Ice Fishing...

..at night. OK, maybe not, but it did remind me of this, from John Paul Jones' album The Thunderthief. The piano's nice, but the lyrics are truly awful. Sadly, this isn't even the worst offender on the album.

Moving on, we come to one of the things that defines my little town, the trout festival. I live in a town of around 10,000 people, but one that for two months in January and February attracts visitors from across Korea. The county of Pyeongchang is one of the only places where trout has been successfully farmed within Korea, and so to publicise this, they dam the river, wait for it to freeze over and then dump a whole load of trout in for the public to fish for.

The festival really transforms the lower part of town. A whole complex of buildings gets put up (seemingly just after they were finally taken down after last year's festival) and earth movers work for several months to completely block off the river, save for a small channel running down the side. Then everyone sits and waits for it to get freezing cold, the ice forms and everyone gets their festival on.

The main festival activity is of course, the ice fishing itself. Hundreds of holes are drilled in the ice, and individuals and families come to try their luck, either with their own equipment or the plastic sticks with a metal fish as a lure that are sold at the festival. I felt like the trout may have got wise to this by the time we started fishing, as they'd been swimming through a forest of jiggling golden lures for several weeks beforehand. While we did see some people get lucky, Linda and I's only fishing success was the ice that formed on our line.

Fisherman at work.

The equipment.

The lure. Good for luring, well, nothing.

Popular game, catching ice.

There's only so long you can stand on a freezing river in -20C weather with a very slim chance of catching anything. What the sensible festival goer does is head over to the side-event, the bare handed trout catching, instead. This takes place in a pool away from the river, which is kept slightly warmer (it's water, not ice, but barely). With around 30 others, I head into a warm changing room and change into fetching orange trousers, a grey T-shirt and rubber shoes. We then surround a pool, do some shouting in Korean (I'm not sure what I'm saying yes to here) and then, to the considerable annoyance of 100 or so trout, we leap into the water and try to pull them out with our hands.

Trout catching proves to be fiendishly difficult. The idea is to drive them to the edges and then flip them out on to the edge, where you can stuff your trout in a plastic bag to be carried away later. The trouble is, as soon as you locate one it's slipped through your grasp, and your legs, and headed back to the middle of the pool. The water is so cold it soon becomes painful to put my hands in, and I wonder whether I'll suffer the ignominy of failing to catch a single fish. Then, a gift. Like a big cat spotting one labouring wildebeest, I spot an easy target. One trout is trying to hide itself between two rocks at the edge of the pool, little realising that it's entire rear half is sticking out. Quick as a flash, I reach down, grasp it firmly and lift it out onto the side, to cheers from the crowd. I'm excited as I stuff it into my bag and leap back into the water. My enthusiasm is to no avail though, as the trout continue to evade me. When it's just me and some kids splashing in the pool, I accept defeat and head back to the warmth of the changing room, clutching Barry, my trout.

The pool.

The contestants.

"3...2...1..."

Missed.

"Bloody hell this is cold."

"There was one here a minute ago I swear."

"Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!"

"No."

The Korean's being a friendly people, my lack of fish is noted and an old man is dispatched to the pool to catch me another one. This is, of course, hideously embarrassing but it does give Linda and I the chance to try two different ways of eating trout. My gift trout is given to an old lady in one tent, and in a matter of seconds it's delicious pieces of sashimi. It's tender and delicious, especially dipped in a little hot sauce. Having eaten half of that, we then headed to the grill tent, where Barry is taken from me, wrapped in foil and plopped on the grill. It's not long before we're tucking in to an even more delicious trout, grilled to perfection, moist and succulent with the subtle flavour nicely preserved. The fact that it was my catch made it all the more tasty.

Where I failed, the old man with waders and a net succeeded.

On the cutting table.

Vicious.

Sashimi.

Barry and I.

Barry and I again.

Barry, you were too dumb to live, but you didn't die in vain.

OK, maybe feeling a little guilty now.

And with that, it was time to get out of the stinking cold, and head home for a hot chocolate. I'm spending the summer working on my trout grabbing technique.

A

Sports Day

When I applied to teach in Korea I wanted to teach high school kids. The thought of dealing with classrooms full of kids any younger than 15 filled me with dread. Having got the high school post I wanted, I then learnt that there were not enough classes for me at the high school, and I was to be farmed out to rural elementary schools twice a week. Not cool, I thought at the time. However, over the time I've been here my elementary schools have proved to be among my favourite parts of the week. The kids are (in general) far more pleasant and in some cases more able than my high school kids, and classes are in general a lot more fun. Thus, when I was invited to attend Geomun Elementary's sports day I was more than happy to accept.

I must have gone to one of the smallest primary schools in England. I believe there were somewhere around 50 pupils in the school. This meant that grades were pushed together and I ended up in a classroom with two other years. Geomun Elementary makes Frant Primary look big, having just over 30 pupils above kindergarten age. Testament to Korea's huge education budget is the fact that each grade has it's own class and teacher, and the rooms are kitted out with huge TVs, computers, projectors and everything else you could want for teaching. It's an impressive institution and the kids seem to really benefit from it. Some of my best students are here, and will hopefully go on to do good things in the future.

On to the sports day then. I arrived during preparation and managed to busy myself putting out chairs, then helping the kids warm up by doing chin ups on the monkey bars and pushing them on the swings (a key part of any warm up).

"Microphone check. 1, 2, 1 ,2."

