Children's Day

Yesterday was Children's Day here in Korea, which is a national holiday so there was no school! (Why don't we have one of these in the US?) Also, instead of having Mother's and Father's Day in Korea, they just have Parent's Day. I'm not entirely sure what date that is though.

So, after ordering a special gift for my mom for the upcoming Mother's Day this weekend, I then went out with Keith for an adventure since we were home from work for Children's Day.

We had just read in the Jeju Weekly (English) newspaper about an article advertising the new Maze Land/Museum. We had been to the original Maze Park the past year and loved it! It was pretty difficult but small and took us 45 minutes to figure out. Since this new park showed that it was three mazes put together, including one huge stone wall maze, we were pumped to check it out!!

It was a beautiful day- sunny with a lil breeze- and we took a 45 min. bus, then a ten minute taxi ride to the museum. We were surprised (although we should have expected it since it was Children's Day) to see TONS of children there with their parents. We even ran into a family that we had met from Rho and Simon's fundraiser dinner.

Since it was a holiday, there was fun Korean pop music playing, balloons being handed out to the kids, many kids games, including the traditional Korean Yunari board game (but with HUGE toy sticks for them to throw), hoolahoop contests and limbo contests. They even had Winnie the Poo and Tigger costume characters walking around. Of course I had to get a picture with them! They also had ice-cream at every possible corner of the park. haha Keith and I felt like kids that day. It was so much fun! We walked through all of the mazes, although we felt like it was more of a walking path. It was definitely not as hard as the original maze park, but this didn't distract us from our exciting day. No, we just went through the maze quickly, then made it to the end where there was a kid's party going on...the hoolahoop and limbo contests. And the best part was that it was all being recorded by the popular TV program, KBS. So I'm sure all the students at our school, along with their parents, will see the funny tall looking foreigners walking quickly through the maze, then trying to hoolahoop around our necks! We tried it this way, since we had so much trouble hoolahooping around our waists. haha

After the hoolahooping, we saw a field near the surrounding forest, orum and beautiful plants/flowers. In the field there were about 5 HUGE colorful balls. They looked like balloons and even had the end of the ball tied like a balloon. Keith and I ran around and played gigantic soccer with them. Again, we felt like we had taken a trip back into our childhood. We then took a walk near the orum and bamboo trees. All around the park there were really interesting and traditional Korean statues. Take a look at my pictures.

The final thing we did at Maze Land was visit the museum. The museum was really interesting too. I was shocked. It was filled with information about Greek Mythology and explained the significance that it had with the story of the Labyrinth/ original maze. But what made the museum really unique was that each showcase that was set up had a display, which had sound playing telling the story, and then there also was a story illuminated onto the stage. It was as if a 3D animation movie was being played right in front of your eyes. The characters seemed so real life. It was really high-tech and cool!

There were also many 3D images/ artwork on the wall for you to try to figure out the images. Also, there were other mind-games/mazes for you to play or original games from different countries in display cases. Keith and I had fun playing "Where's Waldo?", except that they called him "Wally". haha That was hilarious to see. Well, there were about 10 of the pictures on the wall so we made it a race to see who can find him first. Keith won by 2 points! meh


The whole day was so much fun and one thing that I love about Keith and about Jeju is that Keith always plans and encourages us to take fun lil adventures around the island. And thanks to Jeju, there's ALWAYS some fun, new, random place to check out.




Ok, talk to you soon. I am currently reading the book, "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman. It is one of the books that KIS ordered us to discuss at our training. It's really interesting so far and is about the incredible improvements in technology that our world has made in the past few decades. I'll be reading the rest of my day since Fridays I have no classes! :)

Have a great day and a nice weekend! Keep in touch~