Busy School Days

School activities are sometimes a welcome distraction (for students and teachers) from the daily classroom schedule. Recently we had two. One was Sports Day. This however, is a Korean school sports day which involved only ONE recognised track or field event - a lap of the field outside. Most of the events took place INSIDE the gym. My kids had been practicing a dance rountine for weeks. The song was called the 'Kimbap' song. Kimbap literally means seaweed rice, and is a korean food that looks like this.

Here you can see wrapped inside the rice and thin layer of seaweed is some carrot, egg, ham, spinach and pickled radish (mmm juicy). There are many differant kinds of Kimbap..the rice and seaweed stays the same, the contents differs. Very tasty especially with a small bowl of soup to wash it down with, and extraordinarily cheap in Korea - about 50p for one roll (maybe 15 pieces).
Anyway, this foodstuffs is what the children of Grade 4 sang a song about on Sports Day.....make sense? No, I didn't think so.



They even got dressed up for the part and made fake rolls of Kimbap, and ended up looking something like this:

And here I am marshalling the little old women before their routine, with my co-teacher, Mrs Cho Yeon Ju.

That week we also had a social studies lesson in which we had to talk about traditional games and activities. I introduced some English traditions to the kids such as conkers (although we couldn't play, no suitable nuts) and foxhunting (we didn't do that either, although I wanted to....). No no, they were fascinated by this upperclass pursuit and the pictures of it from the net, and we talked about how controversial it has been over the past few years. Myself and another teacher had wanted to play either a game of cricket or a game of croquet, both foriegn sports to the far east, but the usual problem emerged of where to get such equipment in Vietnam. One thing I did manage to do is organise a shove halfpenny tournement in class.....its not difficult to get these kids excited I tell you. Here I am sailing a 5000 dong coin into the '5 point' zone (clears throat).

The next distraction was a field trip to a Mercedes Benz factory, and later, a famous market in town. The Benz factory was quite interesting as they had the entire assembly line in one building. They showed a comparison of Vietnam with Germany : the same population (80 million), Germany has 35 million registered cars, Vietnam has 500,000. So they think that Vietnam has huge potential for vehicle growth, but I don't. They need a better infrastructure before the country can cope with a large number of cars. Here is a couple of pics from the factory.

So all very interesting (stifles yawn).

I think it was the first school visit the factory had hosted so you can imagine the look of the Vietnamese welders as this lot came through the factory. I don't know who Ji Hwan thinks he is lying on the floor like that either.