Mass Chaos and Confusions: Arrival in Sanya

nmp wrote:
Dane Buson wrote:

Marian wrote:

[..]

So far I've owned a Glenfiddich and a Balvenie but I've never met a
single malt I didn't like.
Hmm, I can't say the same. I have a half bottle of something upstairs
that tastes a bit much of the sea (iodine) for my tastes. I'll have to
see if I can get rid of it somehow to one of my less (more?) discerning
brethren.

And of course, I've had some malts that rather dislike me (the next
morning) evidently.

Right. My body also does not tolerate any distilled drink. I do love the
smell (and perhaps a few *very* tiny sips) of good whiskey, cognac et al
but I can't get any significant quantity past my throat without heartburn.

I guess I should be grateful, it prevents me from serious alcohol abuse.


So no "jim beam" then?

--
Tom Sherman - 42.435731,-83.985007
If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the precipitate.

In article ,
nmp wrote:

Dane Buson wrote:

Marian wrote:

[..]

So far I've owned a Glenfiddich and a Balvenie but I've never met a
single malt I didn't like.

Hmm, I can't say the same. I have a half bottle of something upstairs
that tastes a bit much of the sea (iodine) for my tastes. I'll have to
see if I can get rid of it somehow to one of my less (more?) discerning
brethren.

And of course, I've had some malts that rather dislike me (the next
morning) evidently.

Right. My body also does not tolerate any distilled drink. I do love the
smell (and perhaps a few *very* tiny sips) of good whiskey, cognac et al
but I can't get any significant quantity past my throat without heartburn.

I guess I should be grateful, it prevents me from serious alcohol abuse.

Tiny sips of whisky neat is a good way to enjoy it.

--
Michael Press

No pictures from me for this stage.

http://www.chineseye.com/path-users-...id=1406 .html

Breakfast was a monumental disappointment.

I don't mean to say the food was bad because it wasn't. It was really
good. There was bacon. There was toast. I think I even remember
scrambled eggs.

This is the fifth time in two years I've stayed at Waika International
Hotel in Wenchang and the last four times they had flaky buttery
croissants and bittersweet pain au chocolat. Ever since I first saw
the hotel list I've been dreaming about pastry. I've been thinking
about pastry. I've been anticipating pastry. I've been making plans
on how best to remove the largest number of pastry from the breakfast
buffet and take them in the car without actually being forced to share
them with my friends and coworkers. Yet, there was no pastry.
None.

Bread, and jam, and fruit, and porridge, and milk, and coffee and all
the regular assortment of weird Chinese breakfast food like dried
turnips and salted eggs but there was no pastry.

Owing to having stayed up til nearly 2am drinking scotch, although I
was physically mobile, I wasn't awake enough to be in a bad mood about
being awake. Within minutes of being on the road I fell asleep and
with little interruption beyond giving directions to the driver, which
didn't really require me to wake up, I stayed that way until we got to
the hotel, left the hotel again, and got to my apartment with a full
load of dirty clothes.

I have a dryer. I am the only person I know in Hainan who has a
dryer. It makes me very happy. Although it makes noises and has a
problem with the door latch it makes drying clothes very easy.

I like my dryer.
I mean I really like my dryer.

Unfortunately, as we would only discover when we got back to my
apartment at around 10pm, I didn't set my dryer long enough and the
clothes were all still quite damp.

While waiting for the teams to arrive I got to play with black and
white copies of maps of Haikou marking all the important places the
teams should make sure to visit. KFC, McDonalds, Carrefour... ...

The day before I had been given the Jury Communique detailing
penalties to translate into Chinese. There aren't any Chinese
speaking coms at this year's race but one of the VIPs and the Race
Director are both UCI coms and they checked it over for grammar and
whatnot before it was xeroxed and sent out with the results. Using
the Chinese language copy of the UCI Cycling Regulations to help me I
felt all warm and fuzzy over them trusting me to do an English -
Chinese translation instead of the usual Chinese - English.

Although there were two small changes made I must have done a
sufficiently good job since they gave me the task again, and told me
it wouldn't be necessary to proofread beforesending it out with the
results. If I'd felt warm and fuzzy the day before this made me
practically glow.

