Field Trips, pt. 1

At our school, there's a different activity for every day of the week. Monday is Arts and Crafts. Tuesday is Show and Tell. Wednesday is (supposed to be) AV Club. Thursday is Science. And on Fridays we go on field trips.

My first field trip was to a "bubble show." We walked inside a tiny auditorium on the bottom floor of Home Plus and took seats. Lights flashed and sugary Korean kid's music started playing. A Korean dude in suspenders and a fedora came bouncing onstage. He picked up a long tennis racket rigged up with 50 blower sticks and twirled it around. He dipped it in a tub of bubble solution, then waved it over one corner of the crowd, filling the air with tiny bubbles. The kids went dutifully apeshit. He went up and down the aisles repeating the move until he'd hit every row.

From there the show took an artful turn. The lights dimmed. Suddenly we were listening to Treefingers. He filled bubbles with smoke, he combined bubbles and made cool shapes, he blew small bubbles inside of large bubbles. It was actually pretty impressive.

To close out the show he took people onstage and made giant bubbles around their whole bodies. Robinson and I were among this privileged few.

The next week they told us we were going to a "robot museum" but it ended up being just a really big collection of old robot action figures. A toy collector would have shit himself, but most of the kids seemed bored. I walked around imagining how Rick from Pawn Stars would appraise each item. "500,000 ₩? Well…that's not going to happen."

It was an unfocused place. For starters they had pretty loose standards for what qualified as a robot. Joan of Arc wore a suit of armor? ROBOT. At one point we were ushered into a tiny theater and shown a short film about the Earth's rotation, which they apparently justified on the basis of one of the characters being a robot. 

All the toys were behind glass, with little cards explaining what they were in both English and Korean. There was a whole shelf of Chewbacca toys in one corner. My co-worker can read Korean and she told me that the writing on the card said Chewbacca. The English said "Star Wars Gorilla."

There was a bunch of Superman stuff, too.

Last week we went to a science museum. That was pretty fun and educational, although it seemed like most of the interactive exhibits were a little bit broken. Also there was this:

Christ, the fox's looks like it's crawling after you.