Day 15 cont... The Rodeo!

Think of how u would imagine Texan cowboys to be dressed..( Wrangler jeans,cowboys boats, checkered shirts, big belts with large belt buckles and ofcourse a cowboy hat) .. And you would have it exactly right! Now imagineabout a thousand in one place, along with cowgirls in the matching female equivelant! We arrived to an arena filled with cowboys and cowgirls only tofeel instantly out of place with our flipflops and Steve's manbag, but heywe're from England so its all ok!

The rodeo started with a local young country girl coming into the arena ona horse with a giant American flag, parading around as a country singersang the national anthem. This was followed by the cowboy compare gettingus all to bow our heads and pray to god and jesus and thank him that we were born American! Now those of u that know me well will know I am a definite atheist, and find it hard at the best of times when told to pray,but being told to pray and be thankful for being American... Well let'sjust say I couldn't keep a straight face and almost 'peed my pants' (said in deep south texan type accent).

After all the thanks to god and America it was time to get down to somereal action.. Bull riding! We watched Corey, Cole, Cody, jimmy, Joe and Jason and numerous other cowboys get battered around for less than 8seconds on big fat angry bulls! After the bull riding we saw some steerwrestling where cowboys gallup after the small cows and jump of their horses to wrestle the cows to the ground by their horns.. A real mans sport!!?!!

We had some more thanks for the top volunteers of the year..something aagree with (can't say I've ever volunteered for a Rodeo though.. Maybe Ishould add to my list.)

Inbetween events we were entertained by a clown and the cowboy compare whowere well a little less PC than you would expect in such public places, butwe are in the deep south! Jokes included the following..

Clown's joke - 'I got caught up in an armed robbery yesyterrday, the robberasked a guy if he'd seen anything to which he replied 'I saw it all' thenwas instantly shot dead. He then asked me and I said 'I saw nothing but mywife over there saw the whole thing!' - that was the joke.. Obviouslydidn't get on with his wife.

Other sexist jokes included 'wives say an average of 7000 words a day ofwhich approximately 6000 are ' are you listening to me?'

And the top unPC joke by the cowboy - 'they've been advertising missingchildren on milk cartons and it seems to have been working well. Do youthink if a tranvestite went missing they would advertise on cartons of halfand half?' - everyone laughed.. A lot! I was in shock!

Jokes aside the next event was definitely no joke! Ever seen any MuttinBustin? Know what it is? I'm guessin probably not. Muttin Bustin is a'sport' that children of between the ages of about 5 and 8 take part in.They basically get put on the bare backs of long haired sheep and have tocling on as long as possible as the sheep run around until they fall off!Yes this is actually a sport and yes parents get their small children to partake! - only in America!

Other sports of the night included the 'calf scramble' where slightly olderchildren are let loose with a bunch of small calves and race to be thefirst to catch a calf, battle it to the ground and drag it to the middle of the arena! All in the name of entertainment right?!!

We saw some bareback riding where a horse was injured, put to sleep anddragged off stage while the compare told us it was likely he would be putdown and that was the best thing and if it was your horse you'd want whatwas best and this doesn't happen very often and.. So he went on! Later hetold us the horse was put down.. Did we need to know? It started as just asprained ankle..was that really necessary?

And so we watched some more crazy rodeo sports, ate some more fried foodand then went home for the night! And that is how my first experience of areal American rodeo went.. Entertaining, shocking, educational!?! ... Aa you've got to experience everything once!?!