Day 26, 27 -- Intensive English Training Camp (IETC)

Where to start... I'll keep it as on-topic and short as possible.

KEY Club has an annual outing to initiate the new members and build friendships amongst the club. These kinds of outings are common for Korean clubs and they're called MT (membership training). KEY's MT is known as IETC (Intensive English Training Camp). Don't let the name fool you because there really wasn't even much English going on except when they had to communicate with the ETAs.

On Saturday, the 20-some ETAs that went to IETC boarded up on a train bound for Seoul. We got off somewhere between Chuncheon and Seoul, journeyed down a gravel road, and ended up in a camp-site-slash-MT-place. There were a lot of other people there, but we had our own large room and an outdoors area that included a creek.

Upon arrival, we were split into teams--a handful of Koreans with a handful of Americans. (Pictured is my team, Team 4.) We played various games to win points, such as tongue twisters (some teams had English, some teams had Korean) and relay games. Some of the relay games were... well, different. But it was a lot of fun, even if my group wasn't great at anything but the couple games. Later we went swimming in the creek (with all our clothes on, of course), had dinner, and went to the bonfire, where we learned a traditional Korean dance. Afterwards, we had a short candle ceremony during which we said a few words about each other. We followed up that cute ceremony with drinking... HEY it's Korea, this is what they do here!

The drinking was basically the same as always--lots of drinking games and lots of bonding. The only difference was that (1) we taught the Koreans how to play Kings, Kings Cup, and Flip Cup and (2) there was lots of drawing-on-people-that-fell-asleep. The hazing was ridiculous, but so funny!

There's a lot of pictures that haven't been uploaded yet so I'll definitely make another picture post. I had a great time and would probably write more but there's an important announcement to make that I want to give a separate post to...