My kpop dance story

As most of my friends know I love to dance. When I was little I did synchronized figure skating (I was always too tall for solo 😂) and because of that I started to learn ballet. But I stopped with figure skating when I transfered to high school. Later I was one day surfing through Facebook and I saw my freind's photo from a dance performace. I suddenly felt like I need to start with dancing again. So I joined Anais - amazing group of young women from Prague who love dancing so much that nothing can stop them - kids, university, work, ... - we could still find time to dance (and also to gossip and have different girl's talks about everything). Our choreographies were mostly mix of contemporary, ballet and jazz dance. Here is a video of us dancing at last year's competition - you can easily find other videos if you write TS Anais in youtube (or ask me).

But than I moved to South Korea and I was like: "This is my chance! I can finally learn all those kpop dances I wanted to know!" If only...

First in September I joined regular Korean school club (동아리) of kpop dance, but nothing really happened, because it only meant that I was put in the common chat room on Kakatotalk of their club. Obviously, everybody there where speaking Korean and I had literally zero knowledge of Korean language (I could read hangul) by that time.

Than in October the RC programs for students who live in dormitory started, but the application process was super confusing - I signed up for a soccer and later they told me that it was canceled because we didn't have enough members, so I tried to switch to other RC program (like kpop dance), but the transfer wasn't allowed. Why? 😢 Who knows...?

Here at Daegu University the 동아리 is different from RC program quite a lot (I will try to explain): 동아리's members are mostly Korean students who attend the university and they have schedule throughout the whole year. Also, each club has their own room where the members can hangout. Usually you must pay some fee for joining the club, but it's not much. On the other hand, the RC programs are free and they have meetings every week at certain day and time but only for one month. Most of the foreign students joined just the RC programs.

So later in October I joined the second run of RC program - this time kpop dance. But exactly the same week my 동아리 of kpop dance recruited new members and we started with the practices for freshmens aka new members! So here I was, going to two different kpop dance "clubs" at the same time (by the way I am attending two different soccer "clubs" too, but that's another story) and all my friends are always super confused about this.

Luckily for me Patricia (Slovakian exchange student from UPOL and my friend) joined the 동아리 in October too, so now we share all the sad, happy and misunderstood stories from our dance lives. First, we attended the opening party where we made one English speaking friend and Patricia met her friend who was last year in Olomouc as an exchange student! What are the chances for this?

Very good quality photo from the opening party.

We started to practise BBoom BBoom from Momoland for the Year End Performance event of our club with other freshman students. It was…. well interesting. Usually they didn’t tell us in advance when we would practise, and they just announced it every morning through the chat. It was the same with the Year End Performance event. They gave us all the information (like what to wear and when, where it will be) just like one or two days before the performance. 😑 But we finally made it and here is the video of our dance (yes, me and Patricia are the only foreigners in the club).

After the performance we went for another eating/drinking party where we made more friends! Yay! 😊And Áňa totally embarrassed herself like two times, because she was drunk and therefore hypersensitive. But in her defense – it’s a real struggle to communicate with Koreans when you think they know English well, but then they use Papago for translate! 😔

But, now comes the real problem – how to be friends with the Korean members so we can join some group/choreography? Because from now on there are no common practices anymore and everybody needs to find their place by themselves. Wish us luck! 💪

Well my friends, this is not the whole story yet. Because I was still attending the RC program, right? And at the party I promised my coach that I will attend the RC program ending event. The thing is, I really hate the song we were supposed to perform (my fault I didn’t pushed more for Love shot to be the song we’d learn at the beginning of the RC program), but then again, I was drunk at the party. And hypersensitive. And I felt really embarrassed the next day, so I decided to come for the next practice. And to perform Boy in luv (see the video on my Instagram). After all I think we did a really good job. 😎 So once again I have to thank all the people around me for supporting me! Děkuji! Спасибо! 고맙습니다! ¡Muchas gracias! 💗