Lunch was disappointing. Dinner was worse. I made Meitan Hompo, the
Japanese team, very very happy by telling them about the Japanese
Restaurant with the Japanese cook so they could eat that instead of
mediocre Chinese food masquerading as bad Western food.

I sat with the mechanic from Team China, and my on-top-of-the-world
feeling for the day was made all that much better when, somewhere in
the middle of a conversation griping about the food and making plans
to maybe go out to eat to a restaurant I know in Wuzhishan, he gave me
his real phone number. (Roaming charges are so expensive in China
that most people buy a local sim card to use.) He's quite cute and
very tall though from a checking out the character of some guy I'm
flirting with I'm somewhat perturbed to hear the reason he looks like
a rider but isn't is because he's currently sitting out a two year
ban.

In China what was it and how bad must it have been to get him a two
year ban?

I fell asleep reading another one of the books Michael Robb brought
me. It's nice that he brought me books but they are not just girly
books, they are also depressing girly books.

Some pictures...

http://www.chineseye.com/path-users-...id=1406 .html

And you might notice a familiar name at
http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php?...an08/hainan084

Somehow when we had gone to pick the laundry up the night before Li
Kai and I managed to leave a bag full of Carol's things on my sofa.
As a result she had all the underwear and socks she needed but no
shirts or shorts.
Oops.

Thus, the first order of the day was to go back to my place and pick
up clothes. This proved harder than would be expected as the traffic
closures were just beginning and a Chinese city with traffic closures
going on anywhere is an absolute nightmare of gridlock but we made it
home, got the stuff, and headed out again, hoping, since it was
already 9:30 that we could get out of the city and onto the expressway
before the race did. Although the loop through Lingao would mean that
we would have a chance to bridge the gap it would be exceptionally bad
form if the car carrying the secretariat staff ended up leaving after
the convoy.

Passing the train station mere minutes ahead of the lead police car I
waved at my friends from Kaituozhe. As soon as the sweeps bus went by
they were planning to start riding. No one in the race would be able
to see that they were following and no one outside the race would know
that they weren't supposed to be there. It was a brilliant plan for
getting to ride the stage. I knew about it since my friend Feng Quan
had originally been planning to ride with them but, owing to my
scoring him a place in the Panasonic team car, was instead someplace
much much cooler. All he needed to do was wash bikes. Much as I
personally loathe washing bikes I'd do it for the right to sit
underneath a pile of wheels in the backseat of a team car in an
international race.

However, while I possess the ability to get someone else in, I've done
too good a job at being office staff and office staff I will stay.

In Chengmai we were in a rather inexplicable hotel. It was too nice
for being as middle of nowhere as it was. Considering the size of the
place it probably got a 3 star on the Chinese scale though it was much
nicer than some places which I've been which are ranked 4 and even 5
Chinese stars. I couldn't get any kind of clear answer as to why such
a nice (and new) hotel was where it was because, notwithstanding that
it wasn't within an urban area, the nearest urban area wasn't exactly
the sort that one can imagine supporting a hotel of that size and
shine.

A group of schoolkids from the nearby village were led out to the road
to stand in straight lines, wave flags, and beat drums. They had no
idea. When the first few riders from Jelly Belly threw their empty
bidons to the ground, the kids let them lie. They thought they were
garbage. I picked one up from the ground and loudly exclaimed that
"this isn't garbage" and started to hand it to a little kid only to
have it grabbed by the teacher who then held it behind his back sort
of pretending to not have it in case anyone noticed and took it away
from him. I then went across the road and picked the other bidon out
of the gutter and threw it into the crowd where, after a squabble, one
lucky boy got it.

While the teacher (and the police) wanted them to stand in a straight
line, wave their flags, and beat their drums I had other ideas. First
I taught them to hold their hands out to the passing riders while I
yelled for them to "give the kids a high five". Then I taught them,
in chorus, to yell "high five high five high five" as the riders
approached. I got them into a nice ragged echelon where a rider could
go by and slap thirty hands in a row without any issue. The teacher
kept trying to get them back in their straight line and it kept not
working because another rider would come by and I'd yell out to the
kids to stick their hands out for their high fives.
Everyone loved it.

