A quick update about our lack of updates. I now have installed the parts needed to fix my laptop, and I expect a full recovery. It’ll take a couple more days to download all our backups, but we should be able to resume semi-regular updates soon-ish. Oh, and lots of pictures, I promise. We went to Seoul a few times last weekend, and we’re planning a trip to Suwon this weekend, so there will be much to show and tell. Anyway, on to…

Beauty and the Beast

Each month, the kindie kids have a field trip and the plan for this month was to go see a performance of Beauty and the Beast. So, this morning we all loaded up onto 8 small buses and hit the road for a nearby shopping center. Of course, we teachers were sporting fashionable day-glow green T-shirts (as if we didn’t stick out enough!) with the KoC logo on the back. Stylin’!

When I say “shopping center” I mean it; the “performance hall” was basically a room carved out between the jewelry and bedding sections of a large, multi-floor department store. There was a modest amount of “seating”, which basically consisted of a several tiers of cushions elevated 3 inches off the floor. I’m not sure about this, but I think ready-to-wear would have been referred to as “backstage”. To be fair, though, they did have pretty nice setup that tailored to young children with lights and sound and all that.

The show, of course, was in Korean, but since we’ve all seen the movie, it was pretty easy to follow along. The whole thing was put on by a troupe of 5 actors, who relish their ability to over-act even the most basic scene (again, perhaps tailored for their audience, some of whom were in diapers). The script and music were essentially half-baked ripoffs, with some key numbers notably absent (“Be Our Guest”) and others performed very oddly (the theme song, sung by the wicked witch in the finale).  We’re pretty sure Disney isn’t getting royalties on this one.

Throughout the performance, my kids were pretty well-behaved, albeit a little frightened at times. The boy sitting next to me was really scared at the beginning (dark room, scary beast, etc) and this happens to be the same kid who has a history of open-mouth drooling, so needless to say I’m gonna have to wash that day-glow shirt before next month. There was another spit-related moment when the beast really got into his part, pronouncing those P’s and S’s so forcefully that I—in the front row—needed to wipe my arm on my pants. The Korean TAs had quite a laugh, I would say.

It was really fun to spend the day just having fun with our kids and not having to worry about learning or education or any of that stuff. Basically all we had to do was corral a few children and make sure nobody wandered off in the lingerie section, and we had plenty of help from the numerous TAs. We even got to take a few photos with our classes, so you should be seeing those soon (spoiler alert: my class is way cuter).