VILLAGE LIFE - pulling together: The Festival Village of the Special Olympics World Summer Games is full of surprises. One minute you are watching a giant spider being built using recycled beer cans and newspapers, the next you are being prodded in the back by a man on a giant ladybird.
That's before you join the crowd to witness the rather sedate hairdo of an otherwise sensible woman being transformed into a multi-coloured Mohican by a pouting Spanish man in a bright blue ball-gown.
"I wasn't really sure what I was letting myself in for," said Special Olympics volunteer Marian O'Keeffe from Youghal, Co Cork, who, when the hair-sculptor had finished, also had toy lions on her head and a face painted like a chess board. "Worse than that, I have to walk home on my own".
The hair-raising experience at the Festival Village in Simmonscourt, Dublin, came courtesy of Barcelona-based artists Osadia who yesterday were busy transforming ordinary hair-dos into extraordinary hair-don'ts to the delight of watching children.
"Mammy you look awful," shouted one giggling little girl to her blue-haired mother trapped in the old-fashioned barber chair as one of the artists carefully positioned plastic fish around her fringe.
The emphasis here is on the unexpected and according to organizers this innovative approach to fun is drawing 10,000 people to the area each day. The village - a series of marquees, an outdoor space and a Big Top tent - is located where the Funderland Big Wheel is set up each Christmas. But there is nothing as traditional in evidence here.
Inside one tent, for example, Robert Croft was supervising the building of a 14ft Ferrari car using 130,000 individual Lego bricks. He expects the last brick to be put in place at 3 p.m. on Saturday.
"I couldn't do it without these helpers," he said, standing in the cockpit as a crowd of boys swarmed over the "car" and pondered the logistics of creating a fully functioning Lego engine.
Across the way you can have your caricature drawn, or let the younger children play out of the sun in the Clever Kids Chill-Out Centre.
More industrious youngsters joined students of NCAD in creating a giant mosaic, painting their own picture on a tile. The resulting mural, designed by the volunteers from NCAD, will be called Pulling Together.
"We definitely did not expect this much interest," said art student Nadia Haefeli from Switzerland. "Some families keep coming back each day and we are running out of tiles."
In other parts of the village there are puppet shows, story telling, drama and enough free stickers, badges and balloons to keep even the most avid collector happy.
When it all gets too much, the crowd heads towards the International Food Hall, a place which makes a mockery of the usual burger and chips style catering available at this kind of event.
Children hung hopefully around at the ice-cream stand, while parents ogled the calamari and crab claws at the Tapas stall. Italian, Mexican, Chinese and Irish dishes are also available along with freshly squeezed juices. "We were given an empty car-park to play with and this is the result," said sector manager Tom Prior who credited Sheenagh Gillen, former production manager with Riverdance, as the creative mind behind the village.
As one boy entranced by the latest hair-scare victim in the barber chair put it, "this is even more fun than Funderland". But not, perhaps, if you happened to be the lady with the copper wire hairstyle and a lizard on her head.
• The Festival Village runs from 10.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. until Saturday, June 28th.
