Sports Festival

I'm an ALT in Miyazaki, Japan at an agricultural senior high school so I get to see a lot of cool and strange things. Tomorrow is the Sports Festival (taikutaikai), so there are no classes today. It's a sports festival, but there are a lot of random things that go on during the practice. Yesterday, because of the sudden and oft-occurring crazy downpours, there couldn't be any practice outside. So we were all inside; the students weren't practicing sports, they were practicing how to march in place. When they're not doing military style like marches, I usually talk to the students. If I pick any random group to sit next to, they freak out. One girl asked me if she could touch my hair, and saying yes apparently means EVERYONE in the area can, my poor hair...sigh. Also, constant affirmations of how cute I am is also quite common since the semester started, even though I'm older than all of them. Awkwardly enough though, I've managed to get some cat calls from some of the all male classes as well being called Beyonce more times than I appreciate :-\.

I ran into the students that I know won't be doing any worksheets and will most definitely give me the most trouble. It's easy to see spot it now after a helpful orientation. After the opening ceremony, the boys and girls were separated and the teachers had to check the clothes and hair of all the students. Girls cannot get manicures or pedicures, they can't have different color hair, their nails can't be too long, nor can they do anything to their eyebrows. If any students are caught, their name is written down and after the procedure is over, they're sat down and scolded for a couple of minutes. I didn't see the boys' section but I assume it's similar. So imagine my surprise when I see a group of guys, whom one in particular has a strange Japanese mullet type hair cut with shaved eyebrows. I guess that's as bad as they can get. Awkwardly enough, he knew more about Jamaica and reggae than most of the other kids. At the school, I also see a lot of kids with Red, Green and Yellow and Jamaican paraphernelia, towels or pencil cases and etc.

Everyone here also seems to "love" Jamaica (without really knowing anything about it except Bob Marley and the Jamaican colors), and if anyone watches Japanese TV, they'll know that it's filtered. It's more obvious during the Olympics since I usually ended up always seeing the matches in which Japanese people won. The only time where that didn't happen was when they were covering Jamaica, which was nice. It's a little strange though now, seeing as how people assume that I can run really fast because of it.