A month. WOW.

Its safe to say that the last month or so has been one of the busiest of my life. Busier than finals week in college. Busier than those two weeks back in May when I had to take all of my finals early and get ready to move out and graduate. Well maybe on that last one. 

Be prepared for a lot of text before all of the pictures that fill in just a few of the gaps of my lack of posting in the recent past.

Back about a month ago, I was recruited to write the play for our school's Christmas concert. As I found out later, the Christmas concert is a talent show, dinner, worship night, and play. So there was a lot of things going on, with the star of the event- the play. In true Victoria fashion, I can never just do something halfway- except for the dishes. After watching about 10 minutes of what the school was wanting to base the play on, I said that this play won't work for our school so I came up with the idea. From there I had to execute it. I recruited Andrew, June, Daisy, and Daniela to help as the play was bilingual. Including all the Chinese scenes, there were 13 different scenes with each of the students having a part with a name. For these scenes, all of the 75(ish) students in our school were all scrambled together. So a lot of moving pieces. The goal was for each student's character to have a line or group line. Somehow we only forgot 2 or 3 kids in this process. Not too shabby. We spent about a week and a half writing the entire play, from scratch. I would have finished it earlier, but I found out about my grandma's passing on the Saturday night I was meaning to finish it so it didn't happen. 

Here is the general outline of the play. We start off with a scene where there are kindergarteners playing together (duck, duck, goose) and then a girl, Kala, gets picked on by the boys and they all have to go inside. From there we jump forward to Kala making friends with the other girls in the orphanage as an 8(ish) year old. In the next scene, Kala is reading the Ugly Duckling to the young students and gets angry about not having a family and has a temper tantrum. She gets called into Ms. Partridge's office and finds a snowglobe that has her name on it. Kala has always thought that her mom died giving birth to her so she never had a family, but she finds out that she has been left on the doorstep. She thinks the snowglobe holds the key to finding out where her "real" family is, so she grabs her friend Scarlett and they head off on a journey to find her home. They run into a biking race where the racing "celebrity" dudes try to hit on them and they end up leaving without finding much more information on the snowglobe and head further down the path. Then they run into a painting expo- for wall painting- and have to deal with the boredom. They get some real directions for the snowglobe and head off looking for the place in the snowglobe. The next place they end up is Candyland. In Candyland, the Candyman is the boss and there is only happiness until Scarlett eats a lollipop and becomes the property of the Candyman. Kala ends up trading the snowglobe for Scarlett, the only person who she believes really cares about her. They continue on the path, then come across a Christmas Eve service and stay and listen. While they are there, Kala realizes she does have a family at the orphanage and heads back there, where she is welcomed with open arms. 

So while I was writing the script, I would hang out in the PSL classroom, which is where all the big kids are, since they were the main characters in the play who would be propelling the storyline forward. They helped me cast each character, super helpful. For almost all of the characters/students, it was very difficult for them to understand how to have emotions and show them. It was very overwhelming for a lot of them, so a lot of my time was spent empowering and encouraging them to prove that I did believe they could do it.

We also had term exams going on at the same time. So I was responsible for creating the term exams for, getting caught up on grading, and reviewing with my students. I posted some of the answers to the questions on the exam I created for my G5 Heritage class. Crazy huh. 

The other thing going on was celebrating Thanksgiving and my golden birthday- on the same day. At my school, we were able to celebrate "Thanksgiving" with the students. Note how I put Thanksgiving in quotations. The night before, I hung out with my students and we made homemade rolls and chocolate chip cookies. Lots of fun! Most of them had never baked anything before so it was super interesting! But on Thanksgiving day, I was looking forward to celebrating one of my favorite holidays with my students- Thanksgiving. However, we all dressed up in costumes and there were chicken feet as dishes- FOUR DISHES of chicken feet!!!! Talk about culture shock. During/at the end of the dinner, I was so overwhelmed by everything, my grandma's passing, my first holiday without my family, celebrating something I always pictured with my family 8,000 miles away, the 14 hour time difference, and all of the stress of life. So I grabbed Sophia and we went up to the 4th-floor teacher's office and I cried for a good chunk of time, wiped off the smeared makeup and got ready to tell the entire school the plot of the play and how everything was going to work. I went downstairs and told everyone the gameplan for the next week until we did this play! At the end of this, one of the teachers was talking to the students in Chinese and told them all to sing "Happy Birthday" to me and I was totally shocked since I had no idea what they were saying. Such awesome people. I ended up celebrating my 23rd birthday by eating takeout in my PJs with my friends and going to bed super early. What an awesome night.

