We got there and went inside a large building adjacent to the hill where the kids put their bags. We attended a shadow puppet, bubble, and laser show for the first hour and then ate lunch. Following lunch the real fun began.
Above is a picture of the path you climbed up to get to the top. I was impressed that our school was having these young kids (most of which are six or seven in American age) going down such a long hill. The snow was really more like ice and you really got going fast on intertubes.Below is a picture of some of the kids just leaving the top. I was a little scared at first since I got moving so fast and I wasn't sure how well I would stop at the bottom. They set up a large inflatable pillow that would catch you if you couldn't slow down. The school always has a photographer they hire for all the important events. It's the same guy and of course he came along and actually went down on the sled with his expensive camera. You can guess what happened... He plowed into the pillow-thing at the bottom which tumbled him backwards onto his camera. A large portion of the camera came off. He freaked out and fortunately his camera was okay as the piece just snapped back on.
Sledding was a little frustrating. The guys at the time (Korean 20 somethings) started picking on our kids and saying they were too small even though many had spent over an hour on the slope. I got mad and yelled at them in Korean about the situation and they explained that they had a couple of kids not in our school get hurt and that they didn't want to have more kids get hurt as more adults had arrived on the hill. Only one of our students was at the top of the hill when I yelled in Korean at the guys (thus breaking my no Korean in front of the kids vow). He was so excited and surprised and immediately exclaimed that I was speaking Korean. No other kids where up there and I told him to keep in quiet. He hasn't spoken a word of Korean to me since, proving my point that even if Koreans know a white foreigner speaks Korean, they'll still speak English to them.
Snack time! Mmmm... I had a lot of fun. I got food from around 20-25 kids as I had no snack and they were more than willing to share some of their ample supply. These two boys are fun, but difficult in different ways. The one on the left has really improved his English over the past six months and it is so exciting to watch him go from no English to speaking in broken sentences. His name is Kevin and he reminds me of a teddy bear. The one on the right on the other hand... well, let's just say that his Hello Kitty lunch box sums up his personality. Both were a bit hard to have focus in class as Kevin would like to play hide and seek in the middle of class and the other (David) would like to draw bunnies with giant, shinny eyes all over his papers... Any way, the snack experience was a success and resulted in me discovering previously unknown delicious Korean snack foods.
Now this is Mina. She is so wonderful! Not once has she misbehaved or distracted others. I've never seen anything like it. The only problem she has is that English doesn't come very naturally to her with the exception of songs (and boy can she sing). She had some pronunciation problems, but I think that that is just because she lost all four of her front teeth at the same time, resulting in her inability to make f,v, th, and a variety of other sounds that require your front teeth. I took this picture of her because she was one of the kids that had a ball sledding and probably went up and down the big hill 30 or more times. She had her hood on the whole time and as you can see she was sweating like crazy (no, her head didn't get wet from the snow/ice!).
Just one more picture of the decent. One of the funny things that you can see in this picture is that in addition to the big pillow-barrier-catcher thing is that they had three guys at the bottom trying to prevent everyone from running into each other. I should have taken some videos of it because it was quite entertaining!
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