Work Hard, Play Hard!

I know I’ve said in my last article, but I will repeat it so that it stays in your head. What is nice when you live Seoul (서울) (or the other cities in South Korea) is the number of free activities that is huge !

Member of a Korean group SAYUL (Say About Beautiful Korea Properly), I was invited to some of their activities. SAYUL is a registered NGO of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of South Korea and operates 6 kinds of activities. They present their schedule as the following :

1. Korea Club (with 20 universities to exchange culture with international friends)

2. Korean Wave PD corps (to understand and know about other countries cultures)

3. Korea Night Concert (to show Korean music and performance for international friends in Korea)

4. Producing Educational Video (to produce educational video for Korean history, Korean tour, Korean culture and Hangul)

5. World Tour with Culture Sharing Project (to meet & make friends, to know friends’ countries, and to culture sharing through Korean culture programs we prepared)

6. Finally, Korea Culture Education (with Korea language writing, and stamp Korea).

So, this Friday, October 7, 2016, I went with Korean and foreign friends to attend the the third project, the ‘2016 KOREA THE 3RD NIGHT CONCERT HARD WORK & PLAY HARD’ ‘to YouTheater. All this in order to ” Sharing Korea through Global Festival – Cultural Concert arranged by SAYUL and International students. ”

We can read in the pamphlet we receive at the entrance this: ” Through this experience, we hope that our foreign friends become more familiar with Korean culture, and deeply feel the beauty of it. Furthermore, it is wished traditional Korean emotion ‘JEONG’ (정), the feeling of warm attachment, settles in globally through such cultural concert Held by Korea. ”

First, I’ll describe this event. Upon entering, they offered us a free t-shirt ” Afreecatv ”if you want to. If you agree to receive the t-shirt, then you must go to their Facebook page and like their page. Super easy ! Subsequently, when entering, we have to go choose our seats. The activities begin with some videos presentations of Korea seen by foreign students. Those videos show their involvement through several Korean groups to make their life in South Korea unforgettable.

Then begins the evening. This evening is hosted by two American from Korean origin. They are Youtubers which returned to Korea to travel, to explore their homeland and try to become huge comedian stars playing in Korean drama series. They make several jokes throughout the evening, some of which are very funny hahaha. To spice up the evening, we played rock paper scissors with all the people in the room. The remaining (including me) would subsequently go on stage and play again. The grand prize: 3 super cute pillows for 3 winners. Unfortunately, my rock paper scissors game was not strong enough and I lost the game!

Then begins the show. The first part takes place with the arrival of Nella Fantasia team who comes into the room and play for us. The team plays ancestral instruments and one of the team members stands up to while his mates were still playing and start singing traditional Korean songs. Really emotional !

Then it was the turn of Street Dance. As you can deduce, the team showed up on stage and started making super funky movements, the same as you can probably find in movies like Just Dance !

For the lovers of sports, one part of the night was about Taekwondo (태권도). The Taekwondo team was a mixed one that start by doing some crazy movement and yelling in the room. They showed us that we could ” dance ” by doing super amazing Taekwondo movements ! It was crazy.

Also, during the performance we had the chance to assist to traditional dances. It starts with four men who were dancing and turning all around the room. Thereafter, we also had the chance to assist to a Korean Romeo and Juliet, but where the end of the story is a happy one, like Cinderella!

Finally, taekwondo again. During this part, the team has blown us smashing several wooden boards into the air. Whether doing back flip or jumping five meters in the air, it was really great (and scary hahaha). To conclude, the show ends with a dance mix (Cover Dance) with several members of the previous presentations to the delight of all. In the end, the applause was really deserved! We hope to see them again in a career, why not, international ?

Article by Malek from Canada