School technically ended for the term on Friday and concluded with the school festival. I say "technically" because though the students are on break from now until classes officially restart in early February they are strongly pressured to attend extra classes all throughout the month of January.

The school festival was a school-wide event that permitted the boys to show off their art work, class projects and in the evening performance skills. I was asked to judge the Middle School pop song contest along with the Middle School vice principal and a guest judge. Each class of boys picked a song in English, created choreography and dressed in costumes and performed it in front of their peers. The winning classes got to perform at the evening festival which was open to parents and students from neighboring schools.

During the festival I was surprised how talented many of my students were - they could sing, dance, play instruments and two can even beat box. The video below is excerpts from the festival - one of the microphones malfunctioned during the evening so some of the singing sounds a bit off. All of the students who performed are in my classes - the final two performances - the beat boxing and the boys singing with the guitar are in my night classes as well.

Last weekend a friend, knowing my interest in religious practices, invited me to accompany him to a temple outside of Daegu. We left Jeomchon early Saturday morning and boarded a train which meandered through the countryside of Gyeongsangbuk-do for over 2 hours before arriving at Dong Daegu Station. From Daegu we boarded another train and spent the short 40 minute ride chatting with an older Korean couple who were a bit curious to have encountered foreigners on the train. Upon arriving in Yeongcheon we took a taxi outside of city limits to the temple where we encountered a gold colored series of towers which shone brightly under the mid-May sun.  만불사 (Manbulsa) is a relatively new temple that claims to have 10,000 statues of the Buddha in various forms. It is a syncretic mix of Buddhism - the golden towers more reminiscent of south east Asian Buddhism while the main building is clearly a Korean style temple.

For a few hours we wandered around the temple grounds - admiring enormous statues of the Buddha, lounging on a concrete bed or sitting peacefully in a lotus flower while listening to the consistent chant of the monks being played over speakers throughout the area. Cemeteries scattered throughout the grounds have graves bearing family names  in hangeul (Korean characters) and hanja (Chinese characters) which are decorated with artificial flowers. As we walked along the paths marked on the map given to us by one of the temple employees we came upon a statue of Buddha standing 33 meters tall and looking out onto the valley below.

Below is a video of the monk chanting in the temple in addition to photos from the temple. Click on the photos below to see the larger image.

On Tuesday all but three of my classes were canceled at the elementary school because the students were preparing for their upcoming Sports Festival on Friday.  The students spent two hours in the late morning being organized into groups,competing in races, running relays and hula hooping. On the day of the festival the school will open to the public and parents will attend the festival and watch their children compete in a variety of events.

In my 6th grade afternoon class I had the students journal about Sports Festival and most admitted that they didn't enjoy it because they dislike running. However, one girl acknowledged that even though she doesn't like to run she did like that after the Sports Festival school was dismissed and she could leave early.

Below is a video of the students practicing what I think is the school song. I heard it at an assembly earlier in the school year. The school is very small with about 50 students from kindergarten up to 6th grade and I teach all by kindergarten, first and second grades.