GLEE Club

Unfortunately, it's not "Glee Club", but "GLEE: Global Language Educational Exchange". It's the name they gave to the twice-weekly meeting for Fulbrighters and Korean students that allows them to hang out together, practice conversational skills, and learn new things.

My roommate, Jet. He dances extremely well.

All of the participants have been divided into "families" (complete with an 엄마 and an 아빠) that plan each week's activity. Yesterday, my roommate Jet teamed up with Elaine and taught us all a little bit of Latin dance! We did the basics of merengue, salsa, and cha-cha. The lesson was a total hit! (But a lot of the Korean students seem to have no concept of dance beyond hip-hop and traditional Korean dances, so this was completely new to them.)

Thanks to years of experience with swing and a memorable semester learning Umfundalai, I found the steps to be pretty natural, and it was fun to see how well I could shake my hips. ;) Salsa is fun! And it definitely works up a sweat quicker than lindy hop and blues do.

After the lesson, the class sort of devolved into a dance party. Brittany managed to get nearly everyone to do the "Wobble", a simple but awesome line dance. Yeah, all the hip isolations that were pure torture in Kemal's class really came in handy here. Brittany took a video of it; if I get ahold of it somehow I'm definitely going to show you all. (In fact, I've been taking lots of short videos here on my camera, but I just haven't been uploading them onto this blog. I will soon, I promise!)

A nice shot of our salsa-ing class, taken by Leslie. I'm especially amused by all the heads looking down!

Well, GLEE has been fun for the past three meetings. When it comes turn for my family to host the activity, I'm thinking about teaching Swing dance. Or maybe I'll teach everybody how to play Contact... Until then, I also hope to grow closer to some of the Korean students and work on my conversational Korean.

P.S. After GLEE last night, all of the Fulbrighters (plus our Orientation Coordinating Team and some other friends, totaling nearly 100 people), threw a surprise birthday for Rachel, a Jungwon University student who is serving as our RA for these six weeks. She's such a sweetheart, and she was quite surprised when we all shouted at her and took a million photos and threw balloons and sang.

Rachel is the one on the left, covering her mouth lest all her teeth fall out in excitement over the cakes, presented by Tracey and Ammy, which were bought from Tous Les Jours (pronounced something like "to di joo di" in Korean -- it's hilarious)

 Oh, yes, and then this happened:

Caden, our other RA, cakes Rachel. Happy birthday! 생일 춧하해요!