2 Hours!

Tomorrow, I have to give a 2 hour presentation on "teaching English through the arts." It's not the usual presentations I do for Feinschule teachers across Korea. This time, I'm presenting to adult students studying English Education at a University in Suwon, about an 1 1/2 away from where I live. I'll be presenting the Hollywood Kids program, with the emphasis being on how to teach children English through drama and music. I'm excited! This is a topic I really care about! Good thing I have a whoppin' 2 HOURS to talk about it! Seriously, how does one present for 2 hours straight? As Ali said today in disbelief..."2 HOURS!?!? Not even the president talks for 2 hours straight! Do they get a bathroom break?" (Which led me to immediately grab my presentation notes and insert "bathroom break" in the middle.) Let's be honest, I'm not even sure how much they're going to understand me. Apparently, I'm the first foreigner to present to these students. (Immediate bonus points for being blonde! Whoop whoop!) So how does one go about filling 2 hours on one topic? Videos! When in doubt, show a bunch of cute kids doing something...cute! So along with videos of the entire teaching process of Hollywood kids (ya know -- flashcard games, working on their lines, practicing on stage, etc.), I will also end my presentation with the full performances of The Jungle Book and Three Little Pigs that we did in February. Booyah! Immediate time-filler!

Which reminds me, I never showed you Three Little Pigs. So here it is! The first minute and half, nothing happens except trying to get the kids to line up on the stage properly. (Keep in mind, this is Level 1! Some of these kids are only 3 years old!) So feel free to jump ahead. It was pretty chaotic -- this was the first time they had ever worn their costumes...so, ya. There were some interesting moments.

Tokyo: Mt. Awesome, I mean Fuji

I'll wrap up the Tokyo posts with, what else, Mt. Fuji! We jutted across the city at 6am on our second morning there to catch a bus to a little town called Kawaguchiko, which is famous for having one of the best views of Mt. Fuji. Since Mr. Fuji is renowned for being quite shy, we were worried that we wouldn't get a good view of it...but we SO did, as you can tell by the pictures. :) We strolled along the lake in the morning and spent the early afternoon at an onsen (Japanese spa.) Other than that, there was literally nothing to do in this town, since it was the tourism "off season" so to speak. By early afternoon, the view of Fuji had pretty much disappeared, so it's a good thing we got there so early!

Other than that, there's really not much to say about Mt. Fuji other than...WOWZA!!!

Mid morning snack -- locally grown blueberries were the specialty.

Tokyo: After Dark

Before it's long gone and out of memory, I wanted to finish up my Tokyo posts! (Perhaps for my keepsake more than anything else...) You can't post Tokyo photos without talking about the nightlife! Tokyo at night is like no city I've ever seen before. Everything lights up, everyone wears even more eccentric clothing than usual, and the city comes alive with energy. The nightlife alone made the trip unforgettable.This was taken from the top of the Tokyo Government building. (Ali did some HDR thing to it, which is why it looks so...POW!)

The busiest intersection in the world doesn't get any less busy at night!

The taxis are SUPER retro-ified in Tokyo. Totally 1970s-esque.

The coolest staircase in the world!

In short, Tokyo at night = awesome.

Rabbit Class: "Doh, A Deer!"

In case you haven't had your weekly dose of "cute" yet, you will get your fill with Rabbit Class' (remember them?) contribution to the graduation festival. Julie Andrews would be proud.

The Jungle Book

Here it is! My class performing The Jungle Book at the graduation fesitval! Sorry the quality is not amazing -- I had to compress it BIG TIME in order for it to upload to blogger...

Glorious March!

I’ll take a brief hiatus from the Tokyo posts (there’s a couple more I want to put up of Mt. Fuji and Tokyo nightlife!) so that I can take a moment to express my extreme joy that March has finally come! Somehow, miraculously, I crawled my way through these past 2 months.

Last week, we had the biggest Feinschule event of the year, the graduation festival. It was a 2 ½ hour long event, complete with singing, dancing, skits, speeches, costume changes, and the like. My Hollywood Kids classes performed Three Little Pigs (level 1 class) and The Jungle Book (Level 3 class). While the entire festival may have seemed smooth-running and glamorous to the audience, the truth of the matter is that the entire day was COMPLETE CHAOS. The kids came 2 hours early and there were several “OHTUKAY!” moments (this Korean word literally means “what are we gonna do!?!?!?”) during the process of putting on this far-too-elaborate-for-kindergarten-kids festival. The biggest panic in the Hollywood Kids department was that 2 hours before the performance, we realized that instead of sending us 6 pig costumes for Three Little Pigs (you may be asking why 6 pig costumes are needed when there are only 3 little pigs, but so it goes when you have 15 kids in a 5-character play) the costume company sent us one, as well as forgetting Sheer Khan and Leela’s costume for the Jungle Book. So after frantic phone calls, some guy made a rushed costume delivery 20 minutes before the performance on a motor bike. However, since they didn’t have enough pig costumes, two of our pigs were rabbits. Which ended up working out fine since one girl refused to go on stage in a pig costume anyway. This combined with the fact that the performance was the first time they had ever stepped foot in their costumes made for some…interesting moments. If only my three little pigs could have remembered their lines instead of playing with their rabbit ears and snouts…

However, The Jungle Book was flawlessly performed by my level 3 class, all of which have now graduated from the kindergarten and moved on to elementary school (sniff, sniff). My favorite moment of The Jungle Book was the last line of the play, after Mowgli ventured into the man village with his new love, Leela, and Baloo proclaims, “Well, I guess he won’t be staying in the jungle after all!” To which Bageera replies, “I guess it’s just you and me, Baloo!” And together they say, “Let’s go have some fun!” End scene? I think not! Over the loud speakers comes Shakira’s She Wolf at which point Baloo and Bagheera, quite possibly the two most enthusiastically un-coordinated kids in the school, do a dance that goes down in the history of “most awesomely awkward moments ever.” They groove their way off the stage, then everyone comes in gettin’ down and dirty to Shakira, at which point Shakira fades and the final song of the play begins. It brought the house down! Well, it brought my house down. I was proud.

Another reason to celebrate is that as of about 40 minutes ago, I finished my accounting course! Was it fun? No. But can I now answer any questions you may have regarding income statements, owner’s equity, stock investments, and the amortization of bonds? Ye…No, not really that either. However, I am one step closer in beginning grad school at Columbia next fall – glass half full, people!