Qingdao: So much to explore

Dear Friends, Family and Fans,

Finally some news from the Qingdao trainers, we’ve had an exciting first week as due to the rain, thunderstorms and heavy winds, therefore we have not been able to teach the kids every day. Some days they just don’t show up because they decided for themselves not to come. But off course we’ve had some lessons and off course also a couple of days with sun and perfect winds. We taught them a lot with the help of the OP-simulator Which is by the way a fantastic invention. We’ve covered almost all the basics of sailing during our lessons on the water and during our shore-based lessons we have taught them the 4 basic sailing knots and some useful information about the weather and safety on the water.
for example today we couldn’t sail due to the weather conditions again and most of all the state the beach and the boats were left in after last night’s storm. (check the pictures) All morning we helped tidying up the beach and the boats (dirty and tiring work) and the kids learned from our weather talk and decided for themselves to stay home/at school.

Due to the occasional bad weather we have had some more free time to spend exploring the big big city which was really great because there is so much to see and do and yet still so much to explore. So many restaurants and so much nightlife although everything closes at two o’clock because of the Olympic test event. (the Chinese really don’t know anything about sailors ;) )

Tonight is Dirk’s last night and tomorrow is our day official day off so that’s promising!!
Goodbye everyone and till the next update of our very interesting life ;)

Wieke Kimman and Dancker Bijleveld

we're back and gone again

dear friends and family,

Friday 27 July

Today was our very last day in Rizhao. In the morning we had a race with all the kids. 4 groups of 10 children. We placed marks on their right arm (A1,A2...,B1,B2,...,C1,C2,...,D1,D2,...). Everything went quite good and everybody was very pleased.
Afterwards we had lunch with our chinese sponsor, Mr. Ding, The President of the marina, Mrs. Joe and some other people. It as again a typical chinese lunch with jellyfishes, seecucumbers and others.
Then we had to hurry to the hotel where we had to take our bags. Mrs Joe bought us some gifts and told us that we were expected at the marina to say goodbye to everybody. Arriving at the marina, all the kids were there to say us goodbye, we said goodbye to everybody and to all our "friends" at the marina.
When we got in the car we were very happy to go back to Qingdao and meet our collegues there.

On the trip to Qingdao we took a chinese ferry, what an experience.

Arriving in Qingdao Dirk and the others recieved us in the appartment, which was very special lighted and very nice.
Our first night back in Qingdao was a real Qingdao night!

Saturday 28 July

After a few hours of sleep. We woke up because we had to go working at beach No 1. Arriving there the weather was bad, there was so much smog that we couldn't even see the sea. So Mr Ho (Chief of beach No 1) told us that we had a day off. We did some shopping for the appartment, and watched some movies on our huge flatscreen.

Sunday 29 July

Our official day off! Everybody had a long sleep untill 11 o'clock. Afterwards we went to "fake city" where Thomas got crazy about all the watches and Pia about the sunglasses, the handbags, the shoes... Dirk and Thomas even had to drag Pia out of the shoe department. Pia was a bit disapointed because in China shoe size 42 doesn't exist and all the chinese people were so extremely wondered when they saw Pia's feet that they even called their neighbours to come and have a look. After a tyring day we watched (again) some movies.

Monday 30 July -Thursday 2 August

These days we just trained the Qingdao Kids. Nothing special happpened. We made the 7 rules of sailing:
1st Rule: no crashing with the boats!
2nd Rule: Don't go on or off the water until we say so!
3rd Rule: no complaining you're sailing!
4th Rule: Don't get stuck in the jellyish nets!
5th Rule: Go back to the beach in direction of our blue tent!
6th Rule: No waterfights!
7th Rule: Always keep smiling!


Friday 3 August

Today there was a lot of wind and rain so we had a day off again. Luckily we had the day off, because we still had a lot off things to do (shopping, packing our bags, blogging, cleaning the appartment).
Tonight at 20.50 we have our flight to Beijing. Tomorrow we are goin to visit The Forbidden City and The Chinese Wall. Sleeping in The Raffel's will give us a good rest.
Sunday we will fly back to Amsterdam and then we will com back to Belgium.

We are very sorry about the late update for the blog. But we had some troubles to get internet. Their isn't internet available on the appartment and the internetin the office wasn't working as well untill now.

We want to thank everybody for giving us the opportunity for the lovely time we had in China. We also want to thank everybody of the NOCSP and CYBP and of the local marina's. Especially Dirk den Hollander and Thomas Annicq who have been wonderful managers for us. We hope we can come back next year and will have a great time like we had this year. These 5 weeks flew away, but the memories will stay! Thank you for this great experience.

Greetings,

Pia and Thomas

This week was quite hectic; we apologize for the missing updates…

Tuesday was the first day of lessons; most important job for us that day was just re-rigging 40 opi’s from the 80 we received from the marina. During the ceremony, the Chinese government wanted to show the public all the (totally rigged) boats. Badly enough they were probably rigged by the secretary or the kitchen staff, none of the knots were right and often half of the ropes were missing.
The afternoon we spend on teaching the kids how to rig the boats and some basic instructions on the simulators.

For the next day we made some serious plans, as we wanted to put the 80 kids in a structured way on the water, however (it is china, plans always change the last minute) the next day the promised buoys were not there nor were the motorboats. We had to reorganize and honestly, it was a bit chaotic…
Next day (Wednesday) we decided to go the Chinese way. That meant putting as many opi’s on the water as we could manage. We were very successful in this as we even exceeded the local trainers in number of boats on the water.

