Dear friends,
Tonight I went with the sports class and Hua Shan's teachers and administrators to the Korfball Semi-Final World Game. Kaohsiung, Taiwan is hosting the 2009 World Games. This was the semi-final warm up game for korfball. If you're American, you're probably wondering, "What is Korfball?" Korfball is like basketball but you don't dribble. The ball looks like a soccerball and you try to score by making a basket. The hoop looks different because there's no net, only a ring, and there's no backboard. You play on a court and each team has four people on each half court (when I say "court," think "basketball court"). It's actually a pretty cool sport.

I had a lot of fun because Hua Shan was basically the cheerleading squad for the China-Taipei Korfball Team. The China-Taipei team played the Russian Korfball team. We were very very loud. The Taiwanese love to use these little plastic horns to blow and to also hit. The cheers are so awesome because everyone is so coordinated. China-Taipei won by two points, which is a lot because other teams that we saw kept only a one point difference with the opposing team.

The kids cheers were pretty cute, too. I recently burned the basketball coach a CD of warm-up songs for tomorrow's field day at Hua Shan and one of the songs I put on there was "Who Let the Dogs Out?" by Baha Men. At the Korfball game, the 6th grade sports class started cheering, "Who Let the Dogs Out? Whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo!" They thought the "Whoo" sounded like "Boo" so they thought it was legitimate to cheer against the Russian team. It was so cute!

Fellow teachers and staff at the game (above), Hua Shan students and a teacher (below)

You can find more photos of korfball right here.

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