And when despair tears me in two, who can I turn to but you?

Don't worry about the title of this post. I'm not sad nor being torn apart. I'll explain later.

So this week was my first week of Winter Camp. It's kind of stressful but also kind of fun. I get to bond with some of my students more, but they are a bit wild since it's vacation and 80 minutes is a long time to focus on English. I try to play lots of fun games and do exciting things, but I have never done a camp before so I'm all like whhhhhaaaaaat do I do?

This week's craft consisted of coloring and making flags. Next week we are making panda candles and doing an Olympics day, so it will be fun but exhausting, as camp has been so far. I get more freedom since it's literally aaaaaaaaaaaaaall my plan despite having a coteacher, which is fun but also stressful.

I also had a coteacher switch from my normal one to a new teacher who has never cotaught or taught English, so it makes me feel a lot of pressure to be awesome. So I'm trying my best to just do good activities and not let my anxiety boil over.

Anyway, here are some of my kidlets making their own flags and the English-speaking country banner we made for my Around the World camp:

My third grade girls are my everything. They're so freaking cute.

My fifth grade girls are also awesome! They're so chill and game to help me with things!

Pretty! 

Matthew was so proud to show me mine that he demanded a picture, so that's when I started taking them of the other students.

So pretty! I have no art skills so everything they did I was like whoa.

My babies. 

My A class. 

My B class is mostly 4th grade, and I love them too. These two girls (Eun Ji and Min Ji) are so good at English!

Sometime around 4th grade is when they stop wanting me to take their picture, but not these gems.

This is my Little Korean Harry Potter (his English name is Harry because he looks like HP) is obsessed with Slenderman and I think it's both cool and weird. He's great at English though, so  I try encourage his wandering creativity...

Class B (One of them insisted that France had to be in the lineup...)

Camp is fun but tiring. I only teach til noon but I have to stay til my normal time of 4:30, but I like it a lot. I like being alone in school and only having one thing to focus on. It's a nice change from 4 grades and like 10 lesson plans a week. But it is reeeeeally tiring and sometimes the kids are impossible to corral. But we manage. And we have fun.

I also insisted on putting up the flag banner myself. We'll see if it's still up on Monday.

This is my classroom from the back!

You can tell which countries were the favorites by how many flags were colored.

A lot of the younger kids wanted USA because "Francesca teacher!" 

These are the window blinds we have.

I think they're cool.

My view from the front sans children.

My classroom is reeeeeeeeeeeally nice. My school is small but is in a more wealthy part of the city, so we have a lot of new stuff. And it's relatively clean compared to other schools, from what I understand. Nice school, great coworkers, and awesome students? I'm spoiled.

Speaking of awesome coworkers, one of the 5th grade teachers brought me back a guide book and a green tea cake from Japan because she knows I'm going in February. How nice!

After a tiring week of camp, I did nothing on Friday and it was awesome.


On Saturday I did a lot. I went to the National Museum of Korea with Janell, Lauren, Sarah, and Tina and we spent a few hours perusing old artifacts and whatnot. It's cool to see how countries independently develop similar tools (and how different some things are too!) and other things in history, especially since I'm much more familiar with western things. Like some of the Buddha paintings reminded me a lot of the saints and stuff you see in Italy.


I can't really say much more than we looked at a lot of old things and it was interesting. It was a museum, and I'm sure you can imagine what it was like.


Afterwards, Tina and I left to meet other friend Janelle to go see Jekyll & Hyde!!


OMG IT WAS SOOOOOO GOOD!


It was all in Korean, but I am really familiar with the show and music since I love the English version, plus the source material is from my wheelhouse (nudges glasses up nose nerdily) of literature. The musical is really popular in Korea. This was the 10 year anniversary I think.

The story does a much better job of transitioning from Gothic Victorian Horror story to stage Gothic Victorian Horror Love story than Dracula did, mostly because the character motivations make since in act two based on what we saw in act 1. It's a bit long for me, (Act 1 is 85 minutes and Act 2 is 65 with 20 minutes of intermission) and there are some storylines that just don't get fleshed out enough, but overall it's awesome.