After ten rounds or so of this one of the police officers came over
and yelled at the teacher for his failure to keep the kids in a
straight flag waving drum beating line. Silence fell over the crowd
and they moved back onto the grass. I then walked up to the police
officer, put my hands on my hips, stared him in the eye and said "I
told the kids to stand there," followed by yelling at the kids "come
on back".
"I told them to stand by the side of the road"
"The riders like it. The kids like it. Everyone likes it."
"They must stand by the side of the road."
"No." "Kids, come on back."
"Stop that!" and they stopped for a moment.

There was some more back and forth including gesturing at my staff
badge and a round of who-do-you-think-you-ares with me trumping his
"I'm a police officer and I say no" with "I'm the head translator for
the organizing committee and a professional sporting events organizer
at her fifth bike race and I say yes".

The kids stayed in their ragged echelon of "high five high five" for
another five or six rounds of riders coming by until, eventually, the
head of the Chinese Cycling Association came by in a car and got out
and yelled at the police and the teacher for failing to keep them in a
straight drum beating flag waving line.

At which point I decided it was a good time to slink off unnoticed
into the crowd.

Mr. Cai might have been totally wrong about the children being
"disruptive" but I have no trump cards I can pull against his ability
to make me unwelcome at future events.

Dinner was good and after a mostly uneventful afternoon and evening
featuring little more than coffee and results distribution I shared a
beer with the Czech rider whose name and team I probably ought to
remember cause he's some kind of champion but one eventually gets to
the point where they've rubbed shoulders with so many bignames that it
stops causing gee wows.

With some of my pictures at
http://www.chineseye.com/path-users-...id=1406 .html

No cyclingnews credit for me this stage, but my friend Song Guoqiang
took some of the pictures and, so far as I know, although he has been
a professional photographer for years and years and years, this is his
first time getting photo cred on an English website.

I had known from the first week that I was employed by the Organizers
that I would have no position in the convoy. It was made very clear
to me that I had become too good at the whole "being in the office"
thing and, as a result, would spend my entire race "being in the
office."

This did not stop me from hoping that I would somehow manage to weasel
my way into at least one stage.

Even when I had to interview the liaisons who would be taking the job
that I desperately wanted to have, I still hoped.

I set my goals on the fifth stage, Chengmai – Tunchang – Qiongzhong –
Danzhou. By that point the race would be well underway and the others
would know how to do their jobs so I had a very slight chance of
convincing them that they were good enough that I could spend a
morning running away to the circus.

Li Kai agreed almost immediately.

The commissaire whose car I wanted to be in agreed to.

As did the translator who would be sharing her back seat with me.

Wang Xiangzhou was next and everything was perfect. Perfect I tell
you.

Except that he wanted me to ask Director Ye's permission and Ye said
"no".

Since Chinese leaders aren't especially in the habit of listening to
the questions that people ask and since Ye had, in fact, managed to
only say that my job was important and that the Chief Com's car (not
the one I was asking to be in at all) had no empty seats, it would
have been very simple to pretend that I hadn't really understood what
he meant.

From a pure "doing exactly what I was told to" point of view, I could
get away with going in Com 2's car.

From a "Marian is an American" point of view, I could get away with
going in Com 2's car.

But I knew that if I did the people who had given me permission to do
so, the people who weren't Americans, the people who weren't
graciously agreeing to work at less than a fifth their regular salary,
the people who work for the government year round, the people who were
my friends ... they would bear the brunt of my breaking the rules.

And that was something I couldn't do.

So I found myself at 9:00am in the car on the expressway to Danzhou.

As if to make up for missing the stage I actually had work to do when
we got to the hotel. I've been living in China for 6 years at this
point. For 6 years I have been making snarky comments whenever I come
across bad English. For 6 years I have generally been ignored. The
Harvest Qilin Hotel in Danzhou was different. Within minutes of my
commenting that their very large, very expensive sign detailing the
costs of various services in the business centre had a number of
mistakes they were ripping it off the wall.

