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International Day @ Dalian American International School

youtube clips for this are at https://youtu.be/fdkrxDDErXk (overview); https://youtu.be/Y7Vpt3vXI7M (druming); https://youtu.be/sVxYglz5xfI (choral piece written for this event)

neuage webpage for this is at https://neuage.us/BLOGS/42-internatiotional-day.htm

Every day is international day at our school, after all we have about 25 countries and 15 different languages but once a year we call it International Day. The difference is that we can dress up and be a country – usually one we are from. I chose to be Australia because I sort of am an Australian – a duel citizen, being born in the States and only living in Australia for 22 years a bit less than a third of my time on this planet but enough Australian and with no one else representing it I tossed myself into the nationality pool for a day. Narda could have been the real Australian but she joined the Dutch having been born there. We are both Australian by next-after-birth spot; though she was a boat person having arrived with assisted passage during those days Australia was flirting with that part of Europe to come and be them back in the 1950s. Now days a boat person is frowned upon and the unhappy lot get tossed into detention centres. I was a plane person arriving in 1981 and Narda was a boat person so really I too am an Australian though I am told I sound more like I am from New York.

I wore my son’s clothes as one does on these types of days. Leigh played for Australia before signing with the LA Dodgers and this was his shirt he wore on the U-18’s World Series in Canada in 1998.

Last year we had the , Drum Club come out from Dalian and they did not fail to entertain and get us all moving again this year. I made a bit of a clip and put it on youtube drums https://youtu.be/Y7Vpt3vXI7M - though only three minutes of about half an hour I recorded. Like last year this was the first warm – sort of warm day, of the year it got up to 16 centigrade which I think is 61 ferinheight only because Narda says that 16 turned about is 61 – and as she has reminded me in the past she comes from the clever country as Australians say – but I too am sort of from the clever country and I never know stuff like that.

What these countries do have in common is that they are meat eaters which means where am I from? Some distant galaxy? Speaking of such things at least North Korea did not get too silly. I noticed that there were five planets in Aries this week and with the moon transiting there too I thought that would be a trigger to give us an interesting week.

Well as one of those people who worked on this event and was at it at again at 6:30 this morning and now it is 11:06 pm I will make this a short blog and toddle off to bed. At least I was not as sick as Narda who was running this event and has spent the two past two days really sick - some of us get to watch life from the sidelines and that is sort of what I did and now I am just sleepy though it could be the healthy does of sleeping pills that are making it almost impossible to hit one key after another......but I feel good so that is beaut.

I took hundreds of pictures but I got smitten by pictures of shoes which is unusual as I am not into footwear a whole lot except for the practical purposes of not stepping in dog shit and stuff like that. Maybe it was because I had on my son’s baseball shoes that he pitched in when he played for the LA Dodgers. I have had them in my closet for a decade – well lots of closets as I have moved about a dozen times since getting them in 2003 and I had never put them on. They fit well and being baseball shoes they have cleats on the bottom and being in that shoe frame of mind I took these photos amongst hundreds – not of feet but of people too.

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A highlight to the whole day for many was the world premiere of a song written in several languages by Lana Mountford in the state of Washington for Dalian American International School and Directed by Tyler Smith. The work was done through emails and Skype and though the performance in our gym is not as good as in a concert hall this gives a bit of a sample of it. My film class Skyped Lana at the start of her work last October and again last week. She is part of a group who write choral pieces for schools. I am not the go to person on this so I am writing from a very limited perspective which is that she was given a poem and had to compose her music using several languages. She said was fine with the English and Spanish and I think German parts but writing sections in Chinese and Korean was her biggest challenge. I put it on youtube but it does not do the piece justice. My video suite is two rooms away and I have been listening to them practice for many weeks. Having it played in a gym with people milling around and speaking themselves in many different languages made it more difficult. Nevertheless here is my clip of it on youtube, https://youtu.be/sVxYglz5xfI Our music teacher Tyler Smith

Had them right on target…

There were lots of other

performances as well as parade of nations at then end – I carried the Australian flag as mentioned earlier and there were dozens of countries set up throughout the school