Turn Up Taipei, Hong Kong Pun Asia and the Wuhan Open all occurred within 4 weeks of each other. I wasn't completely aware of this when I signed up for them, and I'm not sure I'd ever had such a packed tournament stretch before, not even in college. My experience with each tournament was extremely different and I mostly want to talk about Wuhan, but here's a quick recap of all three.
Turn Up Taipei:
Taipei is the city everyone from Hong Kong professes to love. It's the smells of late night Chinese cooking but with people lining up. It's got the elbow room that has been squeezed out of Hong Kong with the culture that has been priced out of Singapore. It's a high speed rail bubble tea brewing metropolis with museums and Facebook access. It's a repository for traditional characters with a quaint Japanese respectful veil still faintly in the air. As I say this though, I am acutely aware of how much more I like the idea of Taipei than I actually like Taipei. I've spent all of 4 nights there. I know enough about Taipei to know its subway traffic can be unbearable too, that it's a city with rude people, incompetent government and factories trying to peddle gutter oil.
But I do know that Taiwan Ultimate has some splendor with good players popping up among local university scenes in Taipei and southern Taiwan. Grouped with a core of talented and dedicated expats, Taipei's best club team Whisby Nation has found great success in Asia. They don't travel a ton though, and Taiwan had never hosted a club tournament like this aimed at international teams before (2011 AOUC in Kaohsiung notwithstanding), so there was very much an inaugural feel to the event.
The tournament turned out great for us. First, the combination of me, Blaze & Junk, was able to bring over 550 quick dry towels Katherine Tse, the tournament director, shipped to my apartment because the 200% import tariff was absurd. Distributing it to HK tournament attendees including Julia and Charlotte, who took 300 by themselves, the towels arrived on Saturday morning and we got some good karma from the onset. We knew it would be a competitive tourney with teams coming from Shanghai, Singapore, all over Taiwan, and a rare appearance from Japan. Guam even sent a squad, ironically without the one high level player who lives there. Add three Abu Dhabi players and this first time event had some serious international draw.
Turn Up Taipei:
Taipei is the city everyone from Hong Kong professes to love. It's the smells of late night Chinese cooking but with people lining up. It's got the elbow room that has been squeezed out of Hong Kong with the culture that has been priced out of Singapore. It's a high speed rail bubble tea brewing metropolis with museums and Facebook access. It's a repository for traditional characters with a quaint Japanese respectful veil still faintly in the air. As I say this though, I am acutely aware of how much more I like the idea of Taipei than I actually like Taipei. I've spent all of 4 nights there. I know enough about Taipei to know its subway traffic can be unbearable too, that it's a city with rude people, incompetent government and factories trying to peddle gutter oil.
But I do know that Taiwan Ultimate has some splendor with good players popping up among local university scenes in Taipei and southern Taiwan. Grouped with a core of talented and dedicated expats, Taipei's best club team Whisby Nation has found great success in Asia. They don't travel a ton though, and Taiwan had never hosted a club tournament like this aimed at international teams before (2011 AOUC in Kaohsiung notwithstanding), so there was very much an inaugural feel to the event.
The tournament turned out great for us. First, the combination of me, Blaze & Junk, was able to bring over 550 quick dry towels Katherine Tse, the tournament director, shipped to my apartment because the 200% import tariff was absurd. Distributing it to HK tournament attendees including Julia and Charlotte, who took 300 by themselves, the towels arrived on Saturday morning and we got some good karma from the onset. We knew it would be a competitive tourney with teams coming from Shanghai, Singapore, all over Taiwan, and a rare appearance from Japan. Guam even sent a squad, ironically without the one high level player who lives there. Add three Abu Dhabi players and this first time event had some serious international draw.
