Sports Day!

aka Toddlers and Tiaras Thailand Edition.

A few weeks ago (yeah, yeah, I know - I'm a bad blogger) Pak Chong celebrated Sports Day!  Sports Day happens in varying forms all over Thailand, but in its basic form its 2 or 3 days of no classes and the students participate in performances/cheering and sport competitions.  It was a lot of fun to watch this year and of course I took copious amounts of pictures!

For us in Pak Chong, Sports Day happened on Wednesday and Friday (with normal classes on the Thursday in between).  Most of Wednesday was taken up by a parade and then opening ceremony performances.  The students were assigned a color and so they proceeded down in almost rainbow order (I say almost because orange went between green and blue).  Everyone in the school participates - even the annubon (kindergarten) kids!  The girls who are performing get dressed up (as if on Toddlers and Tiaras) with full makeup, hair, and sparkly costume dresses!  In the parade there was also a variety of themed groups - I couldn't always tell what they were supposed to be but I was entertained by all of them!

All the students before the parade during morning assembly

Line up!

Great outfits, don't you think?

It's starting! It's starting!

Red First!  Aren't they cute!

Now Yellow!

A brief grim reaper interlude?

Green!

Another costume interlude...

Orange!

Blue!

Last, but certainly not least, Purple!

with an HIV theme...

After they paraded around the block they came back and paraded around the sports field.

Everyone lined up!

Oh so tiny!

The marching band was really good!

A wedding dress, of course!

Oh! Here's orange!

Each team had their own stand which was decorated with a sign - Violet Lucky!

Blue Garaka - Boom Cheer!

One of my favorite performances was that of some of the little annubon kids.  They did a hula hoop routine with some intense hula hooping!  Seriously, first they spun it around on their arms and did a little dance.  Then they started hula hooping while dancing.  They were doing arm movements, moving back and forth switching positions - it was seriously impressive... and adorable.

After watching the performances a while we decided to just walk around and find all our students.

So without further ado, here are some of my children!

Getting a make up touch up!

She's not one of mine or Peter's students, but she is a high school student!

Friday we then got to see more of the competition aspect.  They started with simple relay races at different meter intervals.  First came the adorable annubon kiddies.  It reminded me so much of when I first started coaching soccer and the little ones would trip over the blades of grass.  Absolutely no idea what they were doing - just trying to move forward!

After the little ones went it progressed upwards by age.  I'll be honest, the less adorable the children got, the less interested I was in watching them run down a field.  Unless of course one of my children was running in which case I cheered and clapped quite boisterously!

Purple had far and away the best cheer routine - and also the loudest cheering!

Ready, Set, Go!

And I get distracted by my own students... 

After the races there was a little ceremony where the winners were awarded medals by the school director.

 Really, it was all just very cute!