Some photos

While we were at the conference center where the English camp was held, the internet connection was not the best. (Thanks to Valerie Stone for helping get the blog posts up!) Now that we're back in the land of good connectivity, I can share some photos with you:

Setting up for camp on Monday. Steve M, setting up tables and chairs. Different continent, but some things don't change.

The students compete in a vocabulary activity. The team that completes the activity in the shortest amount of time wins a point. (We can't show you the students' faces here. Sorry!)

 Students on a hike/vocabulary-building scavenger hunt. Leaf! Rock! Pine cone!

Koreans are very careful to keep their floors clean. That's because they LIVE on the floor -- they sit on the floor, they sleep on the floor, they often eat on the floor. For that reason, they leave their shoes just inside the door. Most of the students went around in their stocking feet. 

Those of us who brought along our own slippers were very glad to have them!

And here's what you'll find just outside the bathroom door. The floors in the bathrooms are sometimes wet, and you don't want to get your socks or slippers wet, so you just use a pair of these plastic sandals. 

Here's the dining hall, where we and the students ate our meals. Conversations were good; the food could be a little challenging!

And here's a typical meal. Rice and kimchi (what's kimchi?) were served at EVERY meal: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then there were several other dishes that we had trouble identifying, along with a bowl of soup. Standard utensils were chopsticks and a spoon. If you asked, you could get a fork. 

While we were at the English camp, some of us stayed in a house on the Conference Center property. And here's what the sleeping arrangements looked like! (Don't worry: Anne and Jan stayed at a hotel, with real beds.) It turned out that sleeping on the floor was surprisingly comfortable. The challenge was....

... controlling the heat! The heat primarily comes from the floor. Apparently this is common in Korea. The picture above shows the heat controls for the room in the previous picture. We had some trouble getting the heat adjusted so that the room was at a comfortable temperature. This led to us saying things like: "Turn the floor down." or "Is the floor even on?" or "The floor's a little too hot." 

Some evenings the teachers from the school (not the Westover team, but the students' regular teachers, who were there to supervise, translate, and otherwise be indispensable) ordered-in an evening snack. This particular night, the snack was fried chicken! Quite like KFC, with regular, hot, and soy-flavored. Interestingly, the chicken came with...

... radish! It's another form of kimchi. Usually kimchi is spicy-hot, but this was not.

That's all for now. We start the long journey home tomorrow, so please keep that in prayer. Thanks!

--blr, for the team.