We had a good tournament. Seeded second in our pool, we upset a undermanned Shanghai and held off upstart teams Guangzhou and Taiwan HaoCool and won our crossover. With an undefeated Saturday, we came into Sunday's semifinal matchup with Iku from Japan without having been seriously tested. Japanese ultimate is the best in Asia and my previous experiences against with the entity was a pair of 17-2 blowouts at the 2011 AOUC and the 2012 Worlds tournament. Iku was an expat team, and only the 3rd best mixed club team in Japan, but they finished top 12 or something in Lecco this year. I was really quite anxious about matching up against a lot of players I had only known from their vaunted reputations. But Junk is a talented club team that trains together too, and with our strict regimented style of play and some big handlers able to put backhands upwind, we were a force to be reckoned with. The wind was extremely fierce that game, and we were strict about punting downwind whenever near the end zone. Iku was less strict and a couple of costly turns near their end zone gave us an upwind break. Down that break, Iku was on offense going upwind - scoring would put the pressure on us to go upwind to hold the break. We set a hard zone and got the turn but lost the disc quickly. In the confusion-laden aftermath of a turn, we scrambled to set up a cup and Iku took advantage. I saw a handler swing and break throw to a girl in the making, and without making a real decision, my body just started going for the disc and before I knew it I was in full extension laying out off the ground. I was never amazing at layout D's, and in the past year they've become increasingly rare, but this was one of my best. I barely got fingertips on my disc, and was so fully extended that I couldn't bring my arm back and landed fully on my shoulder. In incredible pain, I looked back meekly in terror to see a disc that I had only just barely macked. Luckily, the mack was enough to take the disc out of bounds, and the Iku girl was not able to drag it in. I immediately took an injury sub as I was unable to raise my shoulder, and my replacement helped us make the downwind convert. We won the game by 4 points and met Whisby Nation in the final.
Playing in the finals is a lot of fun. It's great having the whole tournament audience watch you, with heckling commentary coming from at least one outspoken member of our community. The pressure is definitely there, and I'm at the stage of my career where this experience is invaluable. Playing without pressure is almost completely unrelated to playing in the finals, where you don't want to throw that one costly turnover that swings the championship. Developing the right mindset where you aren't playing scared of that turnover but rather playing up to your own game is essential, and something I think is almost impossible to train. The pressure didn't really come up to me too much, as I played exclusively downwind that game where we could afford to throw turnover hucks, but it might have affected our teammates as we made several uncharacteristic turnovers at the edge of upwind scores. Whisby was a great team, with lots of fit fast players and an extremely disciplined and skilled handler core. Without the wind, I think we might have been blown out, as we were considerably slower and less in shape. With the wind, we made some upwind conversions and had a great chance to win. A slow turnover filled game ended up hardcapped 13-11 in Whisby Nation's favor, and we were left with the contrasting taste of a proud seed-breaking second place finish, but disappointing heartbreak over a legit chance to win our first major tournament.
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| Katherine (black shirt, center) having her birthday celebrated |
Hong Kong Pun Asia
So I'm Communication Director of the Hong Kong Ultimate Player Association now, and during our board meeting in July, I mentioned that we need a theme for our annual Hong Kong Pan Asia Tournament. Gio, the tournament director, retorted "how about we call it Pun Asia?" because I have the reputation of being obsessed with puns. I don't know how serious he was, but we all had a good laugh, and then went wait, for real? And so Hong Kong Pun Asia was on.
I was predictably ecstatic about having an official venue to showcase my puns. I didn't know so much about organizing a tournament. How much water do we need? Where do you order it? Where do you keep it?
Gio organized the tournament so he did have those answers and a lot of logistics fell into place with only bearable pain. The executive decisions were more activity oriented, such as what were the Seedings to be? Where and when should the party bus pick up? What should the prizes be?
I took charge of the Seedings, player pack (left) and dinner. The Seedings seemed easy, because a lot of the top teams had played each other or previously in last years tournament. It seemed logical to rank the top 4, and even with unknowns in Korea, Philippines and half of the B pool, I didn't slave too much on the rankings. Afterwards however there was tons of second guessing.
For the player pack, well I tried to get as many puns into the tournament as possible. I split the teams into 4 pools and called them Infinity, Reflecting, Gene and Car pools. I had also been making graphical ultimate puns every week, from Darth Vader imploring the viewer to "Hold the Force" to Gio receiving a "backhanded compliment), so those were all recompiled in the pack.
