Tuesday, 15 August 06

Today we only had four students -- the combination of people leaving the school to go home or travelling as well the fact that this is the last week of classes for this session and therefore everyone has finals seems to be taking its toll on attending my "elective" class.

But the true disaster was this: YouTube.com suffered an outage and no videos were accessible! We had to use Google Videos which has a far inferior selection.

As is customary on Tuesday, I asked if anyone had any music related stories from the weekend. Pei Hsuan was the only one, having gone on a dance cruise for international students on Elliot Bay. She wasn't impressed with the music aboard but she did see her first shooting stars ever while out on the water!

Pei Hsuan said she had the song "I can't take my eyes off of you" in her head so we looked on Google Videos for it. Unfortunately, we could only find this. She said this isn't the song or at least version of it that she was thinking of, but we couldn't take our eyes off of the video!


Next up we somehow ended up seeing the whole "Never Let You Go" (video) by Dima Bilan (bio), the Russian Eurovision entry which we hadn't completed last week. Inna was entranced by the screen. I asked what the song was about and she said, "It's sung in English! It's about not letting someone go!"

Since Inna had the floor, we were suddenly back to Shakira. Inna wanted to see the video of "My Hips Don't Lie" from the World Cup opening ceremony.

For some reason we moved on to this video of a little girl dancing to "My Hips Don't Lie". Very cute and funny; a little Shakira in the making!


I wrestled back control of the class by asking Pei Hsuan to play one of Taiwan's top bands for us. I don't know the name of the band nor can I show you a video as she did the whole search using Chinese characters! The theme of the song is "I am a boy, I love you, but if you are happier with someone else you should go."

Our last song was by SMAP (bio), a Japanese boyband. As was the problem with the other band, Noriko used Japanese characters to find the video and I can't reproduce them here. So I can at least show *something* I am putting a link to a random video from them. You get the idea of what they are about. It is funny to see English words thrown into the Japanese at random points.

At the end of the class we made arrangements for a class field trip for our last class on Thursday: We are going to see Children of the Revolution play a free lunchtime concert at the Seattle City Hall.