china 3 (6/14)

friday morning, the first day of the trip i could finally sleep in. i couldn't. i woke up around 5:30am for no good reason, and at 5:40am fireworks started going off. for like 10 minutes. why the hell this would happen so damn early in the morning is beyond me. anyway, i eventually got up, went to the other tower to take advantage of their wifi, and later found a bus and went to see twin pagoda temple.

twin pagoda temple, obviously

after that i took the long distance bus to qiaojia dayuan. the long distance bus system in china is complicated. i had no idea what bus i was supposed to be on, so i figured out the "district" then walked from bus to bus asking the driver if this was it. a guy said yes so i boarded. a bit later the bus starts up and he checks everyone's ticket and starts yelling at me about how stupid am i to get on the wrong bus! !!! anyway, this being china, it's all fine anyway so the call the other driver who had just left the lot to come pick me up. he yells at me too. oh well.

modern addition to qiaojia dayuan

qiaojia dayuan was just eh. it's a big compound, filled with lots of things, and they actually do try to make it interesting with dioramas and displays and things but i don't know that much chinese history, nor do i care, and i don't remember the "raise the red lantern" movie, and i didn't watch the tv soap. also, nice as these courtyards as, once you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all.

courtyard in qiaojia dayuan

rather than do the bus thing again, this time i took a car (with other people) to pingyao. the ride was pretty good. tho i don't believe in past lives, i have a feeling i was a dog previously. i LOVE the wind in my face. makes me so happy! i got picked up by my hostel people and holy crap harmony guesthouse was freaking pretty. it is not the nicest place i've ever stayed, but it is the prettiest! i also got my own room (which i should not have done because after talking to the hotel people about things i realized that i might be a little short on cash later). in any case, i did and it was great because it had it own kang bed.

view from my room door at harmony guesthouse

my room (minus the bathroom)

i went out to explore a bit pretty much fell in love. this is my favorite town of the places i've visited in china. it's got the city walls, which i love and reminds of xi'an. and because it has city walls and is a unesco site, there's nothing terribly modern in the city. no skyscrapers, no ugly tract apartments... yes the main drag is hella touristy but it's still pretty. especially at night.

outside south city walls of pingyao

china 2 - tourney

competition was much like any other competition. lots of confusion not much organization. oh well, we're used to it by now. this year's teams included us, harvard, toronto, kenya, "congo," russia, "europe," "korea," new zealand, china, singapore, and probably a few other asian teams. teams in quote marks are teams that are actually exchange students studying in china.

there was also TONS of cameras this year. cctv had like 18 cameras or some nonsense like that. and there was the other media on top of that. the girl we had chosen to be "media" person was suddenly camera shy so i ended up doing most of the interviews. bah. but at least we had a couple non-chinese kids who didn't mind being on tv so i'd always try to drag someone out with me. one of these kids, who is 1/8th chinese and doesn't look it at all, speaks some chinese so that was super great. (let's face it, chinese looking person speaking chinese poorly does not make for good tv [talking about me, btw])

the tourney venue was beautiful. the fen river and the surrounding area was very pretty. one of the nicest venues i've raced at. the weather also cooperated fully and it was sunny (hot and humid goes without saying) all tournament. fun fact: tournament was on 6/12-13. 6/12 was actually duanwujie. i made sure to have a zhongzi that morning!)

racing itself went pretty smoothly. there was a foul up regarding our first 200m race, which i ended up missing because i was at the opening ceremony (as a flag bearer, not just cause i wasn't paying attention). but the rest of our 200m and 500m went well (two races each). we did not get to race genders this year, which sucked, but at least it meant our kids weren't super tired. thursday was 2000m day. one race and done! it's a pursuit race, but fastest boats are released first and in 30 second intervals so there's pretty much no passing. also, we were released first. hahah. but our kids did pretty well (4th of 8).

 

after races were done was the craziness of team photos. something weird this year, i'm apparently considered quite pretty in this province. i got A LOT of personal attention this year. some guy even ran up to me and rambled off his name and phone number asking me to call him. i said no, in english, no less. but there were lots of personal pictures, which is a very weird thing for me. china has become a bit of an ego boost for me, looks department wise, haha.

that afternoon the tournament people organized a trip to jinci temple for the racers. that was really great of them to do so! i probably wouldn't have gone myself since it was a bit far outside of the city and i think a lot of the foreign teams didn't get much sightseeing time so this was really thoughtful of them. but there was another foul up there with one of harvard's paddlers missing our 5pm leaving time so most of the north american teams went to the banquet / awards ceremony dirty and unshowered (we were on the same bus). (btw, our hotel sucked. we were pretty much without water for two days. one of our kids [bless his heart!] wrangled a couple rooms in the other hotel tower for us to shower in)

banquet this year was much like last year's with the craziness of teams wanting to swap jerseys and take pictures... not much drunken debauchery this year, however, thank goodness. though of course there was too much food. they also hired a few performers, all singers i think. or lip syncers at least. at least one of them must be semi-famous because some of the chinese girls went crazy over him.

afterwards we went back to the hotel. some people went out to buy drinks (of course) and i think nearly everyone did a shot or two. most of cali stayed in to play cards so i joined them, while some of the rest of cali (along with harvard and toronto) went out to karaoke and drink some more. eventually a few of us ended up at kfc where were couldn't order a bucket of chicken. it was kind of funny cause the manager told us that "no one does that." our guy ordering for us, who was probably a bit drunk still, told him that "i'm from america and we do have chicken in buckets!"

