Sports Day

I have mentioned before that Thailand is a place in which parades and festivals are paramount. The first week of 2011 consisted of Sports Day, an event with which I had become familiar due solely to the week of classes that were cancelled leading up to it to facilitate the most practice possible. This practice took place somewhere other than the school’s field (and by “field” I mean the sparsely grassed rectangle that serves as no athletic purpose other than existing as the land over which the children run in a line that is best described as a “Rover, Red Rover, Let ____ Over” formation). Sports Day, in my mind's image of it, was akin to the Field Day of my middle and high school era, a time of relay races and sunblock sweat and fluorescent popsicles in Tylenol flavors. I was secretly excited to witness this Day of Sports, as the athletics I had witnessed at Anuban consisted solely of people tying knots around trees and the aforementioned multi-person line running from one side to the other of the field. The other athletic endeavor in which I had seen Anuban children was what appeared to be a lot of miniature people in bright pink dancing around the field...

Three flights of stairs down and a closer inspection revealed the revelers to be hula hooping.

The only glimpse of Sports Day to which I was privy before THE Sports Day (January 6^th, 2011) was the practice marching band that paraded around the school’s buildings on the 5^th. “Wow,” I thought. “That is so cute, a real live marching band! I thought those only existed at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and in The Music Man.” I imagined children in Little Drummer Boy outfits wielding large golden drums and recorders.

What I did not imagine was a couple of things, the first being that this marching band was actually a parade of every single student at the school that began at one end of Phang-nga at 8 in the morning and proceeded to the town’s stadium (at which Sports Day was being held) and lasted for three hours. I also did not imagine that the costumes in which these primary schoolers were dressed would be of quite this caliber of sparkle and Wild Wild West meets Vegas showgirl….

(the kindergarten class)

After I got over the initial shock of overloaded hair gel and shimmer (and I thought lower school gymnastics involved a lot of hairspray and clips), I realized that there were also some very interesting shoe choices…

and also that not all costumes are created equal (these are the "cool hat" team...?).

The best part of the parade, however, was the instruments. They were unlike those I had been expecting, to say the least…is that a keyboard with a plastic straw? I think so.

After the many hours of parading and marching bands, the real show began. I was on the yellow team and I spent the majority of the day cheering (by which I mean yelling "WOOOO!!" very loudly) and I was at the very top of the bleachers so I couldn't really understand what was going on on center stage...not that it really would have helped to be any closer to the action. See picture.

I also figured out what all the pre-Sports Day hula hooping was for...

It was actually the cutest thing I have ever seen and I now understand that to be a good hula hooper, or even to be able to hula hoop at all (which I cannot), one must start from an early age. I'll add that to the list of Things I Wish I'd Known When I was in Kindergarten right next to spilling red nail polish all over your mom's bathtub is not the end of the world (sorry, Mom).

The rest of Sports Day consisted of teams of five or six people running relays around the field. It was athletic, I'll give them that, but the runners still had all of their makeup and hair gel and sparkles (and fishnets) on.