Thai Dancing

This year is King Bhumipol's 60th year governing Thailand so there will be many celebrations to mark the occassion on June 9. To prepare for this day, Thai people wear yellow polo shirts embroidered with the king's insignia or shirts that say "We love the king!" We are required to wear these shirts every Monday. The town is covered with yellow banners and huge pictures of the king. At night, there are yellow lights criss-crossing the streets and hanging on telephone poles. I was really looking forward to attending the celebration until I came into work yesterday. Apparently the mayor had decided that all of the female foreigners in Lampang should learn traditional Thai dancing to be performed at the celebration. Of course, I really want to learn Thai dancing...it's beautiful and very slow and graceful. However, I'm not quite prepared to learn and perform it in one week! So last night, we had to wait after school and then we were taken to the place where we would learn to dance. Actually, the class is being taught by a very pudgy, little old man. We have to dance with scarves called sa-bai. We twirl the scarves around our necks and wrists, wrap it around our head, tie it on our waist, etc. Unfortunately, we couldn't understand the man's instructions because they were in Thai. At the beginning of the class, he explained the history of the dance and where it came from. Then a girl came over to us and said, "He said about the history of the dance." But she didn't tell us exactly what that history was. Then he explained the symbolism of the scarf but again, we didn't get too much information out of that. So after dancing with the scarves, we had to lift one leg off the ground, bounce up and down while turning in a circle and rotating our hands. Needless to say, Hilary and I were losing our balance the whole time and laughing since we were clearly the biggest and bulkiest people there. Then we had to join hands with two other people and make a bird formation called the peacock walk. It was interesting, but by that point in the evening I was already so tired. We had a 13 hour work day! Next week, we will practice every day and then perform on Friday night and guess what? They're video-taping it so I will have my own copy to cherish for the rest of my life. I just hope I don't fall!