Vocal Voyages

By Hazel Chan

On September 29th, some choir kids got to skip most of the school day to catch a plane. The BICF (Bangkok International Choral Festival) was an annual event, but it hadn’t happened for a few years, so it was nice to get to sing with other people again. Most of the students that went on the trip had never been before, so they didn’t really know what to expect. Adelina Chee (12) was one of those and when asked about how she felt, replied, “I feel like this trip will be a good opportunity to learn from a different perspective and I’m really excited to meet new people.” 

We ended up having to fly to KL first because our direct flight to Thailand got cancelled about a week prior to our trip. Most of us were quite hungry by the time we reached the KL airport, but there were no restaurants and almost everything was closed besides this one noodle shop. I went to the noodle shop with two other friends, and we all ordered the same thing. The noodles were edible, but very salty and incredibly overpriced. Everything in the shop was overpriced, even the bottled water. 

After the noodles, we all needed water to balance our sodium intake. Larissa Lee (12) ran out of water, so I decided to accompany her to look for a refill station because all the shops were either closed or didn’t sell bottled water. The closest working refill station ended up being at the hall that our boarding gate was in. As soon as we got water, the last call for our flight was announced so we had to rush back. “That was so stressful, but at least I got some water,” she said when I asked her if it was worth almost missing our flight. 

Our two days of rehearsals at ISB (International School Bangkok) mostly consisted of us slowly perfecting the pieces we’d been practicing for the last two months. The five pieces we had to perform were quite challenging because three of them were in different languages and there was one piece that included an intimidating amount of body percussion that we had to memorize. 

Overall, the trip was a good experience. Singing in a new environment with a different conductor, surrounded by different people was a nice change.