Having done that, they now gave me the entire menu for lunch, dinner,
and breakfast and asked me to make signs with the correct English
names for everything that would get a sign. I wrote signs for "Bike
Wash," "Halal Food," and "Medical." I wrote signs for "Sweet and Sour
Chicken" and "Onion Rings."

Once the teams arrived there was the usual flurry of activity and
copying and stuff. I got to translate the Jury Communique again
before getting a chance to get off work and go swimming. I'd already
changed into my bikini and was just stopping by the lobby to leave my
phone on charge and make sure people knew where I was when someone had
a brief emergency and had to run off and I had to sit there for twenty
minutes wearing a swimsuit.

I got way too many wisecracks on the "new staff uniform".

After my swim I went for dinner with my friends Joe and Anna who live
in Danzhou and a friend of their's from Sanya. Although a tropical
island might not seem like the right place to do it, Joe and Anna
manufacturer carbon fiber ski equipment for export and after dinner I
brought them back to the bike room so they could drool over all the
things that other people are doing with carbon. I swear Joe must've
spent about twenty minutes just looking at this one wheel mentally
reverse engineering it.

The day ended uneventfully in a hotel room that, being from the same
hotel management chain, looked eerily too much like the room my boss
put me in for the seven months I lived in Sanya.

With my pictures at:
http://www.chineseye.com/path-users-...id=1406 .html

With a certain familiar name as part of the writing credit and my
friend Song Guoqiang's pictures at:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php?...an08/hainan086

One of the riders from the Danish National Team had had a fever two or
three days before and, although he felt fine enough to keep riding,
the Chinese doctors disagreed. On the first day after he abandoned he
did the sensible thing that any cyclist would do and left an hour
before the race, riding on his own, taking the bumpy back roads that
were the most direct way to the next stage. I don¡¯t know what he did
the second day. Perhaps he rode again. Perhaps not. I know from my
experience at Qinghai that some races don¡¯t just frown on riders who
are not actively in the field getting on the road but actually forbid
it. This, the third day, he was in the backseat of our car.

It was nice to have another cyclist to talk to and I forewent my usual
in-car nap such that, the moment we got to the hotel I immediately
went to sleep on the sofa in the lobby.

I recall being nudged two or three times and asked if I wanted my key
but, as this would have required waking up for the mere purpose of
going back to sleep again, I ignored them and slept on.

When I did wake up I decided to head down to the finish line. It was
reasonably close to the hotel and I was sure, with 45 minutes to go
before the estimated fastest arrival time that there would be no
problem actually getting to see some racing today, unlike the day
before when getting there five minutes after the fast time meant
getting there two minutes too late.

For every person I saw walking in the direction away from the finish
line there were another twenty people walking in the direction of the
finish line. The crowds went beyond huge, beyond enormous, beyond
anything easily describable until only the Chinese word È˺£ "sea of
humanity" seemed appropriate. Out on the road on the way in to town I
had seen groups of students clad in yellow t-shirts with red caps
walking out and I'd thought, from the sheer number of them that they
were the crowd. I was wrong. They were organized by the government
but they were not the crowd.

They were the crowd control.

Every five minutes or so a police vehicle drove up and down the road
blaring on a bullhorn first in Chinese and then in Hainanese ¡°Do not
cross the street. Crossing the street is not allowed. The cyclists
will be arriving soon. It is very dangerous to cross the street. Do
not cross the street. Crossing the street is not allowed.¡±

Of course there was still the occasional person who felt the need to
run very very quickly across but, for the most part, even though the
barriers were little more than red string in places, the crowd was
well behaved and did not push or shove.

And then the motorcycles and other vehicles started to arrive.
Punctuated only by the occasional low cheer as something new showed up
the crowd fell silent except for the beating of drums.

I¡¯ve seen more than a few finishes but I¡¯ve rarely managed to see them
from the finish line. They were flying low almost ten minutes ahead
of the estimated fast time in a bunch sprint and it was pure
unadulterated magic. Being as I conveniently managed to skip all
those fussy intermediate steps and went straight to working at major
international events now I finally begin to understand what being a
race fan is all about.
Wow.

