Sports day
Jun. 13th, 2007 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kodalaiSo, of all the hundreds on hundreds of Japanese-high-school-based anime out there, there's only one that I feel actually captures the spirit of what it's like to be at a Japanese high school.
Azumanga Daioh. Yup, that's the one.
Those of you who are familiar with the anime in question -- do you remember the Sports Day episode? The one where Osaka-san was chosen to participate in the bread-eating contest and got all pumped about it? The contest where you run down a track, then jump into the air to grab a piece of bread off a string with your mouth? Yeah. They really do that, true story. :)
Sports Day events seem to be largely geared towards allowing everyone on the team to participate, without making it so that the slowest or weakest or least enthusiastic students would ruin things for their team (although there were still relay races or other events that small groups of students could participate in and really compete.) Other events of awesome note included an event where everyone on each team (a hundred or so students) flung balls at a basket, then the number of balls got counted; the 'tire-tori' game where a bunch of tires were placed between two lines, and each team ran out and grabbed tires and tried to drag them back to their starting line; and the 'ki-ba-sen' game where three boys would hold a fourth on their shoulders, and then the groups would run at each other and try to grab their bandannas off. (Which degenerated into a slap-fight more often than not, and once a fistfight! :D)
On that note: Our school actually has an attached kindergarten (Go figure.) About halfway through the day, a bunch of kindergarteners came trooping out, all in a line with their little matching color-coded caps with elastic straps to hold em on. :D God, Japanese kindergarteners are so cute. Seriously. A group of them is like... a clusterbomb of cute. In the final event, Japan could air-drop them on an aggressing nation, which would then be paralyzed with cute-inducing convulsions.
Anyway, then a bunch of our high school boys ran over, which only upped the cute factor by ten (the big-dog little-kitten effect, doncha know) and they paired off, and then the kindergarteners got up on piggyback of the boys, and they had their own little ki-ba-sen match, trying to grab each others' caps off. OMG. It was almost (read almost) enough to make me wish I were an elementary school ALT instead of a high school ALT.
I did participate once -- there was a teacher/student three-legged race, where I actually got paired up with one of my problem students from Frontier. (He's actually a nice kid, just supremely uninterested in English.) This race was 2-parter; first an ordinary three-legged race to the halfway mark, then we had to grab some kind of costume off a table, dress, and run to the finish. Despite the language barrier we did pretty well; we were first to the halfway mark, and then second to the finish, only because we had the bad luck to get a costume that was difficult to get into. Oh well!
So I was possibly the only person in my school not to get a sunburn, since I had slathered sunscreen religiously and mostly stayed out of the sun. (A lot of the visiting parents and teachers and university students were carrying parasols -- I still think it's so cool that they do that! You'll see it in Los Angeles, too.) I also made sure to get lots of sleep the night before, and didn't do too much running, and yet by the end of the day, I was exhausted! There was barely time to get home and shower and change clothes before it was time for the enkai.
Nothing much to tell about the enkai, it was the same format of work-party as there always was. Except the food was unexpectedly delicious this time (I ate lots of shrimp salad and lemon pork thing) and I think I got drunker than I ever have been before. O_o I came home, crashed into bed (literally; I sorta ran full tilt at the bed and flopped face down on it) and slept for 12 hours.)
And then today was a day off, which I took to go down to the post office and mail off a few mysterious boxes. >_> The people whom I sent it to will know soon enough, ahahahah.
Azumanga Daioh. Yup, that's the one.
Those of you who are familiar with the anime in question -- do you remember the Sports Day episode? The one where Osaka-san was chosen to participate in the bread-eating contest and got all pumped about it? The contest where you run down a track, then jump into the air to grab a piece of bread off a string with your mouth? Yeah. They really do that, true story. :)
Sports Day events seem to be largely geared towards allowing everyone on the team to participate, without making it so that the slowest or weakest or least enthusiastic students would ruin things for their team (although there were still relay races or other events that small groups of students could participate in and really compete.) Other events of awesome note included an event where everyone on each team (a hundred or so students) flung balls at a basket, then the number of balls got counted; the 'tire-tori' game where a bunch of tires were placed between two lines, and each team ran out and grabbed tires and tried to drag them back to their starting line; and the 'ki-ba-sen' game where three boys would hold a fourth on their shoulders, and then the groups would run at each other and try to grab their bandannas off. (Which degenerated into a slap-fight more often than not, and once a fistfight! :D)
On that note: Our school actually has an attached kindergarten (Go figure.) About halfway through the day, a bunch of kindergarteners came trooping out, all in a line with their little matching color-coded caps with elastic straps to hold em on. :D God, Japanese kindergarteners are so cute. Seriously. A group of them is like... a clusterbomb of cute. In the final event, Japan could air-drop them on an aggressing nation, which would then be paralyzed with cute-inducing convulsions.
Anyway, then a bunch of our high school boys ran over, which only upped the cute factor by ten (the big-dog little-kitten effect, doncha know) and they paired off, and then the kindergarteners got up on piggyback of the boys, and they had their own little ki-ba-sen match, trying to grab each others' caps off. OMG. It was almost (read almost) enough to make me wish I were an elementary school ALT instead of a high school ALT.
I did participate once -- there was a teacher/student three-legged race, where I actually got paired up with one of my problem students from Frontier. (He's actually a nice kid, just supremely uninterested in English.) This race was 2-parter; first an ordinary three-legged race to the halfway mark, then we had to grab some kind of costume off a table, dress, and run to the finish. Despite the language barrier we did pretty well; we were first to the halfway mark, and then second to the finish, only because we had the bad luck to get a costume that was difficult to get into. Oh well!
So I was possibly the only person in my school not to get a sunburn, since I had slathered sunscreen religiously and mostly stayed out of the sun. (A lot of the visiting parents and teachers and university students were carrying parasols -- I still think it's so cool that they do that! You'll see it in Los Angeles, too.) I also made sure to get lots of sleep the night before, and didn't do too much running, and yet by the end of the day, I was exhausted! There was barely time to get home and shower and change clothes before it was time for the enkai.
Nothing much to tell about the enkai, it was the same format of work-party as there always was. Except the food was unexpectedly delicious this time (I ate lots of shrimp salad and lemon pork thing) and I think I got drunker than I ever have been before. O_o I came home, crashed into bed (literally; I sorta ran full tilt at the bed and flopped face down on it) and slept for 12 hours.)
And then today was a day off, which I took to go down to the post office and mail off a few mysterious boxes. >_> The people whom I sent it to will know soon enough, ahahahah.
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