Yeongeuk

On Monday we had a play contest at school. Unlike preparations for our singing contest at Yonsei, which seemed to take months (and come to think of it, it probably was technically more than one month), we only really learned what was going to happen last Friday.

Our lesson text was in the form of a play script. The play is set back "before people knew what mirrors were", and tells the story of a man from the provinces who purchases the wonderful device in Seoul and brings it back home. His wife discovers it, and looking in the mirror, assumes that the woman she sees there is a concubine that her husband has secretly brought back with him from the capital. Wacky hijinks ensue, with the inevitable result that the mirror is smashed to pieces.

We actually read a different version of this story in our textbook at Yonsei last fall, so I assume it is a well-known folk tale in Korea.

After we read the script on Friday, we were each assigned parts and told to memorize lines. On Monday, five classmates would be chosen to represent our class in competition against the three other third-level classes.

I ended up being selected to play the shop owner who sells the protagonist the mirror at the beginning of the play.

In our classroom we practiced for a while, and then put on hanbok 한복, traditional Korean dress.


Here I am holding the mirror during the practice session.


The competition itself was held on the fourth floor, in the same large classroom where I had taken my placement exam back in February.


I decided to play the character like a sinister peddler of the mysterious and strange -- not unlike in the Monkey's Paw or, to choose a more topical reference, Gremlins.


With me out of the way, the rest of the cast gets down to the wacky hijinks. The wife, second from the right, is bemoaning her situation, while her mother-in-law looks in the mirror and finds that the woman in there isn't her son's concubine, but her husband's!


After the performances we watched pictures taken by students back on taekwondo day, and had a pizza lunch. Take-out from Domino's. This pizza was topped with potato wedges, bacon, and hot sauce.

And this one with pineapples, mushrooms, green onions, and various meats.


These pizzas came with garlic dipping sauce and pickles, just like the ones we ate last year from Mr. Pizza.

After lunch the judges had finally finished their deliberations. Our class won for best overall performance (hooray!). I won an individual award for best performance as the shopkeeper, and my classmate won for best performance as the mother-in-law.


It was actually a good day for prizes for me. One of the pictures I took of taekwondo won a prize too, although the prize was not awarded to me but to my classmate who was the subject of the photo.

You are probably wondering what I got inside that "Happy Mind" bag. It was a Peter Rabbit travel toiletry kit.