-29: Gallop of the Dragons

It's Saturday morning, and although I know I should be poring over literature every waking moment I am not. It's pouring out there, which instantly propels me into a happy mood, especially when I have spent the last 15 minutes playing with Pacman courtesy of Google. If you've been hiding under a rock or in a closet (come out already) for the past 12 hours just go to the Google homepage and you'll know what I'm talking about. I read somewhere that it's going to be up for 48 hours, so go now and get your fix of Pacman-induced adrenaline rush! Click "Insert Coin" and the game starts - click it twice and you get a two-player game with Mrs. Pacman too, controlled with the awsd keys.

Awesome rain, thunder and lightning. I hope it doesn't clear too much for this afternoon's dragonboat training. Speaking of which, I got some pictures on last week's race from Hailey through Facebook and here they are:

The paddles.

The boats lined up pre-race. The race was held at Boat Quay.

This is the British Dragons Team A Women. (I was in Team B.) There are 10 in the team, and as you can see there's a variety of nationalities: Indonesian, British, Chinese (Hong Kong), Singaporean, Dutch... so it isn't exactly a British team. The guy back there is the cox, one of the best paddlers in our team. He's Polish. The guy in front's the drummer, though we usually don't have one when we practise. This boat's shorter than the ones we usually paddle in, which are the 20-person boats like the one below.

I'm not sure if this is the mixed team or the men's team of the Brits, but it's a 20-person boat although there's only 18 paddlers. The pose that they're all holding is when the cox yells "Paddles up!" and they go "Up!" - the next second they will be paddling beautifully in unison.

This is our coach Jason, who used to paddle for the national team I think. He's our very own Kungfu Panda, because he always dresses in a white t-shirt and has a black lifejacket on, and because he constantly wears shades under the sun forming tan lines around his eyes hahaha. His shirt says "Longer, Harder, Deeper" which is kind of a chant that we have, that still manages to inspire sexual innuendos that never get old. Comic relief when you feel like your arms are going to drop off.

Guys bailing out water from a capsized boat. Apparently the 10-person boats capsize pretty easily.

This is the zoom out shot of Boat Quay. Trainings at Kallang River are not as glamorous with the skyline and everything, and this is a really short race track, not even 200metres as they claim. The race track is lined by the little round dots that you see in the distance, the buoys.

The next race that they have is in Putrajaya I think, but because that weekend I'll be jetting off to Europe I won't be able to participate. Oh well. There'll be more races when I get back.