Oct 27, 2011
How lucky am I that in my first year here, the 46th National Skills
Competition was held at my school. Right when we got back from summer vacation,
the school was buzzing with so much going on. What is the skills competition?
My school is the top vocational high school in chungbuk province and they
specialize in technical machinery like robotics, aviation, computer
engineering... Every year, there is a nation wide competition to determine who
is the best.
All the big companies are represented to "scout" out
prospective future workers.
It's not all just work. There's plenty of play going on while testings
are going on in the labs. There's a stage with various acts in line to perform
and competitions to keep the students from getting too stressed out.
The fun stuff are the free stuff. There were 2 manicure booths that
both the females and males took advantage of.
They had this paraffin thing to soften your hand. They first massaged
your hands and then stuck it in this hot(!) wax mixture which they then wrapped
in plastic and then finally, with your hand super hot and sweating, made you
put on the pink oven mittens.
They also had a design-your-own-t-shirt booth which was popular with
the students. There were various stencils and you just copied that onto a
t-shirt and colored it in. Simple yet very fun! I either didn't know the
stencils or they were too childish for me (honestly I wanted to do a Pokemon
one but my students were all around making Pokemon shirts, I wanted to be
different. Ha!) so I picked Rilakkuma. I only know this character b/c my lil
sister likes him. Rilakkuma is the lazy bear.
Another fun booth was the cupcake booth. They had pre-made cupcakes and
all you did was pick a frosting and colored sprinkles to top it off. I didn't
make one since it was crowded. I just watched and waited for my friends to make
theirs. Most people don't have ovens in their homes, I felt like I've done my
fair share of making cupcakes back in the states so that was my main reason why
I didn't occupy a seat. But to my surprise, one of my favorite students gave me
his! He said it was b/c I was his favorite teacher. <3
