Shanghai Sea Dragons

For those of you who have known me for awhile, you know I have always had a real love for water sports. This is despite the fact that I’ve never actually been that great at them. With water polo right at the top of my list, when I met JC at a BBQ my second week in Shanghai, I knew we would get along. JC has played polo for years, even knows my old high school coach Clarke, and he had been looking for some cohorts to start up an expat team here.

It took awhile, and to be honest I had little to do with the initial kick-off, but by mid-summer or so, the Shanghai Sea Dragon’s International Water Polo Club was formed, with JC in charge and a distribution list of around 40 potential players. Now, about 20 of us or so head up to the Qingpu Sports Center (where all of Shanghai’s professional athletes train (once including Yao Ming and Liu Xiang)) every other week to play a 6-quarter game against the Shanghai (men’s) professional team, scrimmage among ourselves, and practice some drills. I am one of maybe 3 females on the roster, and as of late, the only one that actually shows up. This makes me “Women’s Captain”, a meaningless title that I carry with pride.

This past weekend the team had our first real test of skill when we were invited to play against the Sichuan Provincial women’s team in Chengdu. We headed out on Friday after work: nine players (including myself as the lone female) and three girlfriends, for what can only be described as one of the most ridiculous, fun and challenging weekends I’ve ever had. A group of us got to our hotel at about 10:30 pm, threw down our bags, and headed straight out to a bar to meet up with one of JC’s colleagues and his friends. Turned out it was a going away party, and we walked in mid speech, just in time to participate in my first ever “three cheers for Mike,” we’re talking the full three “hip hip hooray’s”, and a slurred version of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. We had a lot of catching up to do.

Enter bottle of Jose.

The night was incredibly fun! The expat community in Chengdu knows how it’s done, and is so incredibly welcoming. It is also extremely good at keeping water polo players out until 5 am before their first 8:30 battle against perhaps the strongest, fastest 90 lb girls in the world. Needless to say, when got to the pool that next morning, the 5 out of 9 of us that had been out were still fairly intoxicated, which only added to the fact that our huge men vs. their tiny women was not an even match-up (in the opposite sense than what you might imagine). We actually scored a fair number of goals, but lost due to the fact that, well, they scored more. After the game, we all chatted up the girls in each of our own levels of Chinglish, and found out that several of them had actually played on the national team in Beijing, including the goalie and the “one that looks like a boy,” both of whom I bonded with more than the others.

At about 11 am the hangovers really started to kick in. Four of the boys headed out with the Sichuan coach to a golf club for the afternoon, while I led the three couples and my friend Coley on the afternoon alternative: the Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Center. We grabbed lunch at an amazing Sichuanese restaurant called Gingko, enjoying classic Sichuan delicacies like Dan Dan Mian and Ma Po Dofu (filled with mouth-numbing spices), and then headed north.

Pandas are probably some of the laziest, most uninterested animals around. Don’t get me wrong, they are beautiful creatures and so cute that I actually really enjoyed seeing them, but they really just don’t do anything. They don’t even stand up to poop. The panda base was pretty empty, especially for China, and we were able to make it to pretty much all of the enclosures in just a couple hours. The babies were, of course, my favorite, and I probably spent about 45 minutes jealously glaring at the vets who get to play with them and watching fearfully as one tiny panda attempted to clumsily navigate its way down from a tree. How it got up there, I’ll never know.

Ps. Red pandas … foxes in disguise?

Saturday night ended tamely. I don’t think any of us would have had the energy to go out if someone had suggested it. Of course that meant we played worlds better on Sunday morning than we had the previous day. We still lost, but the scores were much more reasonable, esp considering we played the second half against the Chongqing team, who was fresh from warming up when we were already exhausted. After saying goodbye to the girls, who were still giddy over the presence of a bunch of hunky western boys in Speedos two couples headed out to Le Shan to see the giant Buddha, while the rest of head packed up our stuff and headed to a bath house for the afternoon. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of public nudity, but well, after that somewhat invasive full body scrub, my skin feels like a baby’s bottom, and I rather like it.

After several hours of getting waiting on hand and foot, it was time for dinner at Yu’s Family Restaurant – what some of us had been looking forward to even more than the water polo. My own descriptions of the food at this place will not do any of it justice. When I tell you that, among other things, I ate a tea smoked duck, pork pastry disguised as a calligraphy brush, an omelet supported truffle garnished with real gold flakes, and a dish made from the ovarian fat of the rare snow frog, you will probably just shake your head in confusion, and maybe even disgust. So instead I’ll let the linked review and it's pictures do the talking, and just conclude with a firm, confident two thumbs up for Chengdu, China, and say that there is no way I will ever miss a Shanghai Sea Dragons team trip in the future.