Friday night we had a fund raiser for the primary school- at the dog track. Yes, you read that right. We took our kids to the local dog track and for £10 you got entry and dinner (fish and chips that was so lovely I wanted to kiss the girls who fried it). I can't even imagine this being a little bit acceptable in the US. Gambling and exposing children to gambling is highly frowned upon where I am from. There is just no way in the world that an elementary school would ever even dream to have a fundraiser at the dog track.
Guess what though? It was FUN- loads and barrels of fun. I personally didn't gamble because I have horrible luck and my Granny always taught me to never bet more than a nickle on anything. Others did gamble and the girls had fun cheering on their friends dogs. I had never been to a dog track before and found it very entertaining. I'm not sure what kind of atmosphere I was anticipating, but I found one where the owners of the dogs were very nice. You could tell that they really cared about their dogs (very unlike the sterotype that I had seen on the episode of "The Simpsons" where Homer and Bart adopt Santa's Little Helper). There were also posters about encouraging patrons of the track to adopt retiring greyhounds which I found very sweet.
We had a really good night and I would love to go back even if it wasn't for a school fund raiser. Also, we raised £230 to add to our fund to improve the school library. Not bad for a small village school with around 100 students!
