Excitement, joy, music, dance, food, those are all amazing qualities of the one day I will never forget also known as, polyfest.

I arrived at school at 8:15am, walking to the hall, I was freezing cold as I had no jacket because I was waiting for my leavers jersey to arrive. I got to the hall and sat outside with my friends as we waited to be let inside. Eventually Miss Rowland came out and my friends and I got to go inside first because we were waiting patiently. We looked at the papers that had been placed on the ground to try find our names. As I was trying to find my name I heard a quiet “Danae!”

I thought nothing of it and kept looking for my name. I ended up hearing it again and this time I looked up to see Kalilah waving at me to tell me that I am in her group, I walked over to her and sat down. We had to wait for everyone else to find their groups, in the meantime we just talked to each other. Finally everyone found their groups but we still had to do the roll and get talked to about the expectations and stuff. Eventually we got to the buses.

Kalilah and I got to sit together for the ride, we were bored at the start of it but we started having fun because we were waving to everyone. I think we got 5 people to wave back. Also during the ride the people sitting in the very back were playing rock paper scissors with a guy on a bus next to us.

At last we arrived at poly fest, everyone was raging with excitement. we stepped off the bus to go to the check in, every school went through the same check in so as you can imagine the line went out to the road, but that didn’t matter because we still got through quickly. A lady walking pass said that we had to empty our drink bottles if we had any water in it. Me being the scared person I am I thought that if I didn’t do it I would get told off or something so I emptied my bottle. I was almost was on the verge of tears emptying it because my water was so cold and had so much ice. as I was doing it I noticed that no one else except for a few people was emptying it. I was confused but kept going on until I reached the check in. I opened up my bag and all the check in guy did was take a glance at it and then told me I was all good, I don’t know if there is a rule or something where you can’t touch the bag unless you’re suspicious because that happens all the time but still I could of been carrying something bad and you he wouldn’t know because all he did was have a little glance. That wasn’t the main reason I was not happy though, it was the fact i tipped out my perfect cold drink when I probably didn’t even need to, it was ok though because there were water fountains.

Once everyone made it to the stage we all sat down, but we still had to wait for the other schools. Eventually every school got there, so the host started talking. She talked about how many schools there are, what’s going to happen and stuff like that. All the schools had been split up into groups, there was a Tonga group, a Samoa group, and the group my school was in Niue. The groups split up and we started on the tour. Basically we just walked around the shops near the stage, I was a bit sad because we weren’t allowed to buy anything and the food stalls smelled so good. Once that had finished we came back to the stage to get ready to head off to the next stage.

The next stage we went to was the diversity stage. The dances I saw were so cool, I got to see Philippines dancing, Chinese dancing, Punjabi dancing, Vietnamese dancing, and Bollywood dancing. The dances were so amazing to watch and I was so shocked that the people dancing were only high school students, and some dances were choreographed only by the students as well. In one of the dances we got to see 2 former garden school students dance as well, one of them even gave a shout out to us at the end of the dance.

The last stage we went to was the Māori stage. The schools got to sit up in the stands which originally I thought was cool but we couldn’t really hear anything, it was okay though because the Kapa Haka itself was so great to watch.

Eventually we returned to the first stage to meet back up with the schools, they got some polyfest sponsors to talk about what they do. The host also did a few fun challenges before everyone left as well. Sadly we got back on the bus to go back to school. I will forever miss that day at polyfest.