Dinner was really stressful actually. Tournament dinners are common and very fun in China and I was hoping to replicate the experience with a large, HK-style, affordable restaurant with lots of beer within walking distance of the fields. There aren't many restaurants around Prince Edward like that - space is a premium and I was expecting 80-100 hungry players. I took a tour and talked to owners and found them surprisingly receptive to booking out the place, and eventually agreed to a $10,000 tab at the Macau restaurant we eat at a lot. The owner spent a lot of time selling me on the menu, while I had a harder time being convinced we could fit so many people in the crowded restaurant. I spent a lot of time discussing extra seats. When I rolled in Saturday night a bit late, I had 10 people with me. I felt super embarrassed and stressed at the money I'd have to cover. We ultimately did get to 40+ thanks to some desperate calls, and it was a really fun and delicious meal (those yian-yeungs are amazing), but I wouldn't wish that stress on any event planner.
Prizes were hard. We wanted to think of something creative and interesting, not typical plastic trophies that would lose meaning and get thrown away. I decided to go with an engraved pan, cause that's both pretty and hilarious, for the winners. Other prizes included HK adapter plugs for spirit winners (I'd like to give a plug to a good cause), shoelaces (for the runners up), panda (punda) luggage tags (if you thought you were getting something nice, you were bamboozled). The champions were upset though because they didn't get their own individual prize or medal.
The most stressful part was just being the person people go to all the time, for issues that you have planned for, for issues that you should have planned for and didn't, or for issues that weren't your responsibility to begin with. I was constantly being asked questions and for once, I couldn't point them away to anyone else.
I learned a lot about event planning, dealing with logistics, managing other people, managing complaints and stress and really made a lot of mistakes. The most important lesson learned though: at the end of the day, if you give frisbee players a bunch of fields, a disc and other people to play against, they're going to be happy.
Wuhan Open
I haven't played many China tournaments this year and so I took the opportunity when presented to play with a new group of players mostly based in Shenzhen. This assembly of Pride of Dongguan, as Colin our captain lovingly named the team, consisted of 3 other players from Hong Kong, 3 from Zhuhai, and some pickups from central and northern China in addition to the SZ core. Most of us were to take sleeper trains up Friday night, and then the relatively young high speed rail on the return trip Sunday night. Due to the dropping out of Shenzhen player Sean Keith, I inherited his already purchased tickets. I had never taken a sleeper train before, or many trains in China at all. This one was to depart Shenzhen Luohu station, on the border with Hong Kong, at 5:30pm. I worked longer that week for the opportunity to leave at 4:00pm Friday afternoon, no easy task considering the hangover from Pun Asia, and got to the border at 4:50, happily WeChatting all the way up. Plenty of time considering you don't really need to show up early for a train, and I was glad I wasn't going through the stress that would unavoidably come if I had chosen to fly from Shenzhen airport. But the border was a borderline nursery, with so many little Chinese children running every which way. It literally took me a few minutes between seeing the foreigners line and getting in it. The foreigner lines were long and infuriatingly slow, and it was 5:15 by the time I got stamped and was free to run amok in China. Now I didn't really know where the train station was, all I had to go on was a photo sent into WeChat of the meeting point, which included a picture of a hotel. I find it on the skyline and run up a level to it. I get to it and don't see anyone there - while I'm matching up the picture to my actual view, I realize I'm not that near a train station and oh crap the train is leaving momentarily. I can still make roaming calls so I run and call Colin, to no avail. I call him 3 times without getting through. Panicked I run into what I think is the train station and through security, but it turns out that there is a separate train waiting room for a direct line to Guangzhou. I think to call another teammate and luckily Alison picks up.
"Where are you!??!! Where is Colin?! I can't find the station!!!!!" I scream panickedly.
"Hi I'm in the line to pickup my ticket. I'm on a later train. You've missed your train," Alison freakishly calmly.
"WHAT?! No! shit balls crap aiya."
"It's ok, just get on my train, come to the long distance train ticket booth."
"OK!"
