FESTIVITIES AT SCHOOL

The 3,000 students at my school are split up between four buildings. The building where I teach all of my classes is brand new and was completed just before I started my job. It's six stories tall and holds all of the kindergarten through fourth grade classrooms, along with a bunch of other stuff, like a computer lab, a library, and an awesome indoor playground that puts any McDonald's PlayPlace to shame. Last week we had a couple of events to celebrate the official opening of the new building.

On Thursday we had a festival for all of the students, there were a bunch of fun activities for the kids, tasty snack foods, and a number of entertaining student performances. School was cancelled on Friday in order to prepare for the real celebration which was held on Saturday. Thousands of people attended the event which started at 8AM and ended around 3 o'clock. There were things going on all over the place, student performances, live music, and a traditional Thai opera... all at once! There was a lot to see. However, Mac and I spent most of the day at the front gate, sort of just standing around greeting kids and parents as they arrived. I think they kind of just wanted us to be visible, having foreign English teachers at our school is kind of big deal I guess. So I missed a lot of the action on Saturday, but luckily I was able to see some cool things on Thursday.

One of my favorite performances was put on by the Taekwondo Club, they ran around performing martial arts to cheesy techno music and broke boards and bricks and stuff. This one kid even busted out some nunchucks, it was pretty sweet. The picture on the top right is of this kid running up the backs of a few kids on his way to karate kick a board in half that is being held by a kid sitting on top of another kids shoulders, quite impressive. But what really got me was the traditional Thai dancing that some of my little second and first grade girls performed...