I’ve just returned from the Chuncheon puppet festival, Chuncheon’s premier purveyor of impossibly cute, googly eyed, moderately creepy dolls and marionettes. Actually, we thought that the festival was geared more toward theater and performance, but it turns out to be more of a sort of carnivalesque childrens’s fun fair. We skipped the big auditorium and headed for the back, where the free shows were going on. Having passed out of the main area (itself populated by many, many Koreans in HUGE paper sunhats and one organ grinder—the first Korean I have seen in lederhosen so far), we found ourselves in this huge, dusty wasteland. The only thing to see here were...ostriches. Also, a goat. Hop a fence, though, and you’d find yourself in the middle of about three million small children, engaged variously in banging soda cans with hammers (not kid hammers...like, BIG hammers), sawing plastic tubes to make pitch pipes, or playing in the mud clay room. This is a brilliant idea. Just a single square room filled about 6 inches deep with thick mud. I swear I’ve never seen kids having so much fun. I actually kinda wanted to go in myself...Phase three of the path to the free show was a Seattle Center-style fairgrounds. I don’t know how to explain this, but it was so, so strange. I think we decided that “the terrain of nightmares” best described the atmosphere of this place. Imagine a chipped, faded, dusty merry-go-round spinning along, empty, to Korean wailing, or a sort of swaying, creeking pirate ship with only a single wooden sailor onboard, leering out at you. It was all very “Leaving Las Vegas.” The kids had, I think wisely, opted to avoid this particular area.
Anyway, after all that wandering, we ended up being shepherded into this TINY tent, jam-packed full of families. The puppet show itself was SO INCOMPREHENSIBLE. I mean, to be fair, it was in Korean. Anyway, one scene, between a tiger and an old lady, was apparently repeated, verbatim, about four times, until finally the tiger (the antagonist) ATE the old woman...it was a little shocking. The pre-show activities included a very peppy woman emerging from the puppet box, dragging a small child up to the front next to her, thrusting a microphone into the kid’s hand and then demanding, very sweetly, that they sing along to a number of Korean children’s songs while she sort of dancd and pranced around him. This woman had pigtails, which in Korea automatically means that she is “cute.” (During one of our vocab lessons we had to guess what adjectives described various people...tired, happy, etc. Anyway, when we go to the picture of the woman with crazy sticking-out pigtails scruching up her face and sticking out her tongue every single person reacted along the line of “aaah, ugly, scary, annoying.” Nope, cute.) The kid who sang the second song looked frankly terrified. I however, was delighted because this song was the NUMBERS SONG.

This is a picture of me in front 60 of my peers, the Orientation, my teachers, and a lot of the higher-ups at Fulbright and Korea University dancing to the numbers song:


The numbers song is Korea’s answer to Alvin and the Chipmunks. Very squeaky, very fast. Each line starts with a new number, but integrated into a sentence. As in “one day I went to the fair, Two-sday I didn’t.” Or something. I’m a terrible lyricist, clearly. Anyway, this is a kids song, but the lyrics are....well, they don’t express feelings you think kids might ever have. It’s along the lines of “I can’t stand to be away from you for even one second, life is torture when I can’t see you. When I see you migh heart beats so hard I think I am going to die. Na na na na na.”

So, why were all these people assembled to see us dance? Hm, it was our graduation from the language course we all had to take during orientation. So, I now have a certificate of achievement from Korea University (motto: Libertas, Justitia, Veritas). I even have a written evaluation, but it’s all in Korean, so right now I’m just guessing that I actually passed.

Ah, I also have two pictures from Tae Kwon Do. I don’t think I mentioned it, but I PASSED MY YELLOW BELT TEST. Yessss! This is only slightly tempered by the fact that when we practice at his gym we are usually joined by his 10 year-old, four foot high black belt students. Whatever. Yellow belt. Awesome.

We all look a little wild-eyed here, I think because for the past hour we have been kicking and punching in an incredibly hot room to the point where we think we might actually pass out:



OK, advance warning that this is a VERY UNFLATTERING picture of me. However, I think I look at least somewhat tough, so I want to show it off. Oh dear. Fortunately I'm not the one in the very front (try off to the right a bit...):