So much for no train stress. I enter the long distance train ticket area in a complete sweat and find Alison in line. A minute later, Colin comes running in, swearing and sweating as well, making very clear that he had missed the train as well in an effort to wait for me. He had started running with 5 minutes left and actually found the gate shut on him while the train was still on the platform. Apparently you do have to show up early for a train. We wait in line together to buy tickets for the 6:15 train, and suddenly it's 5:55 and we are still in line. Our SZ-born teammate Esther helps us beg to cut a few spots in line, and soon it's just one guy ahead of us and I see him buy a ticket to 武汉 Wuhan. I jump in the second he walks out and ask for 2 tickets to Wuhan. After the service lady asks us several questions concerning what type of tickets we want (ANY) she says oh, it's sold out. WHAT? I just saw the guy buy a ticket to Wuhan! Apparently that was the last one.
So there Colin and I were, watching our teammates walk away leaving years of handling experience behind. I started thinking about options - trains to other cities like Changsha, planes, driving, giving up... looking out at the throngs of people around us and the Friday evening traffic, the airport seemed impossibly far away. Colin took the role of a captain and decided on taking a train to Guangzhou "and playing things from there," handed me a beer, and told me "we're going on an excellent adventure." Trains to Guangzhou were very frequent, so Cal and and Colin's Excellent Adventure got rolling and before even getting to GZ, included meeting a small Indian man from Kolkata who spoke Mandarin well but with a brutal accent and offered Colin a job, and a super cute girl who asked me for a tissue and then got off at Dongguan, which fairly or unfairly made her slightly less cute. The whole time, we were communicating via WeChat to teammates who were researching and offering to buy us tickets. I was almost further stressed by their efforts and the number of options available from multiple Guangzhou train stations. We got off the train expecting to hustle and make a difficult trip across town to catch the next train. Fortunately, Guangzhou really is a much bigger hub than Shenzhen and even at the station we landed at, there was a slow sleeper train to Wuhan leaving in 40 minutes. We got those tickets and some Burger King and before we knew it we were sharing fries and beer and checking out our fleas-infested top bunk beds on a Chinese sleeper train.
Now the train was an experience I had need to see for a long time. Besides the high speed rail option which was unavailable at the time, there were 4 types of tickets for the slow speed trains (from most comfortable to the worst): soft sleeper, hard sleeper, seats and standing. Soft sleepers are rooms with two double bunk beds, amounting more or less to a college dorm room in America. Hard sleepers are rooms with two triple bunk beds and enough space in between to stick out one elbow, amounting more or less to a college dorm room in China. Seats are your conventional train seats, which you might think seems preferable now to spending a night with 5 Chinese strangers in 3 cubic meters of volume, until you realize that the people actually do buy standing room tickets, and you might be sitting next to 5 Chinese strangers standing within 3 cubic meters of you. I cannot believe people do choose to stand for 12+ hour train rides, and I'm sure some buy them for 48+ hour plus rides. I read stories of these sorts of travels/travails during Chinese New Year, when the train system is overwhelmed like Brazil was overwhelmed by Germany, and it utterly terrifies me.
Colin and I were in separate full rooms, both with the top bunk. We hung out in the corridor until lights went off at 10pm and tried to get as much sleep as possible. If you're wondering how to get to the top of a triple bunk in the pitch dark, I'll tell you it's not for the unacrobatic. There isn't even a full ladder going up to the top, you kinda have to pull yourself up to some of the steps. Anyway, we were going to make it to the tournament, and if you're counting at home, this is #2 craziest getting to a tournament story, ahead of multiple Kindness Hotels in Kaohsiung, China Air driver in Osaka, but behind stranger Italian Moroccan driver in Lecco/Bergamo.
We made it into Wuhan on time and were ready to sprint out of the train. Even on a Saturday morning, the cab stand at the train station was gross, and Colin accurately presumed that the fields were within walking distance. We hustled over in 15 minutes and discovered literally the worst fields I have ever played on. I have played close to 10 years of ultimate on three continents on artificial rugs, near an airport, near a sewage line, and in shin high grass in Anacostia, but these were just the worst. The grass was brown and patchier than an iTunes update, with a huge streak across the field where irrigation pipes had clearly just been laid. The ground was so hard that some of my teammates seriously considered not wearing cleats. The far field was even worse, with a rare green patch full of tall grasses that covered one of the cones, and the sideline just inches away from paved path. Given the pathetic field and the fact that it was public and not rented, we actually compla got some money back from the tournament organizers.
