Dragon Boat What???

So for months now, I have heard about a wonderful Dragon Boat Festival that happens each year in a town about an hour north of Yichang. It wasn't until last week that I finally got to experience what all the stories were about. You see, last term, I heard a strong beating drum coming from the Soccer Stadium all the time. In my curiosity, I would go over to see the origin of this noise. Everytime I went to look, I saw 2 rows of strong men paddling with oars in the air. No water. Just men sitting in a boat-like shape swinging those oars to the beat of the drum. I asked my students and they told me about the Dragon Boat Festival. As I mentioned previously, I got to see these men perform last weekend. It wasn't so much of a festival as a gathering of Yichang people who wanted to watch 22 men in a boat plus the navigator and the drummer paddle down the river in what turned out to be an international competition. Team group after team group raced each other. Preliminaries were fun for maybe 30 mins so the gang and I decided to explore the area on our own. Most of us ended up down near the foreign teams because we had students who were translators. It was really neat to see my students or friends making good use of the English.

We got some fun pictures but the ones below were the only ones I wanted to show off. You will see the starting line. Pretty cool. I would like to see my dad and brother paddle that fast. Beth and I were asked to be on Yichang TV, however, we aren't sure that we made it past the editing room. All we had to say was "Yichang Wonderful!" We sounded very articulate as you can imagine. Then there is the group minus Amy. She was relaxing having her own Children-peeing-beside-her Adventure. But my personal favorite is the last one. We are standing in line. Why? The Pizza Hut lady pointed at a sign that said "please line-up". Hey, ok. We were the only ones standing there and how did she know we wanted to go to Pizza Hut? (That was a terribly bad sentence grammatically. So is this one. Maybe...) Anyway, we did what she asked. Then she went inside and laughed. Hmm...what is it about foreignors that makes Chinese people laugh? Enjoy.