It's Ajarn Kirsten, Miss Marathon if You're Nasty

So when we were at PiA orientation, they warned us about making one student the “tall poppy” – the tallest flower that gets cut down by the lawnmower first. They told us how Asian culture is generally communal and not about standing out in a crowd.
I have yet to find that to be true. Between the number of English competitions we have helped our students prepare for (by listening to the same speeches or stories about 4138419 times) and the number of assemblies we have attended at school, showing what you are good at and performing to the best of your ability in order to win is perfectly acceptable. And Steph and I found out that the same rule applies to aerobics when (as I mentioned in a previous post, declinations are considered rude) we got roped into agreeing to participate in an aerobics competition/mini-marathon for the Queen’s birthday without having the slightest clue what it actually was. The only information we were provided was what day it was (Sunday, August 12) where to go (a department store parking lot), what time to be there (5:30 pm), and what color to wear (light blue – the Queen’s color). As luck would have it, Steph found out on the morning of the competition that she couldn’t get a bus ticket back to Nan from Chiang Mai, and I was left as the lone farang to compete. I was more nervous than I was on my first day of teaching, but I put on my blue shirt and headed to the parking lot.
Turns out an aerobics competition/ mini-marathon is when you wear a number (mine was 039) and do aerobics for 2 – 3 hours straight in the rain while people watch and judges decide who deserves prizes. It also turns out that when you’re the only farang competing in an aerobics mini-marathon, people stare at you even more than usual and stand 3 feet in front of you videotaping you, the people handing out water are too shy to approach you, you realize how much English your instructor has been using for your benefit, and you’re a shoe-in for the Miss Marathon prize. And that’s how, on August 12th, I became Miss Marathon, complete with a 500 baht prize. And now strangers come up to me on the street and ask, “You go aerobics?”