Halloween!

We celebrated Halloween at the school on Wednesday. I don't know where Candy had all the holiday decorations stashed, but they came out in full force!

The first picture is of (everyone knows!) Candy, my Australian colleague, Trudi and the school manager, Mr. Choi. If you think he looks young, it is because he is. He and his wife have one young son and another baby on the way.

The second picture is of beautiful Anna. She was so kind to me when I first arrived. Anna studied in New Zealand and will be having her last day with us tomorrow. And the third picture is of Anna again, and Julie, another one of our Korean teachers. I have Julie's daughter, Melody, every other day in my 3 PM class.

The kids were wildly excited about the decorations and the fact that we had suckers for each class in a jack-o-lantern bucket. We did Halloween word search puzzles and talked about Halloween vocabulary. Most of the children understood costumes and the idea of trick or treat. Halloween is not celebrated in Korea but the kids seem to have had a lot of exposure at their language academies.

Just as a side note, there have been many articles in the newspaper about the fact that about 5,000 foreigner teachers were put out of a job when a Japanese English school went bankrupt last week. And, just today, I received an email from the US Embassy in Seoul stating that a new Korean law will be going into effect stating that anyone coming to Korea to teach will now be required to produce a background check. I will be interesting to see how that pans out, given the time required for those to be processed. We don't know how this will apply to those already here and teaching.