2011 Cup of China Blog #1

Hi everybody,

Myself and Penny are really pleased to have been asked to write a blog for you all, so here’s our first installment about our first few days in Shanghai:

Our trip began with a 14-hour-and-50-minute flight from Newark to Shanghai. It was a long flight, but we were both kept entertained by the interesting people we were sat next to. Penny happened to be sat next to a Japanese artist whose work is mainly inspired by live male nude models. I was sat next to a very talkative antique collector. I missed out on watching some of the movies I planned to watch, but luckily enough I got plenty of sleep in between the lengthy chats.

We landed in Shanghai around 2 p.m. local time, and after travelling to and getting settled into the hotel, we started a battle with ourselves not to go sleep until a reasonable time. We therefore started trying to keep ourselves occupied by doing a variety of different “tactics” to keep ourselves awake. These included going to the gym in the hotel for 45 minutes followed by eating dinner with some members of Team USA who were also extremely tired and having the same problems we were experiencing. I also got an empty bottle thrown at my head by Penny whilst I was “meditating” after dinner — she thought I was asleep! Then finally once we were almost dropping off to sleep we forced ourselves to take “tactical” showers to wake ourselves up and stretch out another half an hour of time before finally getting to sleep.

Today started with an amazing breakfast at the hotel, which included everything you could possibly want for breakfast and more. There were all the usual things that you would expect like your eggs, bacon and toast, but also a section that included ice cream! Among the flavors were mango, lemon and green tea! I did try the mango flavor actually and it was very nice!

Our practice was in the afternoon so after breakfast we went for a quick walk through the streets around the hotel. The streets were very busy with plenty of bikes and scooters! There were lots of interesting sights including a baby in a wooden baby seat strapped to his dad’s back that looked like it had been cleverly made for him. We also saw a brand that was clearly a copy of Adidas sport shoes with all the same designs that we see back home. I can’t remember what the brand was called but we know it began with a ‘W’ so we’ll call it “Wadidas” for now.

Finally our practice was at 3:15 in the afternoon at the very impressive Oriental Sports Centre in Shanghai. Apparently it was previously used to host the World Swimming championships in June this year but has recently been turned into an ice arena! Practice went well and we are excited to show our new programmes this season!

Anyway that’s enough for today, Penny will write tomorrow after the short dance! I hope you enjoyed a little insight into our first few days at our Grand Prix in China.

-Nick.