Long ago in China, there was a poet named Qu Yuan who was accused of treason. He then threw himself into a river to protest and drowned. Then the local people, who admired him, threw lumps of rice into the river to feed the fish so that they wouldn't eat his body. There is now a special glutinous rice dumpling, zongzi (which apparently has such an extremely high calorie count that the government warns against overeating at this time of year.) The local people also paddled out on boats, either to scare the fish away or to retrieve his body. This last part is what I'll be doing next week! (Minus the dead poet in the water...)My school (and all the other branches) is large enough to have a team for the 20+person boat, so we have been practicing each Sunday morning for the past 6 weeks. First we started in the 'bucket' - basically a large metal shipping container filled with water with seats on the outside. It was conveniently located on a grungy concrete slab beneath a major freeway overpass where we shared the space with resting taxis, sleeping dogs, and a ballroom dance class just prior to our practice.
Very multi-use! We practiced our technique in this for 2 weeks so that when we got in the actual boats, we could make full use of our open-water practices. The race is sponsored by the Taipei city government and they own all the carved wooden boats, but to keep things fair for all the teams, they don't release the boats for practice until 4 weeks before the competition so that everyone has the same time to get ready. It's been really fun so far, and the festival is next weekend. In previous years, our team has made it past the first and second heat, but never to the third, so that's the goal for this year. Hopefully all goes well for race day!
