Rice Planting Day

The rice fields were flooded beforehand to prepare for rice planting day.

Today, the water was drained so that we can carry out rice planting the traditional back-breaking way. Yes, today was my school's rice planting day. All the teachers and students participated. Although the fields were drained, the soil was still very muddy.

The rice fields had grid lines marked out. We were given trays of rice seedlings and had to walk into the muddy rice field BAREFOOT (yucks!) and push each seedling about 2-3cm into the mud along the grid lines. Those green patches lying randomly around are the trays of rice seedlings. You just pull out 1 or 2 seedlings out each time to plant.

It felt really disgusting, more out of fear of what lay beneath the mud. I had visions of stepping on a scorpion or snake. The first time I stepped on some really soft mud, my foot sank in till about mid-calf. I shrieked and wailed and the students laughed at my reaction. These girls next to me dumped mud on my foot and attempted to bury it. I screamed and moved my foot. As soon as I did that, the girl next to me screeched "Oh, Shindy!" and pointed at my foot. I looked down only to find that I had trampled on her freshly-planted rice seedling. Haha!

After a while, I got used to being in the mud and stopped wailing about it. It actually felt rather cool at certain parts. Anyway, we took about slightly less than an hour to plant one line of seedlings across the field each. As I was planting, I recalled a song that I learnt in primary school

"Planting rice is never fun
Bent from morn till set of sun
Cannot stand and cannot sit
Cannot rest for a little bit"

I can fully appreciate the song now (although I spent only about an hour in the fields). As we were planting, a farmer was happily driving his rice-planting vehicle in the next field! Grrr!

After the proper work was done, the students started playing with mud. They threw mudballs at each other. They got really dirty. It was funny to see everyone out of the rice fields cos we all looked like we were wearing black socks! We washed our feet and hands in the nearby drains. The water was so cold cos it came from the snow melting from the mountains. Still not clean! Second round of washing at the sprinklers along the road to melt the snow in winter. Urghs, really hard to clean beneath your nails and the part between your flesh and the nail. Many more rounds of scrubbing before I was satisfied, but many people walked around with dirty nails for the rest of the day.

We had an enkai that night, which was quite fun, but I felt very uncomfortable. Was dying to get home to scrub myself clean!