Wednesday March 17th; School programs on St-Patrick's day!

This morning is sunny, yipee! I head out to Thunderbird and we wait around a bit since today we are a fairly big group of volunteers, we are doing school programs. Our job is to greet the many buses and tons of kids arriving to watch the Czech-Italy game at noon. We head out to the parking lot and are informed on how we will greet the 30-40 buses. The first bus arrives around 10am (2hrs before the game), crazy teachers if you ask me, how will they keep all the kids (About grade2 or 3) occupied for the 2 hrs? In the end they decide to take a walk around campus. More buses start arriving. The buses are mostly greeted by one of the volunteers wearing a St-Patrick's day vest and leprechaun hat. We need to inform the teachers that their buses will be in the same place when they come back and make sure the bus drivers know when their group will be coming back, so they are there! The kids are really excited and we get them to cheer for either Italy or the Czechs. They were pretty excited. Some buses were also coming from pretty far away; a bus of kids (& parents) from one of the gulf islands & kids from Whistler. There was also another bus unloading area a bit further away, so we only had to deal with half the kids. It can get pretty hairy when you have 30 buses and are unloading kids so they don't get hit by buses. Once all the kids were unloaded, we got to head in and have some lunch, then we headed back outside to the load zone to get ready for the egress. Some groups started leaving after the 2^nd period (they each last 15mins) since they needed to get back to their schools. So the egress stretched out since some schools also stayed for the extra period since the game was tied by the end of the 3^rd period. Everything went well except for the bus for one school that had left and didn't come back in time. I got the kids playing a game of eye spy and they were all looking at a few of the pins I had and the pictures of Mukmuk on my accreditation, they all love Mukmuk! I think most of the kids were cheering for Italy, but the Czech republic ended up winning 3-2.

Once all the kids were gone, around 3pm I could head home and have a bit of a break before I back out to Thunderbird to watch a game as a full spectator. I saw a Korea vs Sweden game. It was a very exciting game that finished 2-1 for Korea meaning Korea would be playing in the 5^th place game the next day against Korea. Sledge hockey is so exciting to watch. The swedes were very sad at the end of the game but the Koreans deserved their win, they played well. It was neat to see the players I had seen the past few days in action, even though it was hard to recognize them with their equipment on. The arena was almost full, which was good & loud! They also have some audience leaders that get people cheering and making noise to cheer on the game. All in all, a very good evening. If you ever get a chance to go see a sledge game, do it, it is so worth it!