My time at the Regatta

This was a big event for me! I’ve been preparing for this local event for a long time. Do you remember the post I made last year? You can check it out here!

But this time, I wasn’t there to relax, I was there to advertise for Rainbow English! I’d been planning and stressing about it for many months. But it was finally time!

I unpacked all my gear to get ready to set up.

The first step was to set up the tent itself! Luckily, I’d practiced a few times in my backyard, so I knew how to do it, and what to expect.

I got it set up pretty quickly (even though I accidentally set it up in the wrong space at first…).

I printed out a map for people to place pins in. I was hoping many people would want to show where they came from! And here you can see many of my business cards that I had printed just for this event!

And here is the whiteboard where visitors could fill in the blanks with their answers to various sentences!

Here’s what the inside of the tent looked like! Of course, I had to have a Japanese flag up, to show where I lived! I also taught in South Korea for 1 month (there are many names and messages written on the flag!), and I wanted to show the Ukrainian local people support for them and their country!

On the table are 5 lessons, one for each level, printed out so students could see what the material looked look.

You can see one of the banners tied to the table, featuring Prism, the Rainbow English mascot! Isn’t he cute?

And the next day, I was open for business! Come on in!

Many people wanted to try the whiteboard. If they tried it, they got a free Prism keychain!

Here are some of the attempts! Can you spot which answers are right, and which ones aren’t so good? ;) What would you write?

Many people also did it verbally, so they didn’t write anything, but I gave away many keychains! It was kind of popular!

Unfortunately, not many people came inside the tent to look at my lessons! A few did, but not as many as I’d hoped…

The map also wasn’t as popular as I wanted, but I still got a few! I was happy to see various different countries represented!

One nice thing that happened is a Ukrainian student I know came by with her daughter to see the tent. It made me so happy that someone wanted to just come and see it and meet me in person (instead of online lessons!)

She also gave me an interesting Ukrainian drink called “kvass”, pronounced “quash”.

She was kind enough to give it to me cold, and it was quite refreshing! It tasted like bread, like the smell of a bakery, it was very strange! I sipped on it for an hour or so, but when it started to get warm, it didn’t taste quite so good, haha!

But the drink was very helpful, because it was pretty hot, and the sun was bright at times. There were clouds, but I still got a little bit sunburned.

I even made a custom Rainbow English t-shirt! I really went all-out for this!

As for food, I couldn’t walk around like last year, because I needed to stay near my tent. But as you can probably see, I was lucky enough to be right next to the Domino’s tent! It was perfect for me!

I stayed there for about 14 hours. I arrived at 6:30 am, and things were very slow for the first 2 hours, but then people started to come to the area around 9 or 10. I was standing for most of the time, so my feet were VERY sore after. Even more sore than after hiking! It’s most of the reason I’ve been so tired recently.

I had a few genuine conversations with people. They seemed very interested in my lessons. But it was much less than I was hoping for. Honestly, I’m a little disappointed. It’s too early to find out if this event has been a failure for me or not, but I’m still glad I did it. It was very expensive, stressful, and difficult to do, but I’ll probably do it next year, too!

Besides, I had one really nice thing happen; when the event was over, and we were dismantling our tents, the Domino’s tent next to me didn’t have scissors, so they asked if I had any. I had a LOT of tools with me, so I was able to let them borrow mine, and they were so grateful, they gave me a full pizza for free!

(I was very tired when I took this picture, sorry it’s blurry!)

So that’s my Regatta story! I hope you all liked it! I also hope that someday, some of you can drop by and chat in the future! :D