Chinese food doesn¡¯t really work as a buffet and, as this hotel had
decided to serve one table at a time, there was a marked increase in
the quality of the food if you were adventurous enough to discover
that the gelatinous looking white stuff with chunks of something was
fried bamboo shoots or were at all interested in very large fish
heads.

The middle of a race is not the time to be adventurous with your food
choices and although the food was much better than it had been at any
other time since the race had begun most of the riders were obviously
not especially interested. In one of those ¡°oh my god, I don¡¯t
believe they actually listened to me¡± moments I made an off the cuff
remark about comfort food and was astonished when, at dinner, the
hotel did a fast food run and also served up fried chicken and chicken
burgers from Do & Me.

After dinner a bunch of the guys set off fireworks. They¡¯d bought
rather a lot of them and were completely unready for the total
nonchalance with which the Chinese treat explosions. There were more
people stopping to watch the white people watching the fireworks (and
ask for their autographs once they realized they were from the race)
than there were people watching the fireworks.

I stayed up very very late talking with some of the CCA officials.
They aren¡¯t all that much older than me (in fact two of them turned
out to be the same age as me) and, coming from Beijing, even if they
do work for the government, they share a worldview much more similar
to my own than that of most people in Hainan.

Only one picture but it's a cool one
http://www.chineseye.com/path-users-...id=1406 .html

And some familiar names on http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php?...an08/hainan087

Once again there was a rider in the car with us. Saying hello I
cheerily let him know that he was in luck, as three of the four of us
already in the car were English speakers. He looked blankly at me and
slowly said "I can't speak English."

So we ignored him for the rest of the morning and spoke only Chinese.

Not quite but close enough anyways. Periodic attempts at sign
language and speaking very slowly were tried but they failed. Jack
kept using the timeworn method of SPEAKING LOUDLY AS IF THE OTHER
PERSON IS DEAF but it, rather unsurprisingly, completely failed to
work.

The road that we took to Wuzhishan would make a great KOM point—solid
fourteen kilometers of mountain with this one bit, right near the top,
where the ridgeline somehow allows for a bridge where you can look off
into infinity in both directions. Problem is that many of the great
roads like Yinggeling mean not taking other great roads or aren't
convenient distances between places that have hotels or food or, in
some cases, other roads.

We'll figure it out eventually I'm sure.

It would turn out to be an interesting stage in the way of that not
actually Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times." One of
the riders from Panasonic hit a pig and had to go to the hospital with
internal bleeding and if that weren't enough, some Wujing armed
military police asshole bullied his way past some poor grunt and onto
the course and decided to drive his jeep up Atuoling at 50kph while
the riders were descending at 100. Other than some almost certainly
soiled bike shorts there were no casualties but, if there had been
although it probably wouldn't have been diplomatic incident level bad
it still would have been a right cluster**** of trouble.

As if the day's events weren't going swimmingly enough, it seemed that
although I'd been sending the results out every evening and although
CyclingNews and the journalist from Taiwan and the journalist from
Thailand and everyone else who had asked me to send them results was
getting them, the one place they weren't arriving was the one place
they absolutely most needed to arrive.

One of the coms had given Jack someone's personal email address the
night before and everything had been emailed all over again and still
hadn't arrived. The had been no bounce message but there hadn't been
a bounce message from the rankings@ address either and there was also
no "we got it" message. Figuring that maybe it was because Jack's
email address is @163.com and a free email account from China stood a
very good chance of being on a blacklist, it was back to my gmail
account and with a secret spam filter avoiding codeword inserted at
the end of each message.

But now the internet wasn't working and we still had no way of telling
whether or not it had arrived.

Thanks for the reporting Marian.

Tom Kunich cyclintom@yahoo. com wrote:
Thanks for the reporting Marian.

Aye, it's an interesting read.

--
Dane Buson -
"I can't see a conspicuous evolutionary advantage in being good at
higher mathematics. " -- James Riden in the Monastery

I somehow managed not to change the subject for Stage Seven. Final
entry.

