English Festival

This weekend I had to work at the 2nd Annual Incheon English Festival. Basically, the Incheon government is putting a lot of money into helping students learn English, so this a two day festival that is completely free for students to come and experience English through different activities. There were tents set up all around the field at the University of Incheon that each had a different activity. The activity I was in charge of all weekend was 'Welcome to the Incheon Asian Games', since Incheon plays host to the Asian Games in 2014. The activities included tattoos and a dart game. If you won the dart game you got to take a polaroid with two Korean Olympic gold medalists, they were cardboard cut-outs. I opted to get my picture taken with Jang Mi-ran, the Olympic gold medalist in weight-lifting. I think it was a lot of fun seeing the students and some adults get excited when we told them they get to have a polaroid with the Olympic medalists.

The cardboard cut-outs were such a huge hit that even some of the English teachers working the festival wanted to have their pictures taken with one of the Olympians. Priscilla and Brianna decided they wanted their picture taken with Park Tae-hwan the men's Olympic gold medalist in swimming.

It was such a hot day on Saturday that I ended up getting a sunburn on my neck and arms, which was nice because I hate being pasty white and I have never felt whiter than I do in Korea. The festival made some paper sun visers to keep the sun off our faces and out of our eyes. Brianna and I decided to put the paper hats on to try them out, but we decided they were a bit to ridiculous looking for our own good, you be the judge.

We had to work from 8:30 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., which made for a very long day in the sweltering heat, but we did get a free lunch and free water, which was definitely needed and we got to take breaks to wander around and check the festival out for ourselves.

The best part of the day for me was meeting the mayor of Incheon. He was wandering around the festival checking it out when he stopped at my booth to say HI. He asked me where I was from, how long I had been in Korea, how long I was staying, if I would stay longer, what I thought of the festival, etc. I got a picture taken with him and we were filmed likely for the news or something. He had a huge entourage with him and one guy as they were leaving asked me if I knew who that was and I said, "Yeah, it was the mayor."

We were lucky enough to get to leave the festival at 5:00 p.m., which was awesome because we had somewhere to be Saturday night. I really enjoyed the English Festival a lot and I think it is a great idea for the people of Incheon to motivate them to want to learn English and to keep wanting to learn English.