The Mother of All Sports Days

Trip Start May 06, 2010

101

Trip End Apr 14, 2011

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Flag of Thailand Chon Buri, Thailand
Monday, February 21, 2011

Thursday was the epitome of Sports Days at Anubanchon. We've been building up to this day for weeks, training during all non-instruction hours (and, often, during classes). The kids were primed and ready, and I was ready to be done with it all. A little while before Sports Day, we were instructed to tell the office our size for our new sports shirt. This was to be worn with our Friday sports pants. It was, of course, to be made of polyester, to go with the pants. Whoever brought polyester into this country is an idiot. So, we bought our new shirts and got them two days before the big day. Then, the day before, Prem informed us that our Sports Day hats were in the office waiting for us, and we owed her 25 baht. Did we get baseball caps? No, no, sun bonnets! Our polyester sports outfits were topped off with garden party sun bonnets. But only if you were a lady, the men got cowboy hats (Prem kept telling us the cowboy hats were men’s hats despite the fact that I saw numerous female Thai teachers wearing them)

Classy sports attire

. I was pretty annoyed that there was gender discrimination in the hats, I would have much rather had the cowboy hat than that bonnet.

So we got to school at 7:00 and then went to stand in the parking lot for about two hours. Then we began the slow progress of getting all 2,000 students from the regular and English programs over to the big stadium. The entire English program was on the purple team, while the regular program was divided into pink, green, and orange teams. Each team had cheerleaders and majorettes to support the team. The purple team was the only one with two cheerleading squads-one for boys and one for girls.

The morning was rather slow going. There were individual running races and then relays. Each level had its own heat (so all the teams from levels 1 to 6 had three individual races: 50 meters, 80 meters, and 100 meters, and then a relay heat as well). I sat in the stands with my kids and tried to cheer for my team, but most of the cheers were in Thai, so I had to just yell, "Go, purple!" in English and Thai. I forgot to put on sunscreen and bring my water bottle, so I was pretty miserable (and begrudgingly became grateful for that awful bonnet).

The best part of the day was watching the boy cheerleaders

The male cheerleaders

. They were hilarious, and slightly inappropriate. It’s a little disturbing how much thrusting was encouraged in those cheers. But they kept the crowd lively throughout the day.

Unfortunately, the purple team was not so good. We showed some promise once tug of war started up, but only ended up winning two rounds. We didn’t stand a chance with the running events. The kids on the orange team had to have been on steroids. It wasn’t even fair putting those kids against the kids on my team. Apparently the purple team did pretty well at swimming and table tennis (events that happened earlier in the week), but I didn’t get to watch any of those.

At about 1:00, we finally got to go back to school for lunch (we were supposed to be finished at 11:00, but things never seem to go quite as planned when the entire school is involved). The kids were all given giant bowls of ice cream and spent the afternoon in the classrooms playing games and watching t.v. I got to go home because Prem knew I was heading to Chiang Mai and would serve no purpose in the classroom that afternoon. Which was perfect, because it meant I got to shower off all the sweat and dirt I had collected from Sports Day before sitting on buses for the next 14 hours.

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