Best of Broadway! Lah!!

This is the town square at Fraser Hill. Fraser's Hill is at 1500m and hence a lot cooler than KL.


The title was the name of the drama production put on at the school this week. The Lah is a Malaysian thing. Sentences in English are usually ended with lah or can lah. I guess the way Canadians say, eh. I tried to include a movie clip of the finale but had problems. Instead I put a short clip from the play from the Annie section. A lot of my Grade 5 munchkins were involved in this. The scale of the production of the production was something else to behold. About 250 kids from Grades 2 to 12 were involved. The level of talent is very high. A lot of parents, I'm sure, have had their kids take voice and drama lessons. Maureen and I worked at all three performances as 'head of the house'. I'm not really sure what our duties were other than supervising the ushers and making sure the audience behaved itself during the performances (no flash photography, no crying kids etc.). The director is a cute little Filipino gal, who has studied drama all over the world including some famous school in New York. She is married to a Canadian fellow and just completed her Master's last year at Simon Fraser. We thought the production was an unbelievable undertaking but found out the 'big one' is in the spring. The extra-curricular expectations here are pretty high. I guess when parents (well their companies in 99% of the cases) pay $22500US in tuition a year they can expect a lot in return.

Maureen has been bagged all week after her adventure in Singapore. She went with 7 other teachers, 5 from our school and 2 from another international school. They decided to fly because the price difference between the bus and plane was negligible. The problem arose when there flight was delayed in the return by 5 hours. She didn't arrive in our condo until 3:15am Monday morning. Needless to say this kind of slowed her down for the week and has left her fighting a cold. Other than that she really enjoyed Singapore.
Singapore was part of Malaysia for a short time in the early 60's. Singaporeans are mainly of Chinese decent and after a series of squabbles with the Malaysians they were booted out of the union of Malay states in 1965. From 1959 to 1990 Singapore was ruled by Lee Kuan Yew. He pushed through an ambitious plan of modernization and industrialization that has created one of the most prosperous cities in the world. He and his political allies have also created one of the most controlled states in the world. Maureen was scared to death of dropping a kleenex out of her purse or some other such offense as there is an immediate $500 fine. There seem to be rules and fines for everything including gum chewing. The other side of this of course is that everything is very well organized and run. There are no traffic jams in Singapore. People actually signal and shoulder check when they change lanes there. Crime is non-existent. Those in possession of drugs are executed. There is no defense or excuse.
The other downside of being in such a prosperous city is that everything is extremely expensive and believe it or not Maureen didn't shop. She really does like bargains. She did have a Singapore Sling at Raffles though and checked out the city thoroughly.

Saturday night the Parent Association hosted a dinner for teachers. The theme was western. The group was rather small but we managed to have fun. Maureen taught a group of keeners a five or six line dances. As the event was outside this was enough. They all needed to wring out their clothes after. All this is still a bit hard to comprehend. It's turned December, the Christmas decorations are up but it is so hot and humid outside.

Today we drove up to the hill resort of Fraser Hill. We managed to get in a little hike. There are lots of birds up there. We were looking for exotic types like hornbills etc. but only managed to run into a large owl. There were a number of Malaysian bird watchers on the trail when we told them of the owl they were unbelievably excited about this and we had to show them where we saw it. I guess owl are rarer than hornbills in Malaysia. The cameras and lenses these guys had were very large and expensive. We did have to pull off a few leaches after our walk. They like to crawl inside your socks.




Broadway Lah video.