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.