A great part of working at an international school is the travel on the school's dime. This time my volleyball team headed to Beijing, China, for our league championship tournament. The downside is that I spent four days in a gym rather than seeing China.
Don't get me wrong...coaching twelve eighteen-year-old boys has it's charms. (They seemed fit to report their bowel movement schedules to me. The first time I heard, "I have to go pooh" from an otherwise-macho all-star jock, I was pretty sure he was pulling my leg.) We did well in the tournament (first in our division, which is the story we're sticking to...only fifth out of 12 in the whole thing). We were down one kid, our starting setter, so frankly I was quite pleased. But twelve hours a day in a gym is not the way to see a country. Fortunately, the local coaches were pretty cool and showed us around.
This is Dave, the Beijing assistant coach and our tour guide. Fortunately, he knows his way around Beijing better than he knew Osaka last year. There was a lot less random trekking through the city, and the pizza at this joint, called The Tree, was the best I've had in Asia. Good times.
We were also lucky to have only one day, the first day, of Beijing smog. The winds picked up later and we breathed easy the rest of the time. On the last day our plane was a late flight, so thanks to the host school we arranged a tour up to the Great Wall and I finally got to see something unequivocally Chinese. Yeah, I'm a history geek, too, because I lectured my assistant coach Nick on the ineffectiveness of the Wall as defense--remnants of some research paper I had done for my Chinese history class in college. Glad to know that $120 grand was worth something.
These are our boys. Yeah, the kid in the front wore his "iPot" shirt on an international flight through customs. And he's one of the smartest ones. Can't buy common sense, though.
We rode a chairlift up and rode a toboggan down. It was pricey at $10 round trip, but worth it--especially to hear the screams of the tough 6'2" middle blocker who's afraid of heights. Okay, I felt a little bad for him, but only a little since he had expected there to be nets under the lift the whole way up. Heck, we didn't have those in Colorado, let alone China. Another player said what bothered him was that he was pretty sure the chairlift itself was "made in China." Come to think of it, that might be kinda scary. I certainly wouldn't eat the paint chips.
We rode down the hill, ate some real Chinese food (my first on the entire trip!) and made our way to the airport. Good times. I'm sorry the season is over, but happy to have my life back.Next trip is India in a month. Oh yeah, that's gonna be interesting. Bye for now.
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