I ran a 4k in slippers

Hi!  Today was Part I of the annual Gwangyang High School Sports Day!  Super exciting!  Here are some of the highlights:

• To open the day, there was a ceremony type thing where a bunch of people make speeches and all that. A lot of Korean events do this I have noticed.  It's kind of annoying because I think people just wanted to start playing the games and stuff.
• Anyways, the first event was Tug-of-War!  It was pretty cool, they were all really getting into it.  This was pretty long because all 23 homerooms had to compete so I just moseyed around and chatted with students and stuff.
• There were soccer games of course.  Soccer is the most popular sport in Korea so this was one of the main events.  I watched for a while and it was actually pretty interesting!  I usually don't like it, but it was enjoyable.  I was playing a "bounce the soccer ball in the circle" game.  Despite my trash talk and comparisons to David Beckham, I wasn't too good, but it was really fun anyways!
• I also got to catch some basketball games so that was fun to watch.  Then came the Marathon (which really ended up being a 4k).  I didn't really want to run since I didn't have any shoes and when the race was setting up I was wearing dress pants, a tie, and a vest.  And slippers.  Not exactly proper running attire.  However, some 3rd grade students that I really miss started talking to me and they were saying how they were going to run and all of this and they somehow convinced to go with them.  I did have my gym clothes that I changed into, but I had to complete the 4k in my slippers.  It was pretty funny actually.  And I finished in a decent ranking so that was cool.  A lot of students were cheering as I was turning to the corner to finish so that was great too!
• Then afterwards, I got to just sit around and chat with some 3rd graders.  I really do miss them a lot.  It was great to just relax and talk with them about what's going on and how we don't really have a high school sports day like they do in Korea.  When I was talking to some of them, I noticed that some of them seemed to have lost some of their speaking abilities.  There's one in particular that was very vocal in class, and he is still vocal now, but his grammar is definitely worse and he adds more Korean than he used to.  The 3rd graders are pretty much exclusively studying reading and listening so he simply isn't using those skills anymore so they aren't as sharp as they used to be.  Oh well.  It was still great to talk them.

More sports day tomorrow!  Should be fun!!!! :)