The frisbee portion of the tournament was really a wash. The game we arrived late for was the most competitive game of Saturday, and we were down 0-3 when I stepped on. Against a Changsha team that had several former Tianjin stars, we still had the more well rounded team and should have won when they turned the disc near their end zone on universe point. Considering we lost that game and our elimination matchup with Big Brother on universe point and blew out weak opponents in every other game, the on field experience in Wuhan Open was not good. But the experience on a whole was way worth it as I bonded with many China players with whom I normally don't get to connect, plus the adventure making the tournament. Even the journey home was an adventure. On Sunday afternoon, we left the finals early to make sure we made our high speed trains back home, because I was not going to miss another one. We gave ourselves an hour and a half. After walking around the campus for 20 minutes and having only discovered dead ends, I started to sweat and panic. Roldy took charge at this point and started asking directions and dropped his bag with a teammate and started running for the main street. When we get to the main street, we're still having rough luck hailing a cab. Suddenly, a van stops in front of us. Doors open and people file out. One, two, four, eight, ten and now we are all engrossed watching this magical clown car van just file out more people. We see the now empty van has had its trunk modified to fit two benches up against the walls of the vehicle, perpendicular to the other seats. Roldy goes to the driver and asks if he can take all of us to the train station for 100 kuai. And voila, that's how I found myself cracking open a beer on a bench in the back of a modified, possibly illegally so, Chinese van with 9 teammates feeling like we were crossing the border.
It doesn't even end there. Remember, Colin had bought tickets for me. Actually he had bought tickets for his teammate Sean Keith, who subsequently dropped out. China train tickets are bought with ID and are name-designated, but according to Colin security never checks. Wuhan station security though is intense, possibly in the wake of the Kunming train stabbings of this past year, and they are most definitely checking tickets. I examine my ticket and learn that Sean Keith is actually Sean Zohar Keith. I take a deep breath, put on a poker face and put the ticket deep in my passport. A security woman then takes my passport, pulls out my ticket and then turns to the ID page of my passport. She clearly puts my passport photo up close to me and cross checks my name with the ticket name. I'm standing there, in too much shock to open up my bladder, and the thought pops up that I might just miss this train. I start formulating arguments in my head. "Oh yeah that's my other name. Oh I must have mixed up the tickets. Oh what does the name matter anyway?" Then inexplicably, the woman hands my passport and ticket back to me and shoos me through. I never look back. Perhaps she's illiterate in English?
So there it is, 3 tournaments in 3 jurisdictions of the Sino world in 4 weekends. When people ask me what the difference is between China and Hong Kong, I can simplify it so.
Question: How often do I have travel adventures in Hong Kong? Answer: Never.
Question: How often do I have travel adventures in Mainland China? Answer: Every damn time.
I was predictably ecstatic about having an official venue to showcase my puns. I didn't know so much about organizing a tournament. How much water do we need? Where do you order it? Where do you keep it?
Gio organized the tournament so he did have those answers and a lot of logistics fell into place with only bearable pain. The executive decisions were more activity oriented, such as what were the Seedings to be? Where and when should the party bus pick up? What should the prizes be?
For the player pack, well I tried to get as many puns into the tournament as possible. I split the teams into 4 pools and called them Infinity, Reflecting, Gene and Car pools. I had also been making graphical ultimate puns every week, from Darth Vader imploring the viewer to "Hold the Force" to Gio receiving a "backhanded compliment), so those were all recompiled in the pack.
