P caught doing meths at school!!!

Today is the last day of term three for P, so we are off to the beach to eat fish and chips (pronounced: fush and chups) and celebrate! She gets 2 weeks off for school holidays (as vacation is known here), then heads back for the final term of year 6.

Whew! Every kid feels like summer will never come and school will never end but for P this year it really is true! She hasn't noticed yet that this has been the longest school year ever, and that by the end she will have spent sixteen straight months in school!

The grand finale for term 3 was a musical production by the year 6,7,& 8 students called A Knight's Tale. I saw it twice, and I must say: I laughed, I cried, and it was better than Cats. Actually, it was better than most of musicals I have seen (though I really did like South Pacific).

The Production, as it was called during production, was set in medieval times at her school, and was a fun mix of Monty Python's Holy Grail and any number of Disney princess movies (witches, curses, weddings, ladies in waiting, knights, wizards, trolls, happy endings...) with a soundtrack by Elvis, Madonna, Abba, and whoever sings that I Will Survive song. Try-outs for the lead roles happened before P started at this school so she got to be in the singing and dancing chorus. She did a great job!

I remember being in the school play when I was P's age. I was a pilgrim. It was not a very high quality production and was only entertaining to the people who loved us. P's school production was fantastic, lasted 2 hours, charged for admission ($5 for adults, $3 kids), and drew quite large crowds!

This was no watered-down, just-for-kids musical, and is not something I would expect to see back home. One song was set in a tavern while drinking beer, another song made a reference to having a sex change operation, and two of the knights did a striptease in the forest (they only removed their socks, all in all a very tasteful striptease). This was a fine example of what it is like to live outside of the Zion curtain! (Another example: the University of Auckland's student newspaper just released its annual pornography issue. You can read it while sipping a beer at the bar on campus.)

On a somber note, P was caught doing meths at school. Turns out all the kids do meths here. I kept incorrectly calling it math, which I thought was merely spelled maths here and pronounced math, just like it ought to be, but no, it is correctly pronounced meths as P points out every time I mispronounce it as if I were still living in the old country. And in a funny twist, methamphetamine is called P here. I don't know why. So I won't worry about P doing meths so long as she isn't doing P.

We're off to read books, play outside, sleep in, and goof off on our holidays!