The first proper business of the day was to pledge the pledges, sing the national anthem, and then stretch off properly. Clearly, the only way to do this is to stretch to music. Preferably something trumping and stately that sounds like it was produced in the 1950s and probably was. Pictures and sounds can relate this event far better than I can in words:

I swapped hats with a student for the purposes of the comedy picture below. Then the serious business began with some short sprints. Below you can see two 6th grade girls really going for it, and some way back, one not really going for it.

It being sports day plenty of parents turned out to watch their kids. For a Korean parent (or, as it turned out, a guest English teacher) sports day is a little more involved than an English one. First up was the women's race. This was one of the strangest competitions I have ever seen. It consisted of a metal hoop tethered in the middle of the football pitch. The teams line up on either side and run to the middle in an attempt to get through the hoop first. The twist being that once through, the first woman is allowed to run off with the hoop and drop in closer to her side, leaving the opposition with much further to travel. To balance things out though, you can tread on the chain, grab the hoop or engage in good natured but spirited wrestling with your opponent in order to stop them from taking the hoop. First team through the hoop wins the prizes. Once again, I'll let the pictures tell the story:

Once the race was over, everyone was awarded a prize. For the older ladies too fragile to brawl in the sand, a more gentle fishing game was offered. What you can't see in this picture is the small boy in the "pond" clipping prizes onto each granny's fishing rod.

Then next up it was the men's turn. Given what I'd just seen in the women's event I was expecting to be given a rifle and told to shoot on sight. Fortunately ours was the more leisurely pursuit of hoop rolling. I was rubbish, but not as bad as some on the other team and we won comfortably. A good result all around. Here's a picture of me in action.

My event one successfully negotiated with minimal humiliation, the focus turned back on to the kids. Now it was time for them to take part in some strange activities. This particular event featured either skipping (OK), spinning on the spot (a bit weird) or putting on and taking off an egregiously coloured pair of trousers (really weird). Here's some video footage. Check out a clearly dizzy girl taking a slightly circuitous path back to her team post-spinning:

Next up was the school band's performance. I'm starting to really enjoy the Korean traditional drumming. We were given brilliant displays a couple of times at orientation. There's often some incredible athleticism involved with dancing and twirling hats, all while keeping the beat on a drum, or simply some brutal rhythmic pounding to enjoy. The school band's performance doesn't really have either of these, but is still pretty good. I was especially impressed that they took themselves off to practise one lunchtime without any adult supervision and managed to conduct a pretty well ordered session. It wouldn't happen in England, I'd wager. Here they are:

All this and we were still not through the morning's activities. Without even giving the kids time to change, we were on to the relays, with more excellent running action from the girls:

It was about this time that my high school co-teacher popped around to see what was happening (and, possibly, to check up on me). She arrived just in time to watch the Korean folk dance being performed by the kids, as pictured below:

I may occasionally be a bit dim, but I'm not entirely stupid. I knew exactly what was coming after the kids dance. I also warily took note of the camera in my co-teacher's hand. It looked pretty old. Definitely too old to have a decent video function anyway. I was probably in the clear, right? Wrong. As expected, the parents (and me) were called into the circle and I was forced to perform the entire dance, while my co-teacher captured it on video. I clearly have a huge masochistic streak, because here it is for your viewing pleasure. I am thinking of disabling the comments section on this post though to avoid the inevitable hilarity...

After a decent (and soju free, for once) lunch break, the festivities continued with the amazing onion ring race. This comprised crawling through a tunnel, then grabbing an onion ring from a clothes peg with your teeth, eating it and racing for the line. At this stage I wasn't really surprised by strange events, though I still had at least one surprise coming after these photos.

Geomun teachers (in natty matching tracksuits) pegging up onion rings. Only in Korea.

As the washing line was cleared away and the discarded fractions of onion ring swept from the track, I noticed two tables being set up where the washing line had been. Placed upon these were two transparent bowls of small fish, uncomfortably tightly packed. My palms started to sweat a little. This didn't look good. It got worse when the 6th grade teacher beckoned me to the start of the sprint course to join the fathers. The instructions were simple. "Two fish. End". I spotted some small bowls stacked by the fish and clutched at straws "Using the bowls?" "No. Bowls for ladies. You use hands." "Oh."

I didn't have too much time to reflect on this though, as the starting gun fired and I was sprinting towards the bowls. It actually wasn't too horrible, and I managed to grab two fish in good time. Things took a turn for the worse when one of them flipped it's way out of my grasp with 20 metres to go. I pondered briefly what to do, then figured that an attempt to rescue it would probably result in two fish flapping about on the sand, not just one. I raced the rest of the course, threw my one remaining fishy into the bowl of water that awaited it and then went back for the straggler. Whispering soothing words about cool water I managed to scoop it up and get it to the end of the course, still managing to finish second.

The fish were carried away to destinations unknown at this point. I suspect it may have been to the school canteen, but my co-teacher refused to be drawn on this speculation. There weren't many photos taken of the race, but I did procure this one of me scrabbling around for my two fish.

The two final competitions were the dressing up race and the tug of war. During the dressing up race the teams donned wellington boots and raced to dress two boys up as man and wife. Proof indeed that it's never too early to start stripping a young boy of his dignity. Following this was the parents tug of war, which my team won comfortably. This had very little to do with me though, as anyone who has seen the size of my arms will testify. Finally, the kids did the same, prizes were given out and everyone went home. Everyone except me, who went back to the high school and taught an afternoon class there. It's a hard life.

If you made it this far, congratulations, and thanks. This ended up being a bit of a marathon post, but the day was one of the most interesting and fun I've had in Korea. Many thanks to all of the staff and kids. I'm starting to think I might be around for next year's as well.

Cheers

A