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Over, Over, Over and Out

Well, there it is, folks. Last night, the camp party was hilarious—I was the “Official Photographer” and mainly just snapped shots of kids posing with one another, their teachers, and their class TAs. But the highlight of the evening was a dance competition. Now, getting kids to dance was hard, so Myoung Jae—the host of the dance-off—did his best to be really hyper on stage, and sell the idea of dancing as fun and cool. Most of the kids were reluctant, so Myoung decided to show them that dancing could be a good time.

The TAs were called onto the stage, and danced a little. Once the TAs kind of petered out, the teachers were called onto stage, but since John was working lights and Patrick was DJing, Megan was home sick, and David and Troy were too scared to dance (hahah!) it ended up being myself, Myoung, and Gordon (who was done up as a mime). I could have sworn, from all the jumping around alone, that my back was about to break.

Then came time for the kids to dance. Now, to get them to enter the competition, we had to simply walk through the gathered crowd, coercing kids (nicely) onto the stage. The funniest thing I found was that boys were kind of resistant for a few moments, and then gave in and went onstage and got into it right away.

The girls, on the other hand, were all (on the surface) resistant to going onstage, all the way until they were on. The funny thing, though, was that when there were a lot of boys and no girls onstage, I focused on getting a few more female students up there. It was hilarious to run across the ones who wanted to go onstage, but also wanted to put up a front of resistance. More of them were like that, but one was hilariously obvious about it: when I loomed closer, I grabbed towards her, and she very slowly, carefully moved her hand out of the way—slowly enough that I could easily grab it if I wanted to. I looked at her face to see whether she looked scared, but there was a big smile on it, so I grabbed her hand, and there was a short delay before the, “No! NO! Teacher, no dance!” started up. So I hauled her up onto stage and she ended up in the semifinal round, dancing her heart out.

The kids (one boy, one girl) who won the dance competition were absolutely exhausted, and the boy especially looked ready to pass out. I have some video (though without audio) of the kids dancing and I’ll post it sometime, it’s quite funny and worth seeing.

Well, in the end, the party ended later than I expected, at around 10 pm, but I think everyone had a good time. I was up late with some of the teachers from our camp, and then had to pack all my stuff, so it was almost 5:00am when I finally got to bed. I expected to awaken feeling like hell, but instead, I felt good.

That’s amazing because I only slept 4 hours, and because when I awoke the room was freezing cold; I’d forgotten to close one of the windows and it had been open all night long. But I’d been warm under my wonderful blanket, so I guess it hadn’t mattered, and the nice fresh (?) air must have helped me out.

The Awards ceremony went quickly, I said bye to some of my students and hugged others farewell, and then Myoung dropped me at home and helped my haul my ridiculous amount of stuff up to my flat.

So the camp is over, and all I have left to do now before work is out of my life for a month, is to submit my documents at the office on Monday, pack up my desk and stuff, and then I’m free free free! I can finish my novel and relax some, maybe edit the previous one down to a reasonable length, work a bit on the Taiping poems, visit my middle-school friend Mike who just moved to Korea, catch up on blogging and news, and just relax for a while. Sounds like interviews for my new contract are on February 25th, which is nice. Whew.

Ah, it’s a good, good feeling. Now to aggressively relax. Can’t wait to see Lime, who is also on holiday now and having fun, from all reports.

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