Dinner was really stressful actually. Tournament dinners are common and very fun in China and I was hoping to replicate the experience with a large, HK-style, affordable restaurant with lots of beer within walking distance of the fields. There aren't many restaurants around Prince Edward like that - space is a premium and I was expecting 80-100 hungry players. I took a tour and talked to owners and found them surprisingly receptive to booking out the place, and eventually agreed to a $10,000 tab at the Macau restaurant we eat at a lot. The owner spent a lot of time selling me on the menu, while I had a harder time being convinced we could fit so many people in the crowded restaurant. I spent a lot of time discussing extra seats. When I rolled in Saturday night a bit late, I had 10 people with me. I felt super embarrassed and stressed at the money I'd have to cover. We ultimately did get to 40+ thanks to some desperate calls, and it was a really fun and delicious meal (those yian-yeungs are amazing), but I wouldn't wish that stress on any event planner.
Prizes were hard. We wanted to think of something creative and interesting, not typical plastic trophies that would lose meaning and get thrown away. I decided to go with an engraved pan, cause that's both pretty and hilarious, for the winners. Other prizes included HK adapter plugs for spirit winners (I'd like to give a plug to a good cause), shoelaces (for the runners up), panda (punda) luggage tags (if you thought you were getting something nice, you were bamboozled). The champions were upset though because they didn't get their own individual prize or medal.
The most stressful part was just being the person people go to all the time, for issues that you have planned for, for issues that you should have planned for and didn't, or for issues that weren't your responsibility to begin with. I was constantly being asked questions and for once, I couldn't point them away to anyone else.
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| I made an inter-mission impossible at the party |
I learned a lot about event planning, dealing with logistics, managing other people, managing complaints and stress and really made a lot of mistakes. The most important lesson learned though: at the end of the day, if you give frisbee players a bunch of fields, a disc and other people to play against, they're going to be happy.
Wuhan Open
I haven't played many China tournaments this year and so I took the opportunity when presented to play with a new group of players mostly based in Shenzhen. This assembly of Pride of Dongguan, as Colin our captain lovingly named the team, consisted of 3 other players from Hong Kong, 3 from Zhuhai, and some pickups from central and northern China in addition to the SZ core. Most of us were to take sleeper trains up Friday night, and then the relatively young high speed rail on the return trip Sunday night. Due to the dropping out of Shenzhen player Sean Keith, I inherited his already purchased tickets. I had never taken a sleeper train before, or many trains in China at all. This one was to depart Shenzhen Luohu station, on the border with Hong Kong, at 5:30pm. I worked longer that week for the opportunity to leave at 4:00pm Friday afternoon, no easy task considering the hangover from Pun Asia, and got to the border at 4:50, happily WeChatting all the way up. Plenty of time considering you don't really need to show up early for a train, and I was glad I wasn't going through the stress that would unavoidably come if I had chosen to fly from Shenzhen airport. But the border was a borderline nursery, with so many little Chinese children running every which way. It literally took me a few minutes between seeing the foreigners line and getting in it. The foreigner lines were long and infuriatingly slow, and it was 5:15 by the time I got stamped and was free to run amok in China. Now I didn't really know where the train station was, all I had to go on was a photo sent into WeChat of the meeting point, which included a picture of a hotel. I find it on the skyline and run up a level to it. I get to it and don't see anyone there - while I'm matching up the picture to my actual view, I realize I'm not that near a train station and oh crap the train is leaving momentarily. I can still make roaming calls so I run and call Colin, to no avail. I call him 3 times without getting through. Panicked I run into what I think is the train station and through security, but it turns out that there is a separate train waiting room for a direct line to Guangzhou. I think to call another teammate and luckily Alison picks up.
"Where are you!??!! Where is Colin?! I can't find the station!!!!!" I scream panickedly.
"Hi I'm in the line to pickup my ticket. I'm on a later train. You've missed your train," Alison freakishly calmly.
"WHAT?! No! shit balls crap aiya."
"It's ok, just get on my train, come to the long distance train ticket booth."
"OK!"
