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!