with the team leader saying one word (in Hangeul) and the team yelling the next word, this pattern repeated with different words each time until the cheer was over. I was the only way-gook on the team. Once that was completed, we all boarded the norea-bang bus and headed for the camp site in Geumsan, about an hour south.

We arrived at camp around 10pm, unloaded the bus and walked the rest of the [short] way to the camp house where we set up for a delicious dinner of samgyupsal, or Korean barbeque, with the usual sides of kimchi, lettuce (to make a samgyupsal wrap), onions, garlic and red pepper paste. There was also beer and soju, which I was also apprehensive about. In the states, mixing drinking with work is taboo. In Korea, it's taboo NOT to partake in the festivities (unless you don't drink at all, ever, and then it's okay). The principal kept pouring somek (soju + beer, which translates to mekju in Hangeul) for everyone and encouraging us all to drink more, drink more. Is your cup empty? Oh no! Bali bali, fill it up, more somek!

After we were all sufficiently lit, we proceeded to play some team games involving coordination and lots of silly activities, such as a 3-legged race, popping a balloon with a partner stomach-to-stomach, guessing words with charades, and more. (During these games, more drinks were being poured to make sure we all stayed sufficiently lit.) The scoreboard was entirely in Korean with only a few numbers, and all I know is that of the four teams, we didn't win and we didn't lose. After the games, we all sat down to eat again, around 3am. By the time the food was ready to eat, I was falling asleep from being up at 7am that morning for parent observation day number five. (I don't know how these Koreans do it.) I went into the camp house and promptly fell asleep. On the floor. That was heated to about two thousand degrees, you know, to make it comfortable to sleep on.

I slept until about 6:30am, when we all had to get up and get showers before starting the day's activities. (Mind you, I went to sleep first.) The day started with breakfast in the dining hall, which consisted of a red broth tofu soup, kimchi, rice and fried spam. (Spam is big here, don't knock it, it's not that bad.) After that, the Korean teachers went into a room for a meeting on how to make the school better while the foreigners, kids (yes, a few of the teacher's kids were brought along, witnessed the drinking the night before, and stayed up later than me) and husbands had some free time.

Camp house on right

Semi-dry river bed

I spend this time exploring around the area, which upon waking up I noticed was quite beautiful. The campground was situated in the ravine between two mountains that were spectacularly green. A semi-dry riverbed occupied the area, and I followed it with Alicia Teacher (the other foreign teacher from the Philippines) and we came across a museum geared towards children that turned out to be quite fun as we were the only ones there for quite some time. There were all kinds of things to see, a fake tree, bug habitats, a cool bridge, a garden complete with sheep- and bear-painted tree stumps, and more!

Mountain Museum 

Chimes and garden outside of museum

Tree hugging! (It's ironic that this tree was made of plastic...)

Awesome bridge

Kate Teacher and Alicia Teacher

After a few hours of exploration, the teacher meeting ended and we had more games and activities in the camp area. These consisted of talking with every teacher (there are 23 of us) for one minute before moving on to the next. We also met with the principal briefly during this time, and she gave us each a paper with something nice about us written on it. My meeting was translated by my absolutely awesome head teacher, HJ, and the principal just gave me a lot of compliments saying that I always look neat (neatly dressed), I'm always smiling, always helping out (she gave examples), and I am really pretty. Thank you! *Smiles* When I met with the other teachers, most of whom I haven't had a chance to get to know and vice versa, but a few of them told me that they liked my teaching skills of walking around the room and doing picture talks and being an active teacher, which I thought were the best compliments of all, aside from the principal being able to cite specific examples of my helpfulness. I really like my new school, can you tell? It's really wonderful to be working in such a different environment from last year that is so welcoming, supportive and friendly.

We also had a treasure-hunt activity where we had to search for little yellow pieces of paper folded up and placed under rocks and the like. The papers each had something written on them (in Korean) that turned out to be a 'prize' that we could get from a goodie bag. I got a computer mouse pad and some foam door stoppers (to stop doors from hitting into something else when opened). We also had another activity where we had to take photos of our team doing things and send it to the principal. It was fun, but I honestly had no idea what was going on for about 3 hours that day, as everything was in Korean and when I asked what was going on, I received very brief one-word-ish answers because it was hard for my team members to explain it to me in English. It was still fun, though.

After a lunch consisting of ramen and watermelon (which there was no big to-do about the presentation and cutting up of the watermelon - very anti-climactic), we packed everything up, walked back to the bus and drove back into Daejeon. I slept most of the ride back, and then walked home after and spent the following sixteen or so hours sleeping until the next morning when Buddha's Birthday Adventure 일분 (il-bon, number two) began.