Sometimes when living as an expatriate overseas you come across customs & sports that are as amazing as they are strange.  Here in Penang, Malaysia, there's a competition every year for the gymnastics-like sport (or is it an art?) called Chingay (妆艺).  The basic elements came from mainland China.  For over 100 years, when parades were held to the Chinese goddess of mercy in Penang approaching Chinese New Year, men would walk down the street balancing tall flags with 30 foot bamboo flagpoles on their heads.

English language newspapers termed this a Chingay procession—while Chingay actually used to refer to one of the floats or stages in the parade.

Nowadays both Chinese & Malay participate in competitions to see which team has the best Chingay skills.  They do a lot more than just balance these heavy (approx. 25 kilogram) flagpoles on their heads while walking or running around.  They do acts where one man laying on a sit-up bench balances the flag on his foot, then kicks it up into the air over his head.  At the same moment a guy behind him jumps up onto the shoulders of a friend, & then catches the bottom of the flagpole either on his forehead (using a small padded headband).

 More impressively they sometimes catch these flagpoles while ridding "piggyback" on the back of a moving motorcyclist.  And often the catcher will acquire the flagpole on his bottom teeth.  

Then, if the team's really good, the catcher will squat on the shoulders of his carrier, then bolt upright & throw it over his head to land on the forehead of another man behind him.  Watch my Malaysia galleries for action shots of this!

They don't do this in a vacuum.  They do it less than a couple hundred meters from the oceanfront at sunset when there's a stiff breeze coming ashore.  

Their warm-up practices are done as the sun is setting.  The competition starts just after dark in the lights of Georgetown's colonial era City Hall.  Here 5 judges sit at tables around a roped off square.  Teams march in & are given 10 minutes--displayed on a large screen computer screen--to dazzle the judges with all the tricks they can successfully pull off before time runs out.  All of this to the stirring title music to the old 1969 movie "The Battle of Britain"!

It seems like some crazy sport my Scottish ancestors would have dreamed up—“Hey, while tossing telephone poles around, let me pluck the flagpole out of the school grounds & throw it so you can catch it with your jaw—with the flag still blowing in the breeze.”

Cultures never cease to amaze!