So much for no train stress. I enter the long distance train ticket area in a complete sweat and find Alison in line. A minute later, Colin comes running in, swearing and sweating as well, making very clear that he had missed the train as well in an effort to wait for me. He had started running with 5 minutes left and actually found the gate shut on him while the train was still on the platform. Apparently you do have to show up early for a train. We wait in line together to buy tickets for the 6:15 train, and suddenly it's 5:55 and we are still in line. Our SZ-born teammate Esther helps us beg to cut a few spots in line, and soon it's just one guy ahead of us and I see him buy a ticket to 武汉 Wuhan. I jump in the second he walks out and ask for 2 tickets to Wuhan. After the service lady asks us several questions concerning what type of tickets we want (ANY) she says oh, it's sold out. WHAT? I just saw the guy buy a ticket to Wuhan! Apparently that was the last one.
So there Colin and I were, watching our teammates walk away leaving years of handling experience behind. I started thinking about options - trains to other cities like Changsha, planes, driving, giving up... looking out at the throngs of people around us and the Friday evening traffic, the airport seemed impossibly far away. Colin took the role of a captain and decided on taking a train to Guangzhou "and playing things from there," handed me a beer, and told me "we're going on an excellent adventure." Trains to Guangzhou were very frequent, so Cal and and Colin's Excellent Adventure got rolling and before even getting to GZ, included meeting a small Indian man from Kolkata who spoke Mandarin well but with a brutal accent and offered Colin a job, and a super cute girl who asked me for a tissue and then got off at Dongguan, which fairly or unfairly made her slightly less cute. The whole time, we were communicating via WeChat to teammates who were researching and offering to buy us tickets. I was almost further stressed by their efforts and the number of options available from multiple Guangzhou train stations. We got off the train expecting to hustle and make a difficult trip across town to catch the next train. Fortunately, Guangzhou really is a much bigger hub than Shenzhen and even at the station we landed at, there was a slow sleeper train to Wuhan leaving in 40 minutes. We got those tickets and some Burger King and before we knew it we were sharing fries and beer and checking out our fleas-infested top bunk beds on a Chinese sleeper train.
Now the train was an experience I had need to see for a long time. Besides the high speed rail option which was unavailable at the time, there were 4 types of tickets for the slow speed trains (from most comfortable to the worst): soft sleeper, hard sleeper, seats and standing. Soft sleepers are rooms with two double bunk beds, amounting more or less to a college dorm room in America. Hard sleepers are rooms with two triple bunk beds and enough space in between to stick out one elbow, amounting more or less to a college dorm room in China. Seats are your conventional train seats, which you might think seems preferable now to spending a night with 5 Chinese strangers in 3 cubic meters of volume, until you realize that the people actually do buy standing room tickets, and you might be sitting next to 5 Chinese strangers standing within 3 cubic meters of you. I cannot believe people do choose to stand for 12+ hour train rides, and I'm sure some buy them for 48+ hour plus rides. I read stories of these sorts of travels/travails during Chinese New Year, when the train system is overwhelmed like Brazil was overwhelmed by Germany, and it utterly terrifies me.
Colin and I were in separate full rooms, both with the top bunk. We hung out in the corridor until lights went off at 10pm and tried to get as much sleep as possible. If you're wondering how to get to the top of a triple bunk in the pitch dark, I'll tell you it's not for the unacrobatic. There isn't even a full ladder going up to the top, you kinda have to pull yourself up to some of the steps. Anyway, we were going to make it to the tournament, and if you're counting at home, this is #2 craziest getting to a tournament story, ahead of multiple Kindness Hotels in Kaohsiung, China Air driver in Osaka, but behind stranger Italian Moroccan driver in Lecco/Bergamo.
Our train was to get in around 8:30 and we woke up naturally shortly after 7. Colin's bunk room was friendly and chatty, and we learned they were on their way back to their hometown of Harbin, after a tour group trip of Hong Kong/Macau. Keep in mind this is a sleeper train, and Harbin is further north than North Korea. The elderly tourists we encountered and their 30-something daughter would be on that train for 72 hours. Their tickets only costed around 900 RMB, which I realized certainly puts long distance travel in the range of many Chinese citizens, provided they are tough enough to sleep in a triple bunk for 3 days. I realized that talking with them that much of my knowledge of China derives from conversations like these. It was interesting to hear their perspectives of Hong Kong and Macau. The tourists seemed to unanimously like Macau better, because Hong Kong was too dense and hectic. They were taken around by their tour group the whole time and seemed to have no freedom of their own and next to no interactions with locals (which is exactly why I hate tours). When I asked them what about the skyline in Hong Kong, they replied that Macau had cool tall buildings too. I was floored by this statement. Macau's tall buildings are fake casino structures with neon lights that scream "facetious" to me somehow marvels visitors from Heilongjiang to the same extent as the world class fabled Hong Kong skyline. I never could have predicted the way they saw these cities, but now that I think about it, if you don't have any real interaction with your environment, a place like Macau which is geared towards entertaining tourists will seem much more attractive than a bustling metropolis like Hong Kong where busy people could give a **** about tourists.