Friday, I was the boss. I had to tell literally everyone what their job was and how this whole thing was going to work. Lots of pressure. I spent a lot of my day working on character development with the main characters and starting to block the main scenes. Lots of work. That night, June and I went out to celebrate my birthday with ramen, foot massages, and hot chocolate. What a good night. 

Saturday, I went to Hong Kong for the day. Unfortunately, Sophia and I didn't do enough planning so we didn't have as much time as we would have liked to do everything. But I did get the steak I wished for. It was actually not that good and wayyyyy too expensive. Hong Kong is ridiculously expensive. Because of our poor planning, we almost didn't have a way to get home from the train at the border to get to Guangzhou. But we got in a van for 100 yuan that took us to Guangzhou. Literally one of the most uncomfortable rides of my life. WAYYY too little space. We got home at about 2 am ish. Sunday, I slept in and went to church and back home. Simple day, but awesome. 

Monday I was back at it again as the boss. I worked with a lot of the scenes and it took a lot of time. Most of my students have no acting/dancing/singing ability so doing anything is really tough. Almost everyone had their lines memorized so that was awesome. We had a lot of work to do in the Candyland scene because there was dancing involved. So I helped with the dancing. I am a terrible dancer, but I'm better than my students. Terrifying isn't it. I also had to teach teenage boys how to flirt with girls. Shocking isn't it. I've never dated anyone, but somehow I was showing these boys how to have moves where they could put their arm around the girls' shoulders. I also got to teach several students how to sing- something I'm actually useful at.  I got to use a lot of my energy doing random things. On Wednesday night, there were so many details that had to get figured out that I had a meeting with Daisy and Oscar- my student assistant since he took his SAT on Saturday- that went from 10 pm to after 2 am. All of the things that had to get figured out to tell the students and teachers what was actually going on and to invite them into the production instead of me just telling them what to do. I didn't stop working that night until 4 am. So I slept at the school on the floor of my kindergarten for an hour and Daisy woke me up, then we took a taxi home. I slept for about an hour, took a shower and went to school to be the boss and tell everyone what was going on. So much work. By the end of the day, things had improved quite a bit- still wouldn't call it good, but definitely better.

Friday was show day. So I got to school at 8:30 since we would be having a big day getting ready for the Christmas concert at the hotel where it was. I still had some props that I needed to get and my two main characters needed to chill so they wouldn't get too anxious. So Sarah, Joy and I went in search of the final things. We went to this underground mall and found the random things and ate some delicious Korean food. SO much better than school food! After that, we went to the hotel to get everything together. Mr. Huber- I now understand why the musicals were so stressful for you when I was in high school. Well, being the director of the production is so much more stressful than I imagined. As I watched them practice while they completely ignored my directions, I almost ripped my hair out. So stressful. After that, the students and I all got ready for the dinner, so we got all fancy. I got to eat dinner with my kindergarteners, mostly the K3 kids who are younger. I sat next to the cutie in the pictures down below, who also started the night off ablaze, by catching her napkin on fire. I had to grab it out of her hands and throw it on the carpeted floor and stomp it out. So relaxing right. I got to see all of my kindergarteners (who I mostly ignored during this week) misbehave while other teachers were in charge of them. Then I went to get everyone ready for the play. Sarah, who played Kala, was super nervous, so I got to hang out with her for a while and try to calm her down. Then it was showtime. And everything basically went wrong. Microphones didn't work. People forgot lines. So many things went wrong. BUT IT WAS HILARIOUS! Just knowing there was nothing I could do to change it made me laugh so hard. But even though the play felt like a complete trainwreck to me, I was so proud of my kids because they all had improved so much! Afterwards, I got to take pictures with some of my students and it was great. I also promised the PSL boys that we could burn all of the copies of the script that we could find at the school after we all got back with the supplies. However, this idea got canceled by Mr. David, the guy in charge of the school, as we were about to burn them all. So we ended up eating the McDonalds that Mr. David brought instead. I ended up hanging out with the students until about 1:30 am and we ended up singing Karaoke at the school for about an hour and a half. I taught them so American songs and we all had fun so that was great. 

I got to sleep in super late on Saturday, like 3 pm. Which was much needed. I had a lazy weekend, except for leading worship at church on Sunday. While doing so, I somehow forgot the lyrics to one of the songs I've literally led 100+ times. On the first Sunday of me being in charge of the worship. Oh well. That happens. I got to hangout with some friends after and eat some yummy Indian food. I even went to sleep at like 8:30 and got ready for this week mentally. Now the second term awaits. Stay tuned for more of my (mis)adventures!