Day 36: Dance Dance Dance

Ahhh the weekend - gotta love it! I had a full agenda for today, but almost all of my 'scheduled appointments' would be completely changed by the end of the day! I was supposed to hang out in the afternoon with this guy James - a friend of my friend Joanne back in Canada - who was gonna show me around Shihung a bit - but alas, he had been out partying the night before and slept in too late. No wories, this gave me a free afternoon to relax at home, catch up on email, and just chill out. Today's events definitely had a theme (totally coincidental as well) - DANCE!

4pm came round and I was due at REI for some interesting events - be prepared to laugh at me! ;-) Apparently in addition to performing My Love and Uptown Girl at an upcoming recital in May, the elementary classes will also be doing a choreographed dance routine! This will be absolutely hilarious I'm sure!
Between all the singing and now dancing, I'm uncertain these days as to whether my boss is more interested in teaching these kids English, or preparing them for Korean Idol! Hell, between all the miming and the singing and the dancing and other stunts I've performed for the kids I feel like I could apply for Fame Academy now!! I make fun of it but I must admit that I actually kinda like it - it beats just reading out of a textbook everyday!

So we were meeting up with a 'Jazz Dance Instructor' at 4pm who was gonna teach the kids the dance routine (which I have yet to even see.) The dancing is for the kids only, but the instructor encouraged me (and Susan) to join in to help encourage the kids. The first half hour proved to be a pretty rigorous yoga session to get everyone all stretched out and used to moving a certain way. This proved to be especially challenging and embarrassing for me as I am *NOT* flexible at all! So here I am, in a room with 15 7-10 year olds who have absolutely no problem touching their toes, or bending themselves into some contorted pretzel, or whatever acrobatic position the jazz instructor wanted them to be in, while I struggle helplessly to bend and twist and keep up with the rest of them. It's not fair! What 8-year old can't touch their toes? - I'd like to see these kids try it when they're 25 and 6'3" - it's a long ways down to my toes!!! :-) Anyways I provided much comedic relief for the kids who giggled and laughed while watching the instructor trying to guide and physically push me into whatever masochistic tantric position she was trying to get me into!!!

The last half hour was much more fun. The instructor (who looks like a Korean Debbie Gibson by the way - giant poofy hair and all) put on this really cheesy tape of pop songs from the 90's to get us motivated and energized. We practiced various moves of jumping and bending and shaking our booties and doing these really campy sharp head turns to make our hair flip back and forth. (Is this the kind of training that Britney Spears had to go through?) She taught us some ballet moves too - the whole 'pliet' thing (incorrectly spelled, I know) and moving our arms around while standing on our tippy-toes. I didn't do very well at this portion either, but hey it was still fun.

After the dance session was over, I hopped onto the subway and headed into the city. Brad has phoned me the day before and had invited me to attend a breakdancing competition that was happening at one of the Olympic stadiums in Seoul. He was going with Andrea, Steve, and Amy and I thought it would be fun to tag along and check it out! I tried phoning Brad's cell to find out the exact stadium and when approximately they were all gonna be down there, but there was no answer...hmmm....

So Seoul's Olympic stadiums are split into two different parks, about a few kilometres from each other, and each park has at least 5 or 6 stadiums. Not knowing which park nor which stadium was holding the breakdancing event, I picked the park that has "The Olympic Stadium" - the massive stadium that held the opening and closing ceremonies when Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics in 88 (?) I tried to phone Brad again but still no answer. I walked out to the stadiums, hoping that I would just be able to find the event by walking around, but the park was dark and empty. It's a massive park and each stadium is so large it takes like 15 minutes just to walk from one to the other...I wandered in search of my friends, but alas, there was no Brad, no breakdancing to be found! I was obviously at the wrong park, but at this point it was dark and late and I didn't feel like wandering around the other Olympic Park so I just threw in the towel! No breakdancing for me that night!

Instead I took the train to Itaewon to have some dinner, and then meet up with a few friends for drinks. I met up with my friend Gavin - an English Teacher from Wales that I chatted with online a few times before coming to Korea. He was really nice and introduced to me to some other British teacher-friends of his, including his friend Debbie who is an absolute riot, as well as a bunch of Korean buddies. We all had a great night having drinks at the various lounges, and then doing some serious dancing at the nearby clubs! Everyone was in great spirits and more than a little drunk, so we had our own dance competition in one of the clubs while grooving along to "Dirrty" and "Lade Marmelade"! Good cheesy fun!!! We ended up partying until 4am and at that point I was definitely crashing and was all danced out. We crashed at Gavin's friend Ryan's place and I went to sleep, with Christina, Britney, and Madonna dancing in my head...