Busy Month and Josh Joins Rugby Team

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Sorry to all that I have been MIA for sometime now but I have just been extremely busy with classes and other activities here. I have started going to see Chinese tutors for about an hour each weekday in addition to my morning classes. This is helping me immensely because my teachers at the university cannot give me the individual attention I need on pronunciation (since I am tone deaf). My tutors are two women who went to school together, and I met them through my friend Bruce, at a bar no less. Not only do they help me with my Chinese language skills, but they are also trying to introduce me to Chinese culture by taking me to different types of restaurants (I also took them to have Mexican food for the first time). We have also have gone to KTV (its what karaoke is called in China) to sing Chinese songs. But by doing these extra classes I have an extra one or two hours of class each day plus new material to study from my tutoring class. So my life is getting extremely busy during the week because I am studying almost from the time I wake up until I go to bed (sort of reminds of studying for the bar this summer, except without any of the stress of course).
So of course what do I do when my life seems to really busy, I decide to add more activities to my life just to make sure I have no down time at all, haha. The latest activity I have joined is the Hangzhou rugby team. I have never played rugby but they needed players so they signed me up. The team is called the Hangzhou Harlequins (named after a club in England). Rugby is basically a mix between football and soccer with a lot of crazy rules (none of which I know). Also there are no pads of any sort. Our team is a bunch of expats from a mix of countries including England, New Zealand, France, and Kazakhstan. Over half the team like me is new to rugby.
After one practice with the team they throw me into my first game. My position is the number 5 forward. Basically my job is tackle anyone on the other team with the ball and when I get the ball run straight forward until I am tackled. Also, during a scrum (which is basically a big pile up of both teams lunging at each other for more info go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(rugby)) I am in the second row and place my head between two of my teammates butts in the first row… somehow I do this voluntarily.
We travelled to a town in the Jiangsu province called Nantong for the first game. Nantong is a small village of about 1 million people, and absolutely nothing special to it that we could find in our short time there. We played a team of Chinese players from the local university. They were small and super fit meaning they could run around all of my team which was a bunch of out of shape player. However, we were much bigger than them so in the end we did win. I had lots of fun even though I was just sort of wandering around the field for most of the game not knowing what was going on.
This past weekend, we travelled to Shanghai to play another team, but we did not fair so well this time. The team we played the Monks, are about 80% Kiwi’s (term for people from New Zealand) and they had all played for 20 years. Also, they were huge and their height was in the range of 6’0 to 6’5 which made them practically unstoppable once they started to run We got crushed so bad in the first half that the Monks gave us some players so we could just finish the game because we so exhausted. Although I did get a couple of tackles, I was definitely run over by a few kiwis in the process.
I will put up some pictures from the matches in the coming days. Hope all is well and thank you to everyone for staying in touch!!

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Comments

[Warran]

Where are my pics!!!
Nice blog but time is time how us the pics