Dragon Boat Festival is a holiday in China, which commemorates a famous poet, Qu Yuan, who drowned himself in a river. People threw food into the water to keep the fish from eating his body. Now, people in China eat zongzi, sticky rice wrapped in leaves (you can think of them as the Chinese version of a tamale), and often watch a boat race in the evening.
My friend and Chinese tutor, Yuxin (the girl in red in the photo) invited me to go boating with her friends in University Town, located in the Songjian district of Shanghai. It took nearly an hour by metro before arriving at this suburb.
We met at the apartment of one of Yuxin's friends, a professor from Australia, before heading to the river. Near the university town is an area called "Thames Town", an area built to resemble an old English town, complete with cobbled streets and clustered, British-style buildings and we decided to paddle to it, fitting, I suppose, for a holiday relating to water and boats.
We soon realized one of the boats had a leak, so we waited on the dock until Steven (the Australian) could run back and get a patch, then pumped the boat up again. We thought we'd resolved our challenges for the day, but the wind kept getting stronger and stronger and by the time we set off, we were barely making any progress at all. The wind was made more difficult by the fact that we had an uneven number of paddles and if we paddled hard against the wind, the boat only spun in a circle.
We made it to Thames town, though, where we wandered around a bit before heading back in the rain.
We met with a few inconveniences, but as Chesterton said, "an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
My friend and Chinese tutor, Yuxin (the girl in red in the photo) invited me to go boating with her friends in University Town, located in the Songjian district of Shanghai. It took nearly an hour by metro before arriving at this suburb.
We met at the apartment of one of Yuxin's friends, a professor from Australia, before heading to the river. Near the university town is an area called "Thames Town", an area built to resemble an old English town, complete with cobbled streets and clustered, British-style buildings and we decided to paddle to it, fitting, I suppose, for a holiday relating to water and boats.
We soon realized one of the boats had a leak, so we waited on the dock until Steven (the Australian) could run back and get a patch, then pumped the boat up again. We thought we'd resolved our challenges for the day, but the wind kept getting stronger and stronger and by the time we set off, we were barely making any progress at all. The wind was made more difficult by the fact that we had an uneven number of paddles and if we paddled hard against the wind, the boat only spun in a circle.
We made it to Thames town, though, where we wandered around a bit before heading back in the rain.
We met with a few inconveniences, but as Chesterton said, "an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."