Ansan Street Arts Festival

Hello again dear friends and family

I will talk about the very interesting experience that my district had in Ansan this past Friday and Saturday. 

This past Fri-Sun, Ansan hosted their annual art festival where people and group of people, performers and artists come from all over the world to show their talent. Knowing that there might be a lot of people there, we decided to advertising our English class by sticker boarding. When we arrived we realized there are over 30,000 people at this festival. Several streets were closed down and huge portable stages were set up as well. The amount of Korean people that was there was insane. We saw maybe 10 white people so as for us advertising something, it was no wonder why we were such a big deal. 

Usually when we sticker board we have to ask people if they want to put a sticker on our board that asks why do you want to learn English. but here at the festival we had a consistent ten people in front of us that we would try to talk to and sometimes have much more than that. As I said in my last email, Korean people especially girls like to compliment foreigners in English. I have never been told I look handsome or that I am tall soo many times in my life than I did there. Groups of girls at times would run up to me sometimes surrounding me wanting me to talk to them. And as soon as we would respond in Korean they would freak out because they didn't think we knew any for whatever reason. 

Saturday for some reason the Korean people really wanted to take pictures of us, with us and all around us. My companion and I took soooo many pictures with people. We all honestly felt like celebrities. The best thing is, a lot of people had genuine interest in our English class. They loved how we are volunteers who host free English classes. To put a number on how many different people we talked to with only a combined three hours of sticker boarding would be about 600+. Since we had a constant crowd around us more and more people would come up to us. It was soooo much fun!!!! 

Friday night the festival ended with a traditional Korean parade. Some how the same spot that we were sticker boarding was right where the parade was going by so we got front row seats! The people were all dressed in white while banging their drums. In the front of the parade we saw dancers playing a clarinet like instrument and wearing a mask that had eyes as lights. I got a video of the whole thing. It was sooo cool. I will have my mom upload it to my blog once she receives it. 

As for the people that we are teaching, the two of them both showed up to church yesterday! The have become so much fun to know. Brother Park will be leaving to China in a month but he has a desire to be baptized so we will make it happen in all due time.

Thank you for your emails. I try to respond to them as best as I can.

Enjoy the pictures!  

Much love!

Elder Eads

Sometimes Korea is just beautiful

Street boarding at festival. Usually we only have a few stickers.

This structure is made completely out of cardboard.

Parade