baseball

... is one of the most popular sports in Taiwan, even though there were some game-fixing scandals in the past which led to a decline in attendance. In the CPBL (Chinese Professional Baseball League), four teams are competing so that one team plays several times against the same team during a season. In April, we went to see a game in the Taoyuan Stadium with our language exchange group.

(In my case language exchange means I ask questions in English about the Chinese language and try to repeat some Chinese phrases which are commented by friendly encouraging nods of polite Taiwanese who pretend it is somehow possible to understand what I am saying.)

The game started around 6.30 pm and ended after three and a half hours when the Lamigo Monkeys finally managed to run around once – Well, in memory of my time in Australia, let’s say baseball is not as boring as cricket. 

But it is less about watching the game and more about cheering anyway. Motivated by an orange-haired guy and a bunch of cute cheerleaders, the spectators shake and clap little plastic baseball bats, scream and dance short choreographies. During the last few innings, the atmosphere before every single pitch was like during a penalty kick in a soccer match.

So in summary: an evening like a huge children’s birthday party.

dragon boat festival

It has been a while since my last post. Some work for my past and future research, I did in the evenings and on the weekends, as well as the usual behaviour of computers when you try to finish something important was one reason for that. I guess my friend was just worried that I do not get enough sleep and forced me to stop (Is your Mac so caring? :P) The second reason was yesterday's dragon boat festival and the corresponding training sessions.

The Evonik interns got the chance to join the "Dragonboat Legends", the team of the Hsinchu International School, who won the competition of the international teams (no way to be up to the standard of the Taiwanese) in the last few years. So after warming up properly, 

• reach as far ahead as possible
• dig the paddle in with force to the end of the blade
• pull back as straight as possible and not too far back
• go back to the first position as fast as possible

and most important: be synchronized with the other 15 paddlers. At the finish, a person on the dragon's head catches a flag and throws it into the water and the team whose flag touches the water first wins. The paddling is actually not so exhausting for your arms but the back and one leg will definitely hurt the day after.

We became second which was a massive disappointment for most of the other (male ^^) interns and a reason for extensive discussion about what happened and why and ...

 Well, no worries, it was heaps of fun and the commitment of everyone (including our hydrophilic flag catcher) was very high =)