When was the last time you went on a field trip? (New pics and video, too)

So all the kindergartners and the teachers had a field trip Tuesday morning. We went to an exhibition in Northern Seoul called The 24 Hour Famine that was designed to expose the kids to the suffrage from hunger around the world. It could not have been more poorly planned. The trip was designed to take half a day, with everyone returning around 1230pm. However, it took 45 min to get there which allowed only and hour and a half for organizing and exploring. Most of you can imagine how hard it is to organize 150 5 year olds so when it was all said in done, we were rushed through the exhibit in an hour compared to the other schools that probably took about 2 hours to see everything. Needless to say, there were some unhappy kids on the return ride home as many of them had not gotten to participate in any of the activities.

On top of that, the teaching staff was left mostly in the dark about the plans in the days preceding the trip. No one knew the organization that we were contributing to and therefore had not prepared the kids for what they would see or do on the trip. There was no talk of hunger or famine in the days leading up to the trip. As we were standing around, waiting for the buses to board before we left, the only thing we really knew was that the kids had been collecting money for hunger and were going to donate it wherever we were going. When we arrived, the site was actually pretty cool and we were told it was an old battleground. The grounds were decorated with sculptures, pinwheels, and walk-through tents that either depicted the hardships of living hungry (mostly in Africa) or provided activities for the kids. As a consequence of the lack of preparation, almost all the kids didn't know what to think about the pictures of kids starving and laying the street. Some kids even laughed which was embarrassing for everyone as it appeared every other school there had at least warned their kids about what they would see and instructed them to be respectful. In the end, the only activity my kids did was color a cheap umbrella for them to take home (what that has to do with 24 Hour's mission, I have no idea). We also brought home the parts for mini pinwheels, which we were supposed to make during the last class of the day, but instead they were too complicated and allowed me to harness my rusty construction skills as I put together all 7 of them.

Here's a video from the field trip:



All in all, it was a waste of a field trip, especially considering the coolest part was the trip there and back. As soon as we left the city limits, the highway ran parallel to a water channel about a half mile wide and the bank on our side was protected by double fences with barbed wire and military outposts every few hundred yards. According to the driver and Korean staff on my bus, across the water was North Korea! Pretty cool to be able to see the mountains and even their capital from the road.

Heres a picture of N Korea, you can see the South's Army posts on the right and across the water is a town in the North:


Anyway, I put up new pictures from the last week, including the field trip and North Korea, check 'em out.