Thursday: Warming Up

Here's a wrap up of yesterday's activities:

1:24
I woke up at about the time I normally do at home, which is promising -- looks like my body has adapted to the new time zone OK. Or maybe it's just that I'm still so tired that it doesn't matter what time it is, I'm still going to feel the same. While not feeling as wretched as I have for the last couple of days, I'm still a bit spacey from lack of sleep -- I expect I'll invest in a nap this afternoon before we go to the big opening dinner this evening.

This morning Richard and I went and filmed the team warming up in the hotel car park (unfortunately the actual venue isn't available today). Then it was time for lunch, which we again ducked out of (with most of the rest of the team).


Stretching in the car park

4:35 PM
The rest of the day has been fairly uneventful so far. The others went for lunch at Subway while I was upstairs writing the last bit. I went out for a wander on my own for lunch and took a couple of photos of the local church, then walked around the local shops. I had McDonald's for lunch, including a Rolo milkshake (yummy). They don't give you any prices for burgers over here -- everything assumes you want a combo. It would be an exaggeration to say that the guy behind teh counter looked at me like I was a madman when I said I didn't want any drinks or chips, but he was surprised.

Apart from that, we've just been sitting in the room relaxing and watching snooker on TV (Ronnie O'Sullivan cleaned up). The opening banquet thing is on tonight -- it's supposedly somewhat formal, but all I have is a nice shirt to go with my black cargo pants and leather jacket.

10:25 PM
The opening banquet was at the Oriental City restaurant -- not bad, but a long bus ride again. We got to chat with the Swiss team on the way back -- they seemed like fun guys, although it was a bit disconcerting to hear that one of them had been training since he was 4, and now trains with a kung fu brother of Mr. Guo's...

Tom spent most of the time frantically getting everyone's forms sortd out. Due to a large number of late entries, they had to cut everyone back to six forms (three Chin Woo forms and three traditional ones), so everyone needed to work out which ones they were going to do, and make sure they didn't clash with any of the other ones they wanted to do. It seemed to get sorted out in the end. Bed now -- long day tomorrow.