It's a new school year

1200 kids. 600 parents waiting to pick them up after school. 1 gate, 6 metres wide. Do the math! It's a crowd unlike any other I've seen before. All the kids, from the smallest grade 1 kid to the tallest grade 6, all wearing the same thing - navy blue bottoms and a white, button down shirt. You can tell the boys from the girls though, the girls wear a tunic. Otherwise, at 1.20 in the afternoon, it's a sea of blue and white kids looking for their ride home. Every one of them has black hair, brown skin and brown eyes. I'm one of the lucky ones because I'm tall and white so my kids can spot me in a crowd a mile away, even if I can't see them. Even so, we have an agreed meeting point, the guard house. Yes, there's a real 'guard' there, but he's quite old looking so I don't know how effective he'd really be given an emergency. So we meet at the guard house and then walk against another sea of parents craning their necks to find their children, slowly inching forward in hopes of getting some small advantage. The inconsiderate ones bring their motorcycles into the throng, unaware of the complete stupidity of their actions. If one of their mufflers clash with a kiddie leg, it will not be pretty. We walk single file, the kids pulling their trolley bags behind them and me yelling out 'watch the motorcycles' every time we pass one. By the time we get to the car, we're a sweating mess. I unlock, start the car to get the aircon going, hustle the kids into the cool air and load their bags into the back. And then we sit there, catching up on the day while the 500 cars that belong to the 600 parents file past, moving little more than a metre at a time.

Oh, the joys of school. I can't wait til it's pissing rain and we have to do all this and get wet too! Fun!