My best friend is taking a Masters' in Applied Linguistics. I'm watching in slow motion as the language he speaks slowly morphs from English to. . . English-ish. Academian. Scholarish. I'm reading Korean folk tales again. I might be hooked. I may even blog some of them.
So anyway, last weekend I went to city hall to hang out. Met girlfriendoseyo and we stomped around the downtown for a while and saw some cool stuff.
I had to bear this on the way downtown. . . the things I do to entertain you with pictures, dear readers. The things I do!
People were scattered across the City Hall lawn like paper cups.
Some ladies in Hanbok. Just because.
And, of course, kids were playing in the water fountain.
More kids playing.
This little one was having an especially good time.
He was my favourite.
I like this picture, maybe third best.
As a picture, I think this is the best one. From a photographer's point of view, that is.
Maybe the cutest picture of the lot. . . wait a minute. . . maybe not.
there it is.
gonna grow up to be a plumber.Hope all your weekends were as happy as this little boy's. Hope you were a bit better covered up, though (unless that was the reason you had so much fun. . .)
Take care, eh?
6 comments:
oh. so so cute!
The ladies in hanbok are, based on what's written on their sashes, beauty pageant participants. Yeongyang County in Kyungsangbukdo Province holds the pageant to promote their local product, which happens to be chili peppers. I hear that this year's pageant was the first time it was held on the national level. (Only girls from Yeongyang County were eligible until last year.)
There's also the absurdity of naming a female beauty pageant named after something that's a common euphemism for male sexual organ.
thanks for filling us in, Frank.
the pepper pageant? maybe it's not absurd; it's just a bit more honest.
I was also thinking about posting Korean folk tales to my blog. A friend bought me "Folk Tales from Korea" by Jeong Inseop - a very enjoyable read! - which brought the idea to mind. Do you hear many folk tales from individuals, or mostly through reading them?
I also heard mine by reading.
I'd love to see some of them written in English, so that Korean kids could learn Korean fairy tales for their early elementary English reading, instead of being confined to western fairy tales -- cinderella and junk are crowding out Korea's own folk tales, and that makes me sad.
I wonder if having more Korean folktales in English would help kids with picking up new vocabulary and grammar patterns. They already know what's going to happen in the story, so they don't have to worry about that aspect of reading comprehension.
Last month my academy held a speech contest, and four groups of students picked folk tales as the basis of their "speech". Two groups presented "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse" (which they had read for class), one girl recited this version of "The Elves and the Shoemaker", and a group of two boys presented the story of Dangun.
Interestingly, the boys doing Dangun were the only group to give up before finishing their speech - doing so about four lines in. There is probably a good reason to explain why they had problems - stage fright, laziness in preparing, etc. - but coming from an outside (adult) perspective Dangun seems like it would be the easiest to ad lib.
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