Here are some of the costumes from the show!

Emma's dress

Jekyll's outfit. I wish men still dressed like this. I love Victorian style clothing.

Hyde's fur coat.

Lucy's dress.

Stage!

Park Eun Tae, our Jekyll/Hyde, was amazing. Yeah, the same guy is both Jekyll and Hyde, so it must be really fun and challenging to play. His voice changes between the characters were spot on. Jekyll is right-handed and Hyde is left-handed, which is fun to watch when they're on stage.


I don't know what else to say besides it was awesome. The main characters, J/H, his (Victorian representation of proper woman and supportive and in my opinion not entirely necessary but I like her anyway) fiance Emma, and (Victorian representation of bad woman who is good person but a prostitute so guess if she survives) and the surprise love interest Lucy were all spot on. They were such a great cast.

Our incredible cast!

I think the Jekyll/Emma and Hyde/Lucy pairing is important for upholding the Victorian standards and whatnot, but it's hard to develop both stories enough along with allllllllllll the other things going on (Jekyll getting redemption for his father, trying and failing to convince corrupt people about his experiment, trying to prove himself worthy by using it on himself, murdering the corrupt officials, Jekyll and Hyde's increasing fight for control) in the show. And I think the fact the Jekyll is so protective of Lucy but also kisses her and shows interest in her that is not in line with societal expectations is a good point to the source in that Jekyll is not entirely a good person. The Jekyll/good Hyde/evil dichotomy is too black and white. Jekyll's motivations in the Strange Cas of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson novella are not as pure as in the show (in the novella he wants to be able to enjoy all the vices which would destroy his social position without actually having to answer for it, so he invents the serum to detach all of his terrible qualities into Hyde so he can avoid detection rather than the show's redemption of Father/victory of science/proving the haterz wrong plot) and I think the show does some good things to show that good and evil aren't so simple.


I cannot stop saying the show was amazing. The theatre was sooooooooooo freaking hot though. I wish David Hasselhoff  hadn't sullied it with his presence and I wish it was better received in America. While I'm in Korea I might have a chance to see it again, since it's popular!

Here is my favorite song, Confrontation, when Jekyll and Hyde are finally on stage together and you see the back and forth. Hyde is left handed and wears his hair down, and Jekyll looks a little more kept. So you get to see the differences in manner, voice, and character in this song:

I actually prefer the song to be a bit slower, as it is on the original soundtrack, but whatever. In our Korean version, the last NOOOOOOO started out as Hyde then changed into Jekyll mid-note, which was flawless and fabulous.

One of my other favorite songs, Dangerous Game, is between Lucy and Hyde.

In English first, then watch the Korean because it's awesome.

Korean staging is awesome. 

And last but not least, Take Me as I Am, the love song between the proper couple:

They sing such wonderful songs before bad things happen.  This song contains my single favorite lyric in the show (it happens before the transformation and everything goes to shit):

And when despair tears me in two, who can I turn to but you?

SO CLEVER.

It was such a good show and I will be listening to the soundtrack for like ever.


Okay here's another observation: Korea tends to cast way more attractive people in their roles. Remember Dracula?

It's so much more believable when Dracula is younger and really handsome.

Which I think really helps. Henry Jekyll is crazy. How could two awesome women characters fall in love with him?

WELL IT HELPS THAT HE LOOKS LIKE THIS

Not like this.

And now on to Korean music, because I'm all about that life too.

I am BEYOND obsessed with this song. It's called "Shadow" by Beast and it is awesome. I love Beast. Definitely one of my Top 3 Kpop Groups (Super Junior, Big Bang, Beast). I don't normally like/watch music videos too much, since I think they never make any sense or I get distracted by watching, but I really like this video. Beast isn't an SM Entertainment group, so they actually get to do more than just dance in a box for their videos. I really love this one and the song. 

Incidentally, my bias from Beast (Hyunseong) was almost a member of Big Bang.

Speaking of Big Bang, here is another song I'm obsessed with from Taeyang, one of the members of Big Bang. 

 

I like the dance video better than the music video, but just hearing the song is cool too.

Wish me luck on my second week of camp! Fighting!