Accidentally Never Bored: Company Sports Day

This post is about 6 months overdue. Mainly, because it was a morning filled

with jaw-dropping experiences I didn't even know where to begin!

My school was started by a company here in Shanghai. Originally, it was for the

workers to have a quality school for their children. The school was a big hit in the community and quickly grew to being open to almost anyone. Now, there's a

long waiting list to get into both the Chinese and English sides to the school!

Each year the company has their Annual Sports Day.

It is a BIG DEAL.

Ya'll, I have been able to do a fair amount of diverse activities since moving to China.

Visited remote villages
Stayed in local village housing
Eaten lots of traditional food from various provinces
Ate a duck head and tongue
Had donkey meat
Frequented many a sketch squatty potty
Hiked up mountains of stone steps
Camped and kayaked with nationals and their wild children
Rock climbed with nationals
Roomed with a local who each morning hacked and threw up due to the toll of pollution on her young body
Stayed in a Buddhist Monastery on top of a mountain
.....and MORE It's good for me to remember this, because for the past three weekends I've barely left my apartment!

Yet, this experience is one of the most culturally..........unique.

Aside from the daily occurrence of seeing a bare bottom peeing in the grass on my way to lunch, of course!

I was asked by one of my bosses if I'd join the 200 meter sprint. He falsely assumed I'm fast at running since I'm tall.

I warned him! Not many want to participate, but they offered comp. time so I figured

why not!? I'm glad I did.

Coworkers who have participated in the past told me not to worry. People from the company show up to compete

while wearing HEELS!

I stopped fretting as much once I got our oh so business casual collared team shirts.

FOR REAL!?

Those hats though, right??

Our team got pink hand clappers the American men were great sports while the purple team got sparkly GOLD hats!

We weren't sure who these ladies were to be for the longest time....

CHEERLEADERS!!!!

One team what looked like Kung Fu fighter cheerleaders. It was like

watching a Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movie in person!

Aside from the cheerleaders, there were:

gigantic drums
multiple drones
a director for each team's "performance"
a GRAND stage for the company's bigwigs
flags for everything
tons of security dudes totally the norm here

The handful of us English speakers basically had NO CLUE what was

going on the entire time. Someone would explain here and there;

basically we'd goof off, drop our jaws, and crack jokes.

We think a national anthem was being played in the picture above,

that's why all the peeps in suits are facing one direction. It was all Chinese to us!

I'm sorry, that phrase just NEVER gets old!

Our festivities were kicked off with a torch runner. That's right, suddenly

we were at the Chinese Olympics right at my school!

Sorry the pic is blurry. Someone else took pics that day.

Let the games begin!!!

But, not before we were all given large foam boards.

Most memorable part of the day you ask? Squatting under the foam boards of course!

I'm fairly certain we'd be there to this day had an English speaker not taken pity on us and told us to duck down further! We think maybe the drones were taking pictures and all the boards spelled something? After a bit, we thought we were done but, instead,

we were directed to flip the boards over and keep squatting.

We were under those things FOREVER! All we knew was our thighs were burning and we hadn't even done the sprint yet! Oh, we tried resting our knees on the ground...duh. We were then yelled at in Chinese and someone told us to get up higher, but not too high - thus, the squatting.

It was a BIG BIG BIG deal how those boards looked.