Perhaps my understanding of China should come from books, tv shows, articles and historical 古文 texts but for me I am really shaped by these sorts of experiences. As I slept on that dirty top bunk in that cramped room and sped through Southern China, and realizing that Chinese college students might spend 4 years enduring what I find difficult to endure for 13 hours, I learned something about China. I realized that growing up in this environment, I would think often about how there are too many people and not enough space. I would dream about going into distant pastures and spreading out. With such a mindset, perhaps it's not surprising that China so firmly holds onto Tibet and Xinjiang. Perhaps my understanding of China from anecdotal firsthand experiences does have some ultimate relevance to national-level policies and global security.
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| This picture does not capture the disparity of this field |
The frisbee portion of the tournament was really a wash. The game we arrived late for was the most competitive game of Saturday, and we were down 0-3 when I stepped on. Against a Changsha team that had several former Tianjin stars, we still had the more well rounded team and should have won when they turned the disc near their end zone on universe point. Considering we lost that game and our elimination matchup with Big Brother on universe point and blew out weak opponents in every other game, the on field experience in Wuhan Open was not good. But the experience on a whole was way worth it as I bonded with many China players with whom I normally don't get to connect, plus the adventure making the tournament. Even the journey home was an adventure. On Sunday afternoon, we left the finals early to make sure we made our high speed trains back home, because I was not going to miss another one. We gave ourselves an hour and a half. After walking around the campus for 20 minutes and having only discovered dead ends, I started to sweat and panic. Roldy took charge at this point and started asking directions and dropped his bag with a teammate and started running for the main street. When we get to the main street, we're still having rough luck hailing a cab. Suddenly, a van stops in front of us. Doors open and people file out. One, two, four, eight, ten and now we are all engrossed watching this magical clown car van just file out more people. We see the now empty van has had its trunk modified to fit two benches up against the walls of the vehicle, perpendicular to the other seats. Roldy goes to the driver and asks if he can take all of us to the train station for 100 kuai. And voila, that's how I found myself cracking open a beer on a bench in the back of a modified, possibly illegally so, Chinese van with 9 teammates feeling like we were crossing the border.
It doesn't even end there. Remember, Colin had bought tickets for me. Actually he had bought tickets for his teammate Sean Keith, who subsequently dropped out. China train tickets are bought with ID and are name-designated, but according to Colin security never checks. Wuhan station security though is intense, possibly in the wake of the Kunming train stabbings of this past year, and they are most definitely checking tickets. I examine my ticket and learn that Sean Keith is actually Sean Zohar Keith. I take a deep breath, put on a poker face and put the ticket deep in my passport. A security woman then takes my passport, pulls out my ticket and then turns to the ID page of my passport. She clearly puts my passport photo up close to me and cross checks my name with the ticket name. I'm standing there, in too much shock to open up my bladder, and the thought pops up that I might just miss this train. I start formulating arguments in my head. "Oh yeah that's my other name. Oh I must have mixed up the tickets. Oh what does the name matter anyway?" Then inexplicably, the woman hands my passport and ticket back to me and shoos me through. I never look back. Perhaps she's illiterate in English?
So there it is, 3 tournaments in 3 jurisdictions of the Sino world in 4 weekends. When people ask me what the difference is between China and Hong Kong, I can simplify it so.
Question: How often do I have travel adventures in Hong Kong? Answer: Never.
Question: How often do I have travel adventures in Mainland China? Answer: Every damn time.
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