Thursday 8th May 2008
Year One's Sports Day is rather different to the Reception "Race Day" last year.
For a start it's held at a real sports track. The school has no area for this sort of thing at all – at break time, the children have to play on the roof of a 7 storey building.
Deb and I have coffee before making our way to Yoyogi track which turned out to be a heck of a lot further than we expected which wasn't helped by us getting a bit lost. Yoyogi track is enormous and the school had only a part of it. We finally found our children just after the event started. Oops!
There are four houses in this school: I can't remember the names (actually, I can't be bothered to look it up) but the associated colours are red, blue, yellow and green. Rhiannon is in blue and parents are expected to wear the house colour too.
Goodness knows how the teachers organised the kids, it looked to be absolute mayhem, but with a theme. Each group went through a series of events and were awarded points. So far, so good.
However, it was unbelievably hot. Absolutely sweltering and everyone was wilting fast. Some delightful child emptied Rhiannon's water bottle over the ground – how spiteful. So I had to find a tap to get her rehydrated quickly.
I was pleased to see Rhiannon finally showing a bit of competitiveness, and a lot of skill in many disciplines. She still prefers to run at a snail's pace while waving to friends in the crowd though.
It got hotter and hotter. The games were taking longer than anticipated to finish and to my disappointment the parents' races were cancelled as time ran out. I was eager to race against a particular mum who seems to have taken an instant dislike to me due, I believe, to us both wearing the same Long Tall Sally outfit when we first met! As we didn't get a chance to speak on that first occasion, I can only assume this was the reason. Since that first meeting she has pointedly ignored me at every opportunity. Expats can be very strange people, sometimes. I bet I would have beaten her in a race though…
After a while, the point awarding system started breaking down as the teachers lost track of what was going on. So, to our mirth, they just randomly handed out points willy-nilly.
This was good news because it meant that the blue team won. Even though they only had half the number of children than the other teams and lost most of their races!
