I just flew in from The World Wide Language Olympics and boy are my arms tired! *rim shot* But seriously folks the Olympics were a lot of fun. The Pokekorean and I had our collective asses handed to us by the largest ever field of Korean competitors…26 teams! The Korean contingent was by far the largest group and there were more native Korean speakers amongst those teams than you could shake a stick at.
The events were as follows :
Showdown – Something like a cross between $25,000 Pyramid and Taboo. One of us would give clues in Korean to our teammate and try to get them to guess a particular word while we avoided using any of the taboo words. (we sucked, our sister team of SPC Lovechild and SSG Unreadable did well)
Jeopardy – As you might expect this was Jeopardy but in Korean. We did allright in this event beating our sister team in the semi finals by a fluke of bidding. (8th place I think)
Impromptu – Given a topic you have 3 minutes to prepare a brief speech in Korean. Your partner has to translate into English as you go. (For this one we had one memorable moment. I had just said, "For the last 10 years North Korea has been trying to buy or develop nuclear weapons technology." in Korean, I look over to The Pokekorean and wait for the translation. At this point he looks at me like I just asked him for a lightly grilled weasel. We drive on after missing that bit and suck up something like 20th place. When I asked him what happened he tells
me, "Sorry I was thinking about Smallville." Grrrr…..)
Triathalon – This event took place out on Soldier field. Our job was to first run about .5 miles and then separately interrogate two people in Korean. One person was a police officer and the other was a student arrested by that same officer for her part in a student group that is planning some sort of anti-american crime in Korea. I interviewed the cop and The Pokekorean interviewed the student. We had 3 minutes to ask as much as we could while we took notes.
After the interview we had the choice of running another .5 miles or climbing a 2.5 story rock-wall. We took the rock wall which was my first time trying rock-climbing. I enjoyed it and we got to the top of the wall much faster than e would have completed the run. From there we moved to the next station which was simulating document exploitation. They gave us 3 documents written in Korean and we had another 3 minutes to read through them and take notes. My document seemed to be a message from the student group of the previously mentioned girl outlining their plans to kidnap 2 Americans and stage some violent rallies outside military bases in South Korea. The Pokekorean had a grocery list which was used as code for the supplies needed for the operation.
Following that station we ran another .5 miles instead of doing a somewhat shorter uphill bike ride and moved to the Numbers event. In years past this was a simple recording of someone reading 3-5 digit number groups at a rapid pace. The object of course is to copy them as completely as possible in one pass. This year the school upped the stakes and used a recording of someone reading very faint 5 digit numbers while some *very* loud North Korean propaganda and music was played over it. Out of 40 number groups I believe I got around 20 complete.
The next choice was between running yet another .5 miles or do The Minefield. We took The Minefield. For this event The Pokekorean was blindfolded and spun around 10 times in each direction. Then I had to instruct him using Korea commands to walk blindfolded through a simulated minefield to a series of cardboard boxes in the center. In those boxes were a large variety of items. Our particular item was a squirt gun. Once he had retrieved it I then had to guide him over to my position. This was a lot of fun and we did it very quickly.
The last station was a two page test you took regarding all of the things you learned in at the various activities. The team score minus how many minutes it took you to complete the whole event determined your placing. (We were somewhere in the middle I think)
In the end we were pretty happy to have not ended up in last place. Let's hear it for lowered expectations!