Umsa Festival

Yesterday and today have been my school's annual festival. It's a chance for the kids to show what they've been working on this year and just have fun. Some of the students' artwork is incredible. The paintings and cartoons look professionally done. There were skits yesterday from each foreign language club - english, german, french, arabic, chinese, japanese, and spanish. You can guess the only one I understood. My host sister made an introduction speech for the English play, she did very well. I hope her nervousness from that was what has been eating her the past few weeks. More on that later.

Also in the morning, there were performances by some kids, mostly dancing. The popular skits involved cross dressing, toy guns, and monsters. For some reason, boys dressing like girls was a hit. I was laughing a lot. I also tried to picture kids from my middle school doing that. I couldn't really see it happening, how about you? And American middle schools just aren't cool with the toy guns either.

At night, a stage was set up on the field outside school. One of my favorite students started off the night by doing a Michael Jackson routine, and he was pretty good. All the students who danced on stage were very good. The students practice their dance moves a lot before they perform. I did the Napoleon dynamite dance plus a few other moves to fill out the song, and I think the students liked it. I got a lot of "ohhhh ben! dance - good!" I was happy to do it for them. Then to close the night the 3rd grader rock band played. Chun Yong is the bassist and I know most of the members, so it was fun to see them, and they were good.

Today was the sports part of the festival. Our school played the rival middle school in soccer, and lost... then all the students had to complete a 3K 'marathon' which I ran too. At the end I did a little SGT Davis and tried to cheer on all the students who were almost finishing. There was also a 3 point shootout, class jump rump, and my favorite, the relay race. For some reason watching all the classes in each grade race was pretty exciting. I guess that's what happens when I don't watch football all season, I think middle school relay races are exciting.

So, the festival was two days without teaching, kids having fun at school and running around, not as much beating, and sports and dancing. Teaching won't be nearly as fun tomorrow.

Also, coming soon: blog layout redesign.