The Epic Football Match

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Following another late night we had our second day of classes, more Chinese oral and an intro to the Peoples Republic of China.

For lunch we learnt from last nights experience and went with the swedes who had become friendly with a student Guang Chao who knew the local eateries well! He took us to a place where you get small pancakes and fill with various meat and veg, it did well to settle my dodgy stomach! In the afternoon we did chinese calligraphy and I learnt that in order to make similar sounds to my name in chinese Lewis becomes "road easy such". I have decided to take easy to mean chilled out and not the other "easy" so I am now gonna relax and let others organise, and yes mum it has happened!

That afternoon the girls, minus Lil and Freda, went shopping so the rest of us went to play football with Wally. We went down to there artificial pitch which is basically a harder version of the rubber crumb at Durham. There were 12 of us to start with and we managed to borrow a ball off some other students. After a few minutes people started joining us, Magic and Simon some Chinese students and then Justin from Tanzania, "Ronaldo" from Zambia and many others whose names I didn't get. At one point we playing a full 11 a side match!

Me and James took the Xavi and Iniesta roles in our Spanish style attack of 6 players with some sweet one-twos. One culminating in James lobbing Max in goal after a three pass move from our keeper, to Alastair, me and then to James and another one ending with me smashing in a sweet shot across goal. Towards the end we had a proven method of keeper to Ronaldo at RB and then a one to two between me and him before putting in a cross fo someone to smash wide.......Alastair "the clatterer" Bounds was solid in defence and even got a few goals. However due to some extreme goal hanging by Matt, Rob and Max, some very poor decisions by our non existing linesman and some poor picking decisions by me, leaving them with some seriously skilled players, we lost....not to make excuses or anything. Even with the score it was great fun and must be repeated! In the end we played for around 3 hours and by the end we dead on our feet so hobbled off to English Menu Guys for dinner. Later we watched a movie and then crashed out!

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Photos

The Remaining Players
After 3 hrs only a few remained!