Advertisement
Published: June 27th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Dragon Boat Racing has been going on in China since 250BC, although it took Xiangyang a little while to catch on and they started their own race here last year. Despite this, I have been told that Dragon Boat Racing started here in Hubei Province, but I get the impression that this may be a bit like the way half of the coffee shops in Edinburgh claim to be the one where JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter, or all those American towns who claim to have the largest toilet/longest hotdog/man with the biggest beard of bees.
I didn't really have much of an idea of what a Dragon Boat was, so on the day of the race a couple of weeks ago, which was a day off here, I wasn't really sure whether to expect a huge Galleon type thing or something that was more like a glorified canoe. The race itself took place on the Han River early on a Monday morning. Annoyingly, because communication is almost viewed as a dirty word here, or at least is seen as something that 'other people do', no one really had much of an idea what was going on. We had been
reliably informed that the race was between Bridge Two and Bridge One on the river, which is about one kilometre or so, and different people had told us that there'd be anything between ten and twenty five races with the whole thing lasting somewhere in the region of four hours. We got there early and positioned ourselves next to Bridge One thinking that we'd have the perfect view of the finish line from there. How were we to know that the actual finish line was the precarious looking boat in the middle of the river about half a mile from the starting bridge? There were three races in all, although we didn't get as into them as we probably should have due to our assumption that they must be warm-ups thanks to our misguided ideas regarding the location of the finish line, and also because for the majority of it we couldn't see a thing through the mist and smog that was enveloping the boats, the river and the far bridge.
It took us two and a half races to realise that we and the hundreds of others around us had made a fundamentally bad choice of bridge and
so after being told by a security guard that there was at least one race left after this one we headed up towards the real finish line. After waiting for half an hour and watching as disgruntled people left and flags were taken down, it became increasingly clear that there were no more races and that my reason for getting up at 7am on my day off had been and gone in a kind of misty, blurry view of some long boats at a distance of about three hundred yards. I wouldn't like to suggest that the security guard had lied to us, I think it was probably more like when you're leaving a football ground back home and you ask a Policeman if they know anything about another game that is going on elsewhere; they will always answer you with a score despite clearly not having the faintest idea. I usually put it down to them not wanting to lose face or look in anyway inept or incompetent - so I never mind too much.
Despite the disappointment of the race itself, there was something of a carnival atmosphere around the river during and after the event. Most
people had the day off work and all the schools were closed so there were thousands of people around and with all the food stalls, people selling Dragon Boat souvenirs and various performers performing on the street, it gave the whole city a really vibrant, quite exciting feel for the day.
It was in this carnival-like atmosphere that I got a look at probably the most amazing toy that I've ever seen, another one of those moments like seeing a batman car in Xi'an or escalators in shopping centres that slow down when there's no one on them, where you just realise that on some things, China is way ahead. It was a toy horse, roughly the size of a standard rocking horse, except it was actually standing on it's own four legs with small wheels at the bottom of each of them, and with a small boy sitting atop it. The way it moved, and this was the genius bit, was when the boy kicked his legs using some kind of metal stirrups, the beast's legs moved forward themselves, propelling him at a fair speed along the promenade. It's very difficult for a layman to describe such genius
and I'd flounder around like this if you asked me to talk about the internal combustion engine or the workings of a nuclear reactor, but suffice to say, for me, it was one of those moments when the human mind seems very very impressive. I'd love to say I had a picture of it but, being British, eventhough the rules are very different out here, I still look three ways and then decide against it anyway when it comes to taking a picture of any child, no matter how public the situation. I know that logic and decency suggests that if you leave the house riding one of these things, you pretty much know you're getting your photo taken - this kid certainly did anyway, as he was as good as posing for everyone who was videoing him, whilst somehow still retaining the necessary level of coolness mixed with disinterest required of anyone riding something that reinvents the wheel as dramatically as this. But despite all that, I still couldn't do it, sorry.
At 10am, after the races, it was time for food and we plumped for the Xiangyang breakfast tradition of beef chilli noodles. This is thick noodles in a kind of spicy soup with bits of beef in it, and it is delicious, although I maintain that there is something inherently wrong about eating noodles of any description for breakfast. (That, however, is said by someone who for the best part of fifteen years ate only a nutrigrain bar or an apple until two in the afternoon just so his lunchtime cheese sandwich would taste particularly good.) One important thing that I have picked up from this tradition is to wear only black when eating noodles, as I've slowly learnt that thick ones dropped from poorly held chopsticks into a red spicy soup can make quite a mess of a white tshirt, and I can assure you that a 27 year old foreigner would need a hell of a good mechanical horse to make himself look good in that situation.
Pura Vida
Dave
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 10; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0608s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb