The trip to Beijing, China

I went to the Arlanda airport in Stockholm where I live to meet the other go players that would go with me to China. I was a bit early when I arrived at 15:25. I got directly to the desk where I was supposed to check in. I looked around but noone from my group was there. I have just met a few of the players on tournaments so when I stand there I had to guess and imagine if this person is a go player or maybe that one.... But I found noone. So after fifteen minutes I started to get a little nervous. Maybe I am at the wrong spot? So I called Myao who told me he was in a car and would be there in 5-10 minutes and that the other guys waited att the check in. Still I could not locate anyne. So I waited ten minutes more and still no Myao. But ok... if Myao is late it might not matter if I am at the wrong place. He can call me if he misses me. Then... just a couple of minutes later a couple of guys walked up to me. I did not recognise them at first but then I saw that Chili was one of them. I did not match the face from my memorybank at first because he had a nice shave. He usually has a short beard durng touraments. And then Myao with familly popped up and we waited in line to check in.

When we got into the plane I was seated in line with four others from the gang on my right side and a chineese girl on my left side. The plane took of and after a while we got someting to drink. I got some coke and the girl next to me got some red whine. After that they served us some food. We could shoose between fish and meat and I ordered meat because I am often suspicious of fish. I regretted myself soon after I tasted the meat and I saw how the fish looked like. Well... too bad... I ate moste of it anyway. I was chilling and looking around when suddenly somethng beside me happened. I looked to my left and saw that the girl had spilled all her whine over the tray and it flooded over to her lap. Her napkin shortly got all soked in whine so I handed over my unused napkin. That helped a bit but now her jeans was all wet and also the seat she was sitting in. I felt sorry for her.

Later she started to talk to me about my trip and I then asked her about hers. She has been an exchange student at the university in Stockholm the last ten months studying international economics. So after that we talked a lot during the rest of the flight. It was nice and the trip got shorter. Oh... I almost forgot to mention the breakfast at the plane. We got a small baguette with a lot of ham and tomatoes. Pretty good sandwich that we drank tea with. The girl next to me was about to take a look in her teacup by the window and managed to spill out the tea on her self. Just typical.... two times on the same flight! Such is life sometimes... For her defence I can say that when I managed to sleep four hours before my trip, she stayed up all night packing all her stuff and cleaning ot the appartment she had lived in fro the past ten monts. She took all of her student books with her and I was such a gentleman and helped her with that bag off the plane. Then she had a transfer to another plane to southern parts of China. I hope you had a nice flight!

All the go players got a private buss to our apartments. The first thing I noticed when I got outside in Beijing was the dirty air. It is foggy and you feel that the air you breath is not clean. I guess I'll get used to it but it will be nice to breath the clean swedish air agin.

I will be living with the three proffesional players in one appartment. The other guys are living in three (I think) other appartments in other buildnings. We have our classrom in one of the buildings as well. Then we directly started to play go for fun. I started to play against a german 1 dan. I took 6 stones of handicap and the game looked very well for me. We did not have time to finish because people wanted lunch.

So we went to a chineese restaurant (What a surprise!) and we ordered in different types of food that we picked freely from a spinning thing in the middle of the table. Many things were great but some I could do without. When everybody was completely full there where still half the food left on the table!

Right back to the classroom and play more go. This time I started a game against a canadian 14 kyu. I got two big corners and he had chance of a big area in the center. Then a chineese 9 kyu took over when he had to go away for a while. This chineese handled the situation great and got the center by sacrificing a rather big group of stones on "my" side where I had set upp for territory. So now I was behind. I faught hard to get into the center but it was really tough but I managed quite a bit. When I then in the end game desperatly tried to invade the chineese made an error and I killed a group of stones and reduced a big area. Resign and I won. Yeah!

Now when I've been writing this I will go back to the classroom and try to post it in this blog. Yes, I am writing this offline for the moment. Then I guess it is time to go out for dinner again.

(back in my appartment and about to go to bed) I had no good luck in posting this text to my blog. I could not connect to my server. It seems that China has cencored my webserver for some reason. I do not know why? Maybe because I got informaton about games and stuff. They have some kind of autofilter that reacts on certain words in a webpage. I got my friend Jones in Stckholm to test if my server is working and he said that it is working fine. I will see how I will solve ths problem. I think that contacting the cineese government will not be the right way to go. My problem is probably to small of an issue for them. If you have any suggestions. Please contact me and tell me what to do.

Well I can say a couple of words about the dinner we ate tonight. It was very good and extremely cheap. We had about ten dishes and beer. For that we payed 15 sek each. That is about $2. So far I have tasted everyting. Usually I am very careful about what I eat because I do not want to get forreign bacterias in my stomach that makes me sick. We will se how this turnes out. Now I feel fine exept that I am very tired. I have now been up for 32 hours. The night before 4 hours sleep. My head feels like cotton with a slight ache and my eyes are hurting.

I have just managed to get the airconditon in the appartment to work. It took me some time to find a remote control with chineese characters but I figured out what is on and off. Before I found the remote controls I tried some knobs on the walls but I guess they just adjust the temperature. Another problem that I have not solved so far is the refridgerator. I can not get it to start. The same for the water heater. So I have warm water to drink and cold water to shower in. I hope the pro teachers comes later tonight and get these things working. Else I have to get that fixed first thing in the morning.

See you later! :o)