Lottes of fun at LW!

The 2nd installment of today's "Friday Reflection."

Yesterday I got to join my school's field trip to the popular Korean amusement park Lotte World. I was pretty excited to keep the "not teaching" theme going this week and blow off some steam in Seoul for the day. And that was exactly the extent of my expectations. I had heard it was kinda janky so my hopes certainly were not Snoop Dogg-high.

I came to school early on Thurs morning to catch a ride with the Mr. Lee (The IT guy I play ping-pong with regularly! I finally learned his name!), Junyoung, and Junhyuk. We took off from Young Sung Middle at 8:30am and headed to Lotte World. After watching Mr. Lee's favorite Korean TV show on his GPS (yes you read that correctly), singing along to some k-pop over the dinging drone of the "wear-your-seatbelt" alert (Mr. Lee hates wearing seatbelts apparently...), running red lights and swerving in-and-out of traffic, we got to Lotte World at 9am.

The initial feel of the place was of a giant mall more so than an amusement park. We walked in and saw the hordes of Young Sung kids. Homeroom teachers were taking attendance, and the students were sitting and waiting for the gates to open. It was really interesting to see my students wearing normal street clothes rather than the uniformed middle school garb. In general, they were all dressed very nicely. Many looked appropriately dressed for a night out at the clubs. Lots of puffy vests, expensive looking dress shirts, and fancy sneakers.

The park itself was a cross between Six Flags, Mall of America, and Disneyworld. Half was indoors and half was outdoors. The elaborate shopping and enormous dome over our heads felt like MoA. The thrill-ride laden outer portion felt like Six Flags. And as much as I hate to say it (...Sigrid...), it kind of had the Disney "it" factor. Whether it was the identical park maps to Disney, the "Cinderella castle", or the Mickey and Minney wannabes, it kind of, KIND OF (Sigrid) felt like a smaller, cheaper version of WDW. It didn't have the same resort scene that WDW has going on, and there's only 1 park, but it was fun nonetheless.

For lunch, the teachers ate at a fancy-ish Korean restaurant that was perfectly outfitted for large groups. My 2 new fave Korean foods are now bossam, or grilled pork belly, and pajeon, a green onion and seafood pancake-like pizza. Oh and, like always, there was a healthy dose of booze on the table waiting for us. Yesterday's poison? Makgeoli, a rice wine that doesn't not taste like medicine. A little weird, but it's growing on me.

The rest of the day I spent walking around with Mr. Lee, Junyoung (a coworker my age), and Junhyuk (a Young Sung 1st grader - our 5/6th grade). We hit many of the rides with little to no wait and fraternized with the kids. Mr. Lee told me summer weekends typically see a 3-4 hour wait per main attraction. Loco. As for the kids, one thing to note was the teacher-student dynamic outside of school. Kids see their teachers as more than just an authoritative figure. They are role models too. They have parental characteristics in the classroom and almost become an older sibling outside the classroom. Hierarchy is also huge here. For example, Mr. Lee and I would cut almost every line simply by finding a willing and honored student. Part of me felt guilty but it seemed very normal for everyone else. He would grab kids' water/food, take a swig/bite, and then offer it to me. And sometimes they would gladly offer food. Mr. Lee even gave some kids money to spend on arcades and ice cream. Overall, a very interesting and notable relationship between teacher and student.

I'm probably missing some details but I just want to finish this post. I'll let the video do the rest of the talking. More on the videos though. I probably have a few hours of raw video to edit yet, and I'm going to make them in order. So, it's gonna be Gangnam video first. School festival second. And Lotte World third. Hopefully it doesn't take me TOO long.

In other news, I JUST bought myself a Nikon D3100 off the Korean version of Amazon (thanks Junyoung). So expect pictures I actually took. So. Damn. Excited.