My body, my town

Every Friday morning at Haba is spent preparing for what we call 'Presentation'. Each English teacher spends the first two hours of school with the same 6 or 7 year old class doing 'Show and Tell'. This show and tell usually consists of teaching the kids a phrase about the monthly topic and then typically a song. Oh yeah, each month we have a different theme. January's is 'My body, My town'. February is 'Friends and shopping'. A few classes are centered on these themes and your presentation is supposed to be related to the theme somehow. At 12:00 sharp Friday the 6 and 7 year olds are marched into the gym and perform, along with their teacher, what they have learned that day for everyone. It is usually very fun and always super cute to see what actually happens when the kids are standing up front with a microphone in their face.

For most of the time that I have been at Haba, I've spent these mornings with schwarz class. This is a very interesting class because it is full of 6 rambunctious boys (who most the time think that they are honestly transformers) and one very sweet girl. While I have a hard time always controlling them and keeping them from harming one another, we also spend a lot of time laughing and having fun. This past Friday we talked about our body parts and how many of each part we have.For presentation they talked about whatever body part they wanted ( a lot of "I have one head", "I have two arms", and "I have one mouth"), and we all sang the song "I have two arms". I was very proud of their performance. The following video is them practicing the song before we headed out to meet the rest of the school. You can see that most of the kids are doing great but in the right corner Optimus Prime (Antonio) and Megatron (Roy) being a little feisty.

Oh, we also had a 'Sorry, Sorry' dance party.

They dug it.

Paris

Spending the better part of my winter break in Paris was a very interesting experience. Not only was it my first time in Europe, it was my first time traveling alone (our winter breaks only overlapped for Christmas eve and Christmas, so David and I had 1.5 days in Paris together), as well as the first time I had left Asia for the past 7ish months. My introduction to the 'city of light' was stepping out of the Metro station in Montmartre at 11 pm Christmas eve night to be faced with an overwhelming amount of diversity, grit and no idea where I was. After walking around for awhile, David thankfully found me and led us towards our cute Parisian apartment that I had rented off of craigslist. From there the trip was only to get better.
Christmas day was spent exploring the quintessential Parisian sights, accompanied by a lot of "wows", "are we really here?", giggling, eating and of course "kiss me under the eiffel tower"s. I'm not going to lie that when David left the next day I felt apprehensive about my ability to explore this new and seemingly overwhelming city on my own. But to my surprise I spent the next three days walking for hours, taking a million pictures and thoroughly enjoying the sights and sounds of this famous city. I even went down into the catacombs alone which was creepy but very very cool. I really had a wonderful time and am so thankful that working in Korea has allowed me not only to pay off debt and save money, but has also given me the freedom, and confidence, to step out into other places in the world. I learned that yes I can be a confident, independent traveller, but enjoy having a buddy there to share the experience with much more. Once I landed in an icy cold Korea, I was quite happy to hop on the familiar airport bus in Incheon and have it drop me off in front of the grocery store where I have bought food for the last 7 months and walk down the friendly (and clean!) street to my semi-warm apartment. It oddly felt like coming home.