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Published: August 8th 2008
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Max Dance-Off
I think she won. Since the thought of starting a blog only occurred to me fairly recently (props to the cmc people who urged everyone to do so), I have a good amount of blog-catchup to do. Fortunately, I've had a lot of opportunities to travel this summer as well as rediscover a few cool spots in Hong Kong, where I've been living for the past 7 years.
The summer began with a bang. The rugby club's tour of China. We practically covered the entire country, or at least a lot of the tourist spots that you would think of when you think of China. We started in Beijing then stopped by Xian, Guilin, Yungshuo, Shanghai, and ended the tour in Hong Kong. It's really hard to describe the whole ordeal without having to write an entire book, or severely offend a lot of viewers, so I think I'll just lay down a few highlights from the trip.
Even before we had the time to digest the city of Beijing for what it is, we had our first game (yes the day we landed). Nothing special here. We had a good win so we were feeling pretty good about ourselves (The fact that
Panda Bear
They climb trees! we were feeling pretty confident at this point is actually important to remember. It all takes an ironic turn). We had the usual drink-up which got pretty out of hand and went back to our hotel.
The next day was spent going to all the touristy places in Beijing, minus the Great Wall. We had a pretty good time in Tiennemen Square and the Forbidden City. The place is pretty big. It's definitely one of those places where you can feel the wealth and power of a past civilization. Some of you may have heard about this, but the Chinese people really like taking pictures with foreigners. As in white people. I think for some of the Chinese tourist that visit Beijing from the more rural areas, the foreign tourists that hang around the forbidden city are attractions in themselves. So they were pretty happy when they found a crew of 40 large rugby players traveling in a group. Naturally, they thought I was their tour guide and would say something to me in Chinese as they approached the 'real' foreigners to snap a few pictures. Yeah, so maybe I did feel a little left out. Anyway, the Forbidden
City was followed by a few other hotspots like the Temple of Heaven, where Max Hodge had a dance-off with a local woman, and the Summer Palace.
I'm going to skip ahead a little bit. The following couple of days was more tourist stuff like the Great Wall and the Beijing Zoo (where there were a number of adorable panda bears). It was time for our second game in Beijing against the Chinese Agricultural University. So I've heard they were going to be a pretty strong team from numerous sources. But hey, we played pretty well too 3 days ago haven't we? They can't be THAT good...
I would like to use this blog as a forum to share a few signs that indicate the kind of rugby teams anyone should try to AVOID playing at all costs. We obviously didn't pick up on any of these and suffered the consequences.
1. There is a STATUE of rugby players in front of the field - That's right. They have statues of themselves. Usually a sign of respect and achievement, the college clearly thought the team in question deserved a 15 ft monument.
2. The scoreboard says "CAU
(Chinese Agricultural University) vs. USA" - They really wanted to beat us... as Americans. A sacrificial lamb for the Olympic year.
3. They are smoking a ciggie 5 minutes before the game - Not because they don't take themselves seriously, but because they are that badass. They might have been getting used to the pollution before the game. Some sort of an air quality warm-up.
4. The Lonely Planet guide says that most of the Chinese national team hails from this college.
5. I'm the smallest Asian in the proximity. Never happened before.
6. Our game tactic is based on our coach's rationale that "because a lot of Chinese kids come from peasant families, they're not used to catching the ball because they can't afford it, so we're going to kick the ball a lot and hope they drop a few." - No way...
So you might've guessed by now that we lost this game. Pretty badly actually. 95-5 to be exact. I don't know how we failed to analyze any of these signs that we picked up, but I really did feel like a puppy dog cornered by a group of mean kids with sticks.
With this loss looming in our minds, we moved on to the other cities. I might write a little bit about Yungshuo because it was such a beautiful city.
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