Jeju Foreign Language Festival

The Jeju POE had its first-ever "Foreign Language Festival." It was quite an interesting concept and many of us here were pretty excited about it, but once again, bureaucracy reared its ugly head. Organization wasn't exactly top-notch, to say the least. There was not enough Australians on Jeju so they stuck random Americans and Canadians and Brits into the Australia and New Zealand booth; I got put in the Australia booth although I am *not* from Australia, have never been to Australia, and hardly knew anything about Australia. ALL foreign teachers had to participate whether they wanted to or not (and the unfortunate Chinese and Japanese teachers pretty much were left scratching their heads as the workshop on the previous day was all done in English only). As if that wasn't enough, we weren't told about this until the night before the festival. And so I had to spend that night cramming on Autralia facts and putting together a power-point presentation for the Aussie booth so I wouldn't look like a fool in front of the students.

The booths and displays were nice (the Australia booth has the prettiest visuals in my view), but there was some wierdness too. Somehow, most Americans are German, the US map has no Washington DC, and suddenly New York is capital of the US. Um...what? The New Zealand booth had half a wall explaining why a "kiwifruit" is supposed to becalled "kiwifruit" and not a "kiwi." There was a Native American outfit hanging in the Australia booth... "Pocahantas Dundee"??? Some of the teachers didn't show up at their assigned times and kinda came and went at random times; I ended up manning the Australia booth along with another Australian teacher for 16 hours although our asssigned time was only two hours. The staff never got around to making some of the requested material for the Aussie booth so there wasn't a whole lot available. I heard that the New Zealand booth had it worse since the assigned teachers didn't bring anything.

I think I did OK in the Aussie booth; I had a good time chatting with the few Aussies that actually did show up and stay to man the booth and some of the curious visitors seemed to think that I was actually from Australia or had been there. One of the teachers brought in a hula hoop; that was a big hit with the kids and she was pretty good at the hula hoop herself. Another juggled and played Aboriginal-inspired Tribal trance music, which was really good for ambience.

The performances at the end of each day were nice. The college students did an abridged version of "A Midsummer's Night Dream" with some pop culture references. The high school students did "Beauty and the Beast." It was all well done. One of the girls actually had a nice imitation British accent (although Belle was supposed to be French).

Overall, it was kinda good. It had its quirks, but wound up OK in the end.  I got a few ideas out of it for my classes. Maybe I'll see if I can get some of the less-shy and more advanced students to put on a short performance for the school sometime.