The next days we concentrated on the regatta on Sunday. Sometimes this meant giving up on children that were not standing a chance during the race.

The content of the days and the order of the extra activities the kids did are too hard to remember know. But one day we went with them to the n°2 school to hear the paralympic sailors and one other day (I thought Wednesday afternoon) the kids went to the Naval Museum in Qingdao.

A nice souvenir we have, was the price giving after the regatta. Thomas Annicq presented us during his speech. When we stood up, the 1000 kids in the auditorium applauded very enthusiastic. Afterwards we signed many T-shirts, even some teachers came to us asking for pictures and autographs.

Me (Jan) and Barbara are now traveling towards Weihai, hoping to get there a more organized and hopefully more relax week.

finaly sailing for the kids

after the meeting and the opening already a lot of things have changed. we were told last sunday we would get 158 kids, at number one beach. 550 kids would sail in the marina and 250 kids at some other beach. other than that we didn´t hear anything new at all at the meeting, except for a lot of Chinese words.

then the day before yesterday in the afternoon Taco suddenly felt hungry, in a strange way. after he ate some that got worse and when we were starting for our dinner, he suddenly decided to go back to the hotel. later he had some terrible diarrhea and had thrown up. the morning after that Dirk suddenly had the same. but after having some heavy shit and puking, they both felt good again and got back to business. they must have been eating something bad last Saterday night.

so this morning we could finally sail. there were about 70 kids on the beach and we wanted to get on the water as fast as possible, because we don´t have much time. that is why we had already rigged the boats and had done as much as possible, but it still took quite some time before they where on the water. Taco went first in an optimist and about four kids followed. in the mean time, the other Chinese coaches put their kids on the water as well. that was a bit too much and in no time their was a chaos. they were all sailing through the other group and some kids capsized. we called back our kids and thought of a different plan. we made a mark of some life jackets and decided to put only put three kids on the water on the same time and let them sail around the mark and then return. after a while that went pretty well and only a few capsized and we had everything under control. for tomorrow we´ve got to make a different plan, so we can put more kids on the water in the same time.

when we were done we were all tired and went back to the hotel for a shower, after we heard these 70 kids are the only kids we will get this week in stead of 158. the rest couldn´t swim. that should make it a lot easier.

(This text was written yesterday)
Yesterday we participated in the ceremony for the opening of the mega teaching program here in Qingdao.
It was immense, 1000 kids, 1000 rigged optimists, lots of music, pigeons, and many other official things. Impressive!
That day was concluded with a small tour on one of the yachts. In the afternoon the kids went to school number 2 ( the new one) which was too far away for us to go and visit. The free time we had, we used to put our heads together during a meeting with our local chief at n°1 beach.





Today was the second day of the 8 day program in Qingdao (The 1000 kids in 8 days).
We teach 160 kids at beach n°1. The day consisted of an introduction to the water (handled by the local sport teachers) and in the afternoon an introduction to sailing. Apparently some of the kids were already scared off by the sea, so in the afternoon we only got 120 - 140 kids to train how to sail. We divided the groups in two, so that the local trainers did the rigging and de-rigging and that we could do the theory part (tacking, gybing, and safety). Surprisingly all went fine...

They all wear black neoprene shirts from wrist till ankle. Some were fainting during the day, but still they had to wear it. I heard this kids are selected on two criteria, one is the ability to swim (duh), and the second one are their grades.

Tomorrow half of the group is going into the water, which might mean 60 boats in the water. This is however not sure yet because we had thought off dividing the whole group in 4 and only putting one fourth on the water and working in shifts.

More pictures can be found on this site.

D day

after two long nights we just woke up and now we prepare for a meeting we will have in the afternoon. this will be a meeting for all the trainers about (we hope) everything that will happen next week. who are all the trainers, which location will we get, what translators will we get. (we hope) the 600 boats will be delivered today.
we also hope we will finally get a serious program for the whole week. we still don´t know how much time we will get with the kids and how many it are going to be.

we will hear it today, we will tell all when we know it.

back in business: viva la chaos!

After having a day off yesterday, this morning there was no training either. At nine we met Sören, a german coach who will be training here a well. We explained him the whole situation during breakfast and when that was done Barbara (babbala) and Taco went to the tv-tower and Jan back to computer city. Yesterday he accendentely deleted his china maps for the navigation system, so he went back to the shop to get a new copy. We met close to the tower and climbed down to some nice neighborhood and small park closeby. For lunch we bought some cookies in a very small shop on the street and we took a taxi back to the marina.

We told the translators to rig the boat, but then they told us they had no time. They couldn´t tell why yet, untill we heard we were supposed to sail in the big(ger) boats with some chinese families, who would be very important in the governement. We got a bit pissed of because that wasn´t in our plan and we needed all the time that was left. Plus, we didn´t really feel like entertaining people just for one day. Then somebody told us we could stick to our program, but when we went on with the translators, we were told again that we were really needed. So we thought of a compromise and figured out that the four best sailing translators would go in the bigger boats, with some other chinese, and two of us would guide them in the motorboat and one of us (babbala) would train the other two translators. This was really exciting for the translators, but they did great and it was a good test for next week. They clearly passed the test.

Now it is getting exciting for next week. 600 optimist still have to be delivered and a lot af things still have to be arranged. but we will just keep on training.