Day 200: Angry Spider

Today was the August field trip for all the pre-schoolers and it's something that all of us teachers really look forward to. It's a chance to get out of the classroom with the kids and check out something cool. It happens every month and usually takes up almost all of the morning. Last month's field trip to the fire station was pretty cool but today turned out to be a rather exhausting day.

Today's field trip was to the Central American Cultural Museum (who knew that Korea, of all places, had one of those?) which had the most unusual location for a museum. It was way out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of suburbia north of Ilsan. It's the kind of location that if you were driving by you could blink and miss it, as it was really tucked away. Why this museum isn't located in the city (like where there's people) is beyond me.

The museum was a really cool building whose inside was modelled in a Latin open-air style and it was full of really beautiful and exquisite Central American cultural relics, including masks, statues, paintings, furniture, and many sculptures. All this really amazing stuff though held absolutely no attraction though for the kids. We whizzed through exhibit after exhibit in no time flat and in all seriousness it probably took us about fifteen minutes to cover the entire museum. This was disappointing cause there was tons of cool stuff in there I would've loved to have pored over but I mean, come on, these kids are only five so of course they're not gonna be into it.

The museum was situated on beautiful grounds made up of stone pathways, flower bed gardens, and dozens of unique Latin sculptures. Most of our day was spent doing 'photo shoot' in just about every single spot in the garden. Our Korean assistants LOVE taking pictures of all the kids in a million and one poses everywhere we go, and as cute and fun as this can be at first it doesn't take long for it to get tedious. The kids get bored of having to constantly line up or sit down and pose (as do us teachers) and after a while you really start to wonder exactly *how many* photos do we really need? We probably took at least fifteen or twenty throughout the day!

The kids were having one of their 'we don't feel like listening to the teacher' days and were especially hyper while outside in the gardens. It was cute to see them get excited over the flowers and plants, and you should've heard the SQUEALS of joy/fear/curiosity/ecstacy/disgust when we came upon some spiders who had spun rather large webs in the garden. "Angry spider! Angry spider!" shouted the kids as they through sticks and leaves at the spider webs. They were so excited to taunt the spiders but jumped back in fear every time they did it as if the little spiders were going to jump and attack them. God I can only imagine how they'd be if they ever came across a tarantula!

By the time our long-winded lunch was finally over I was totally ready to head back to school. I was tired, the kids were tired, and I was absolutely starving (I couldn't eat the lunch cause it was kimbok which not only contains ham but is also completely disgusting.) I had a nice, quiet, peaceful lunch when we got back and was thankful there were no more angry spiders at POLY for me to save.