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.