Day 91 and onward

Prior to the tournament, we decided that it would be a fun idea if we all went in some kind of costume or a uniform. It was a one day tournament and we all knew that we were going to stomp on most of the teams, and so why not have a little fun doing so. Sara decided that we should all be cats; Jon didn’t like the idea and said we should all just be different animals. So I was going to be a gorilla, Jon a monkey, Phil a panda, Sara the cat, Dan the mouse, Burrowes the bird/insect of some sort and Adam the fox. That didn’t happen. So we all became cats. Sara jazzed us up with a little cat makeup and from that we came with our team name: Thundercats…HO!!!!!
So the Thundercats had a bye for their first game and would play one more game, eat lunch, play three more games and then possibly the final (we knew and so did everyone). Now my cat back home, Sonny is quite a large cat and catnip seems to have a strange reverse affect on him. He doesn’t get all hyper and crazy when he indulges himself; he gets extremely mellow and lazier. Well the Thundercats seemed to have had too much catnip (we didn’t actually do any drugs). It was an ugly game, and we all realized that we had to get our stuff together to get ready for the real game in the finals. Luckily we played fairly easy games and won easily as well. The Thundercats started to regain their composure and actually looked like a team. The Thundercats rolled over Tianjin B, played well against Beijing Bang, beat up a high school team, and then literally ran over Tianjin A. Now imagine a tornado. Imagine a tornado in a city. Imagine the destruction and rubble and just plain garbage and crap that would be around. Now imagine that someone just decided to scatter grass around and then call it a field. That’s what it was like. A tornado, in a city, with rubble, garbage, crap, and scattered grass field. The final was between Beijing’s Big Brother and us, the Thundercats. We had just finished a hard fought 7-1 victory over Tianjin A while Big Brother had their bye. So naturally we would want to play right away! Not this guy or any of my fellow Thundercats. We were exhausted, we were in pain, we wanted to rest, we wanted to sleep, we wanted to have had to play Tianjin A. So after 5 minutes of waiting we took the fields. The Thundercats scored the first point, and after that it was all a blur. All I can remember was that I couldn’t properly accelerate or run because my body was so beat up. Instead my Mazda3, I felt like an 18-wheeler. Where I have to warm up my engine and slowly reach my top speed, but I can’t stop too fast or else I will die. But we won….somehow. We are still trying to figure that part out. We were up 9-6 at half and then they rallied to 9-9 and then we scored 2 points to win. Sweeeet. It was really cool to win the first Tianjin Tournament because they gave us a free disc, an “official” certificate indicating that we won and this MASSIVE trophy. It felt good to win because of just the type of day it was with only 2 subs and I really felt like we all improved in some way, whether it was smarts about the game or we just got in better shape. Either way, it was a good tournament, and I’m really glad it was only one day.
After the tournament, we were treated to a delicious meal and we all just hung out. They passed out the MVP awards and for some reason all of the MVP’s just started to take their shirts off! Welcome to Tianjin. Drinking games were going on everywhere, bottle caps flying, people losing their eyes, people drinking form frisbee’s…it was just another normal ultimate tournament China, and I’m glad to be here. I am glad to say that I have yet to become under the influence of alcohol here or anywhere, and it doesn’t seem like that will change at all. After the party we loaded onto the bus with Beijing people and headed on our 2-hour ride to Beijing where the next couple days were guaranteed to be a blast.

I’m still tired, check back for great adventure from the Great Wall and Beijing!