Oh, You. Sports Week.

Your ears are not deceiving you. They are most definitely playing some La Bamba. Ohh, if you could have seen me sing this in my younger days. Love it. The red, white and blue flag is the Thai Flag and the yellow flag is the King's Flag.

Surprising to me (and fun!), most of the songs our band plays are recognizable to the American ear. 

All government schools in Thailand have an annual mini-olympics of sorts. Our students competed in basketball, volleyball, soccer, and they ran track. Students spent all week preparing for Friday, the last and by far best day of the week. The ceremonies consisted of a parade, costumes, dancing, decor, trophies and a wide variety of other hoopla. It was serious business and almost everyone was involved in some way or another. We didn't have a single class all week. Nice...

Us teachers spent a lot of time doing this:

Here are some of the things I missed on Friday (compliments of Lia) for various reasons, the best of which is....... drum roll please.......  I got to see the UT / A&M Football Game!!! LIVE! On espn.com! Oh, what a happy day!!

Missing these guys was really the biggest bummer, because they used pogo stick thingums (technical term) to jump over people standing in their way, creating a human obstacle course.

Here are all the students waiting to see these jumpers jump.

Cheerleaders for one of the teams. Their costumes varied dramatically but they were all so authentically Thai. It was very cool to see.

Awesome. All the teams had different hats or signs to hold up that distinguished them in their groups. Way to go, yellow team. Those hats are awesome. The students spent time putting everything together themselves, and I find their dedication to the arts impressive.

Okay, okay, so, unfortunately I missed some kick-A stuff, but it was most definitely worth it. Did I mention UT Football Game. LIVE. Woot woot!!

Here are a couple photos from the parade I was lucky enough to see:

They're big on global warming and saving the environment here. Last semester they had a recycled talent show, where they all made their dresses and outfits from 100% recyclable materials. I was completely surprised, but some of them were just beautiful.

A team introduction. If I'm reading the Thai correctly, it says "Siheluong". Absolutely no idea if I am or what it means, but my guess is yellow in Thai.

Teams and Activities:

Me with one of my favorite M5 classes (11th graders). They are a lot of fun and were some of the few students not too intimidated to speak to Milan. One of the boys even shook his hand (huge deal). Very cool.

Another group of cheerleaders. These boys are brothers. They look sooo much alike!

Check out all the sweet animals on their hats. Way to be creative and ridiculous at the same kids. This is so much of what I love about Thailand.