Paddle Boat Olympics!!!

I think I forgot to blog about our First Annual SOMA Olympic Paddle Boat Races! It's a brilliant tale.

We were all set to meet in the lobby at 3 p.m. on Friday afternoon in Fuzhou. Costumes and mascots were encouraged for teams, but Michael (Captain von Trapp) and I had not planned to do anything for our team: The Thunderous, Rampaging, Monstrous Rubber Duckies. Yes, the name was his idea.

I was out most of the day on Thursday, so I didn't even try to reach him, and on Friday he got in touch with me at 1 p.m. and asked if we should try to scrape together some costumes. We thought of wearing orange shirts (like ducks?), or wearing black shirts with paper cutouts of ducks on them, but we realized we'd be overshadowed by nearly everyone else, so two hours before we were to meet, we went out shopping at Carrefour.

We managed to find bright yellow shirts, possibly the exact color of your standard duck body, and orange sun visors that definitely looked like duck bills! We purchased those, along with some permanent markers. We tried to find some kind of duck mascot, but apparently the rubber ducky is not as popular in China as it is in the USA.

We ate a quick lunch at McDonald's (shame on us!) because we hadn't had time to eat before the race that day, then came back to my hotel room to create our outfits. On the front of the T-shirts, we drew an evil looking rubber ducky, traced from a template I drew, having looked up children's wallpaper online and found one with ducky outlines on it. On the back we wrote our entire team name, and on the visors we drew evil looking eyes and eyebrows.

We met the group downstairs at 3 pm, having finished our costumes just minutes before, and boy were we a hit -- the whole group, I mean! We had Mangor and Brunhilde, the Vikings (Uncle Max and Liesl), Zeus and Prometheus (Rolf and Friedrich), the over-prepared campers (Elberfeld and Elsa), the hillbillies (Sister Sophia and Nazi Youth), the Goat Boat (Sister Margaretta and Frau Schmidt), The Monkey Pirates (Gretl, her mom, and Mother Abbess), the Bible Boat (Franz and Baroness Elberfeld), and the plain old Monkeys (Christine and her husband). The costumes were amazing, from mop beards and binder-cover lightning bolts, to blacked-out teeth, to eye patches, gold earrings, and bandannas, to a full-body goat suit (Sister Margaretta was the back end). We were quite a hit in the hotel lobby and on the walk to the lake where they rented boats.

Each team rented a boat from two different places, because they didn't have enough boats at a single place, and then we all paddled to a bridge to start the race. I must admit it was tiring paddling that boat, and I had Michael as a partner! You can bet I did not slack off -- in the beginning, we tried taking turns resting and paddling, and he certainly noticed a difference when I was not paddling with him.

The race started at an arched bridge, went to a far bridge, under it, back through, through the original bridge and past it to another bridge, under it, back around to the original bridge. We discovered early on that it was easy to be in the lead, get under a bridge, and get stuck waiting for every single other boat to go under the bridge and turn around! This happened to Christine and Danny, who were in a larger boat and couldn't fit under the bridge with another boat there! They started in the lead and lost their position quickly.

However, Michael and I were charmed. We started near the front and did not get caught because we managed to sneak back under the bridge as later boats were just coming through for the first time. We broke away from the crowd, our boat dripping with speed, and forged away under the original bridge and to the far bridge, just tailing the tech boat and the Greek gods. On the way back from the far bridge, we caught up with the tech boat, with just the Greeks in front of us. We stayed side by side with the techies for a while, then decided to part ways as we came near the finish line, and we pulled ahead again! We watched the Greek gods win first place, and then -- lo and behold -- we won SECOND! The Rubber Duckies do it again! I was so proud of us, and our prize was a gold painted rubber ducky emblazoned with the race title and our second place prize. It was really a fitting prize for our team.

We finished the day with a small pizza party in my hotel room and then a bigger Ukrainian birthday party in one of the conference rooms, where we all sat and watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Great times were had by all!