coach scott with our 3rd place trophies & medals (500m mixed)

i was kind of sad i wasn't leaving with everyone the next morning (north america was once again traveling together and they were all talking about what they were going to do in beijing). but they were to be in the lobby by 5:30am and this was finally my chance to sleep in so i wasn't too upset to be alone.

china 1 - journey

china trip this year. it was a headache from the start. we switched from may to june to a date that was inconvenient for everyone. then the cali team we chose thought they more than deserved to be chosen though they never once practiced together and had not even individually trained for the 2000m. people from the team kept asking me what i thought of them. they were better than last year, right? um... no. and even if you were, who cares? you're competing now, not traveling backwards in time to compete with the 2012 team.

there was more than the usual amount of confused emails, drama, and complaining going on when it was finally time to leave. most of socal was meeting most of norcal in vancouver before heading to beijing together. our flight was then delayed. first time was for a couple hours. that's fine. then it was delayed to the next morning. NOT FINE because that meant we were going to miss our high speed train from beijing to taiyuan. these tickets were booked weeks in advance (as was our hotel) and they were all sold out. i was in a mad panic get one of my supervisors (all already in china) to contact me back.

 

after hassles with luggage, vouchers, taxis, and overbooking, three hotels later we each got about 30 minutes of sleep before heading back to the airport. at least this time we took off on time. my supervisors in china knew about the situation and told me that the new plan was that after arriving in PEK, we'd wait a few hours for the rest of the toronto team to show up before taking a chartered bus to taiyuan. the bus takes 7 hours. that train we missed? 3 hours. oh well.

get to PEK. wait for 6 hours for tornonto. get onto bus. driver tells one of us it'll be a 5 hour trip. woohoo! tho i have no idea how this is possible. about "halfway" in driver tells me we have another 5 hours to go. ...i knew it was too good to be true! a few more hours in of horrible traffic we get to a toll booth. the operator tells us that they don't allow passenger buses on this road between 10pm - 6am. ...he refuses to even let us pull forward and off to the side of the road. after calling the cops, we get escorted off the highway to a city. our drivers are now lost. they get rather confusing directions and refuse to follow the gps that the toronto captain has provided.

most everyone keeps going back to sleep. i don't / can't. i'm in charge, i'm worried, and dr chen and i call each other every hour with non-updates. i slept for maybe an hour. after not sleeping much on the plane, after 30 minutes of sleep the night before (the human body is amazing!). it ends up taking us 12 hours to get from beijing to taiyuan. remember that it only took us 11 hours and 20 minutes to get from vancouver to beijing. this after hours and hours of airport waiting. PROPS to the "kids" for being cool about everything. everyone was tired and frustrated but no one acted out. everyone was very orderly and made the best of the situation.

we each then get about 10 minutes of sleep (if you bothered. [i did! but i woke up sooo confused. in addition to not knowing where i was, i didn't know who i was]) before eating breakfast at the hotel and checking out the neighborhood. that afternoon we went to practice and the weather was NUTS. torrential wind and rain and it was scary. hahah. because of a few scheduling issues i ended up steering harvard's boat rather than going out with my own team. i am not a good steer. i was worried. but it all ended up fine.

next post will talk about competition.

sakurajima volcano

march 11th's astronomy picture of the day!

comet

march 18th's astronomy picture of the day!

lemon thief

so i know i shouldn't be blogging about my life of crime on teh internets. but i've become a rather serious lemon bandit. my family and i have been taking lemons from my backyard neighbor's tree for years. they don't ever seem to use the lemons and many of the branches hang over into our yard. at our other property we also do an annual guava harvest from a neighbor's tree. it also hangs over into our backyard, so my dad goes over to trim the branches and also to take the guava. they don't eat eat guava, and neither do our tenants. i've never weighed how much we've got but each year we probably take something like almost 100lbs.

while those two instances are probably legal, it certainly gets into shadier territory. in my neighborhood there is a lemon tree which is overflowing with lemons. seriously. the tree is practically more yellow than it is green. last year i became rather obsessed with these lemons. and one late night, i stole one or two. it was laying on their lawn and i just couldn't resist! around that time i also "stole" a persimmon and an orange that had fallen off someone else' tree (two trees, two different neighbors). both were hanging over the wall over the sidewalk so that's why i used the quotation marks. the orange was the BEST damn orange i've ever had. seriously. since it had naturally fallen off the tree, it was crazy ripe and omg so juicy! i think this was the turning point in my life.

the other turning point. i started volunteering for a produce gleaning group. first with food forward and later with socal harvest. home owners (or parks and the like) contact the organizations who send volunteers over to harvest ripe produce. all that produce is then donated to local soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and the like. it's amazing stuff since much of this produce (usually fruit) would've been wasted anyway, and while soup kitchens and stuff do get a lot of donations, much of it is canned and not fresh. so anyway, the turning point is that i not cannot stop seeing fruit on people's trees. and worse yet, i can't stop thinking about getting my hands on it!

so i've gone a bit nuts. i've actually recruited people to help me steal fruit. seriously. we used broom handles to bring the branches of my backyard neighbor's tree within reach. i've gone back repeatedly to that other tree. all told i've stolen maybe 25 lemons. most of which i give away, either to friends or to my volunteer group, lol.

anyway, i just wanted to get this "off my chest" since it really has become one of my hobbies. btw, i went with a friend to that other lemon tree and knocked on their door to ask them if we could just have some lemons. they did not answer.

Miass River Sunrise

 

march 2nd's astronomy picture of the day!