It should have pictures but, as of the time that I'm posting it it
doesn't yet.

http://www.chineseye.com/path-users-...id=1406 .html

Li Kai was in a bad mood. Being a civil servant as well as being the
person officialy in charge of the secretariat he took everything going
right very very seriously.

It is ridiculous to leave at 8:40 when the race doesn't even start
until to 10:00 so I've been working on 8:40 as a general goal by which
all our bags should more or less be ready rather than the must be on
the road goal that Li Kai has. I am not a morning person. I have a
reputation for not being a morning person. While it is technically
possible, under extreme circumstances, to convince me to be on time
for something in the morning, I prefer not to. There eventually comes
a time when I've been doing my job sufficiently well enough
sufficiently long enugh that people learn to cope with my inability to
reliably be anywhere before 9:30.

It's amazing how successful I've been at this. One would think that I
would eventually annoy the morning people but they eventually come to
realize that working with me at 10:00 is a far more pleasant
experience than working with me at 8:00 and the clock really isn't so
important that they want to deal with me when I'm being cranky.


It was now 9:40. The race was starting in twenty minutes. By Li
Kai's schedule we should have already been on the road for an hour.
Even by my schedule we should have already passed the first KOM and be
well on our way. Instead, we were still just outside the hotel
parking lot.

Li Kai blamed me and Carol. Said our tardiness had flustered him.
And being flustered was why he locked the keys in the trunk. Not that
being flustered or late or any of that was a good reason for how both
sets of keys managed to be there, and not that kicking the tires, or
snarling at us, or looking despondent at the guys who were trying to
break into the car with a wire coathanger was an especially good way
of dealing with it.

I tried to convince him that the importance of having a member of the
secretariat at the race office at the end of the stage was
sufficiently important that I really ought to ride in the (empty)
front seat of one of the Neutral Service Vehicles.

It wasn't really a very good time to be trying such tactics and all he
did was glare at me.

9:50. The car is open now. A police escort has taken us to the shop
that broke us into the vehicle so we can get an official receipt for
the 80rmb spent. No receipt no reimbursement. To my mind this is not
the right time to be getting receipts. Either forget the 80rmb or
take a normal non-official payment receieved slip, but, Li Kai is a
civil servant. He's been indoctrinated in doing things the right way.

10:06. The race starts with a two kilometer neutralization. We are
one kilometer ahead of the racers. A flock of motorcycle marshals
riding fast streams around the car. They've got to spread out and
find their various assigned corners and dips and stand with their
flags waving danger danger danger. I imagine if I squint that I can
actually see the peleton behind us.

10:15. We've just gone past the first KOM. It's only a Category 3 so
it won't slow the racers down too much but we've got an internal
combustion engine on our side and unless we get a flat tire or engine
trouble we'll be fine. Coming through this late the roads are already
well lined with spectators. I've ridden my bike on this road many a
time and seen not a soul. It is as if they have appeared out of the
trees. How many villages are hidden back there?

10:45. The motorcycle marshals are leapfrogging ahead of us again.
Less than before. This time there is a photo-moto with then.

11:30. We've made it to the hotel. It being Sanya there are no signs
that anyone has any idea that any kind of bike race thing is going on
but, of course, they aren't expected to come by for another 30 minutes
or more and in a city people don't come out and stand by the side of
the road. Mostly though I think it is because Sanya doesn't make an
effort to tell people that the race is happening.

At the hotel we have no internet (which is why this entry is being
written nearly a week after actual events). This lack of internet
goes on and on and on and on. We manage a brief interlude where the
media center actually has internet for about 30 minutes but they just
can't get their act together. People in the know (i.e. people who
speak Chinese) eventually stream off to other hotels and to internet
bars in the city to get their work done.

The food at closing ceremonies is a disappointment. I, like many
other people, compensate by not actually eating the food. There is
beer instead. Beer is good. Four bottles of beer is maybe not so
good. Especially not when they are followed by a glass of vodka. And
a Jack and Coke. And a Kahlua and Cream. And exactly how many times
did I toast with the motorcycle guys?

The race is over.

My job here is done.

Until next time.