Hula Hoops and Tupperware

We're happy to note that Blogger is accessible (for the moment) from Shanghai, so we'll try and log in a few entries before the site magically disappears in China again.

So while poor Zach's been nursing his torn Achilles, I've had to pick up the slack in the sports department. I had the opportunity to show (or at least attempt to show) my 'skills' at my company's 'Mini-sports' day. It's been brought to our company's attention that our staff is a bit on the unhealthy side, as a result, our HR team cooked up a day of working out disguised as fun. I was the only western employee willing to be cajoled into actually competing. The events were one part summer camp, one part gym class, and one part 'lost in translation'.

The event started off with a parade mimicking a miniature Olympics. Each 'competitor' was lined up in department teams, and then paraded around in departmental order around the gym. To add more formality to opening ceremonies, my boss, the official referee of the day, gave a welcome speech in English and had to take a formal oath. While the speech was quite poignant, the athletes could not contain themselves and talked quite loudly the entire time.

At the commencement of opening ceremonies, the event turned into chaos. Everyone started running to their specific events as I somehow got caught up in a ferocious game of tug of war.

Other events included a three-legged race.....

throw a basketball into a garbage can (I'm not kidding)

and riding a bike with 2 people, where the front person steers the bike around cones and the back person peddles.

Since most of my colleagues know that I usually hit the gym after work, they had high hopes for me and tried to enroll me in several events. I managed to somehow negotiate from ten down to two events, jump roping and hula hooping. Even though I haven't done either of these activities in years, I figured they couldn't be too difficult. I didn't start to worry until one of my colleagues saw me practicing my jump roping technique and told me I was going way too slow. .

Unfortunately, my lack of balance and coordination got the best of me, and halfway through my 3 minutes of jumping (monitored by a counter who would rank me according to my # of jumps) I started laughing and could jump no longer. Something tells me Zach, my lone cheerleader, wasn't helping with all the laughing and pointing...

I tried to redeem myself with the hula hooping, and managed to get through the first round by hula-ing my hoop for 3 consecutive minutes. The 2nd round entailed me hula-ing 2 hoops at the same time. I got a good start, but then, Zach, again with the pointing and laughing, got me giggling and I lost one of the hoops in the first 20 seconds.

The day ended with my receiving two pieces of tupperware (go figure) as a consolation prize for my failed attempts at athletic stardom within my company. I think it's safe to say I proved to a tiny percentage of China's population that white girls really can't jump (or hula....).