Hello from China!
My team, Rodney Hagebols (aka Hagwami) Steve Erickson (aka Wonder) Mark Reynolds (aka Godfather) and me arrived in China on Saturday night after 24 hours of travelling. We are here to train for the next couple of weeks.
Before I arrived, I spent the week in San Francisco (CA) with my wife Sally celebrating our 3rd wedding anniversary! We had a wonderful time with our friends and the Erickson family. We boarded our flight on Friday morning to Beijing and from there to Qingdao. Despite the long travel, we all arrived in good spirits and were ready to get to work. Our training partners, Marc Pickel and Ingo Borkowski, arrived from Germany shortly before us and were anxious to get started.
We are staying in the same hotel as last summer – The Seaview Garden. The have given the hotel a facelift and the rooms are all totally re-done. It’s really very nice. It almost gives me the feeling of staying aboard a Trinity Yacht with all the dark woodwork in the rooms…(well, maybe not a Trinity, but it is nice). I would definitely recommend it. When we arrived, we enjoyed a bit of Chinese cuisine and then returned to the hotel for some much needed sleep.
We woke up Sunday and headed to the training center yacht club called YinHi (the Olympic Village is not yet open to the sailors). It is very convenient because it is across the street from our hotel. We worked all day unloading our two containers and rigging both boats. WOW, we sure do have a lot of stuff! A few times I asked myself if an America’s Cup team has this much gear. The good thing is we are 150% totally self sufficient and 150% totally organized. I even rented the 40’ Container that our boats came over in, as a base station and a storage locker for all of our sails, masts, booms & parts. The only negative thing is that the locals charge us 300 Yuan to launch our Star boat and 300 Yuan to haul the boat out at the end of the day – and we have 3 Star boats here and 2 tenders.
I find that I am much more comfortable here in China compared to last year when it was my first trip, and I am much more focused. The city really is great and very accommodating.
That said, my cell phone doesn’t seem to work over here this time around, so I am in cell phone detox and I am enjoying it! But not to worry, I still talk to my wife via Skype.
Last night the boys and I ventured out of the hotel to a nice Italian restaurant in the Shangra La Hotel, a short cab ride away. Every cab ride here costs about 10 Ding Dongs (this is what we call the currency, the real name is Yuan) anyway 10 ding dongs is about a dollar. We ate at the DaVinci restaurant and made friends with the Chef Salvatore who is from the South of Italy. He took really great care of us, I am sure we will go back.
Before I left for China, NBC sent me a cool Flip Camera. It’s this really small movie camera that I take around with me and shoot behind the scene footage of what our team does. This is so fun, but unfortunately the footage I have been shooting so far has been a bit off color, so I am not sure it will make it to the big screen.
That’s all for now. I have been up since 5am (couldn’t sleep) and getting ready to head to breakfast and looking forward to another good day of training.
Later
Austin