Field Trip
Aesop's Village 2
Originally uploaded by Laughter317. So I'm gonna post just about the field trip right now since its pretty lengthy.
For the field trip, we went to Caribbean Bay and Everland. Everland is a big amusement park outside of Seoul. Its celebrating its 30 year anniversary this year. It reminds me a little bit of Disney World with the themed areas and such but its a lot smaller. It has a American area, a World area, a European area, Magic Land, a Safari area and some places I can't think of right now. Caribbean Bay is a newish (10 years old) water park that is next door to Everland.
We left Incheon around 1:30 in the afternoon on Friday. The bus ride was only a little over an hour but it seemed like more with the screaming kids and such. It was quite a challenge to keep them sitting in their seats...until Kelly made them all put their seat belts on. We took 29 kids on the trip with 5 teachers; me, Drew, Kelly, Sunny P and Ellie. Ellie was my co-teacher for summer school. Kelly is the manager for Wonderland and Sunny is one of the team leaders. None of the other summer school teachers wanted to go and we kidnapped Drew so we'd have a male teacher with us...very necessary for the locker room situation at the pool.
When we got to Everland, the first thing we did was check into our "hotel". They have a cabin hostel on the grounds of Everland which is where we stayed. Its designed for large groups. Our cabin had 3 rooms, and 2 bathrooms. There was one big room where the girls slept and then two smaller rooms...one for the teachers and one for the boys. We got the kids into their swimsuits and had them bring dry clothes for later and got on a shuttle to go to Caribbean Bay.
At Caribbean Bay, we got all the stuff put away and got life jackets for the kids and headed to the wave pool. They made everyone wear a life jacket if you went in deeper than 4 feet. I guess that's because most Korean's can't swim. Also when the waves come through its really easy to get pushed under so its much safer to have a life jacket on. The wave pool was intersting. Instead of having continuous waves like at wave pools back home, there'd be one big wave (like 6 feet higher than the water level) followed by 2 or 3 smaller waves. This repeated about every 3 minutes. They gave Drew and I the older kids so I wasn't actually in charge of any of my summer school kids. I think they gave us the older kids so we could have more fun. I only had 4 kids to keep track of and Drew only had 5...I think. Even still, I managed to lose one of my kids. She was terrified of the big waves and would cling to me every time the horn went off to signal that the wave was starting. She about drowned me one time. So after a few times I took her into the shallower water where the Korean teachers were with the younger kids and went back in deeper with my other 3 kids and 3 of the kids Ellie had that wanted to go in deeper. Kelly took her into the locker room because she was crying so I figured she was still with Kelly when we got out of the wave pool. Luckily we found her pretty quickly.
After we got out of the wave pool (after a couple of hours) we had dinner then went and got changed so we could go over to Everland. The whole Everland thing that night was kinda nuts. It wasn't very well planned. We kept splitting up but only for like 20 minutes at a time which was kind of pointless. We should have all stayed together through the parade and fireworks because by the time we got the groups back together we missed most of the parade. Then we split up after the parade and my group missed the fireworks because I didn't hear Kelly well and we went to the wrong meeting point. Eventually we found them again and my kids got to go on a couple of rides before the park closed. We actually were all in one place for a short period of time but we lost Drew's group when we went to go back to the hotel. One of his kids had lost something at a ride so they went to look for it and then he didn't realize that there was a short cut back to the hotel which was out the back gate of the park so they went to the front gate. Kelly was a bit stressed out...but it all worked out. We put the kids to bed at the hotel (traditional sleeping mats) and stayed up pretty late talking (and drinking a bit of beer).
On Saturday, the kids tried to get up way too early. The Korean teachers kept sending the girls back to bed. Drew had been sleeping in the hallway (our room was really crowded with extra stuff) but he came and curled up in the corner of our room to escape the noise the girls were making. We finally let them get up around 8 and we headed back into Everland for breakfast. My stomach was very confused that day. In my opinion, bean sprout soup, rice and dried seaweed is not breakfast...but the kids are apparently used to it. After breakfast we went over to the Safari area and went on a Safari ride. It was basically a big bus that drove through two different enclosures full of animals. The first enclosure had lions and tigers in it (apparently its the only place in the world where they live together) and you could see giraffes, elephants and some other animals across a moat. THe second enclosure was full of bears. The cool thing was that once you were in the enclosure there wasn't anything separating the animals from the bus...they could walk right up to the windows which the kids thought was really cool. The bears were pretty harmless...they were trained to sit and clap on command from the bus driver and I don't think any of them actually had teeth (I got a good look at a couple of them) but they were cool to see so close. After the safari ride, I took my group through the rest of the animal area. We got to see a lot of animals including some baby lions which were really cute. We also went back over to Magic Land so they could go on some rides before we needed to meet for lunch. After lunch, we went back to the hotel and got on the bus to go home. Our trip home was delayed by about an hour because we lost another kid on the way back. We were running late getting back to the bus so the person in front was walking really fast and the group got really strung out and we lost a kid going through a crowd. Luckily they found her pretty easily. I tried getting the person in front to slow down so we wouldn't lose anyone but I couldn't get her attention. Oh well...at least all the kids made it back to the school in one piece. All of the teachers zonked out on the ride back so who knows how much trouble the kids got into...all I know is that the bus was a disaster.
All in all...it was a very fun trip but very exhausting, especially since I didn't get much sleep the rest of the weekend.