DuanWuJie - Dragon Boat Festival

As part of the DuanWuJie festival there are Dragon Boat Races. When Du Yuan commits suicide by throwing himself in the lake, the villagers supposedly race to keep the fish from eating his body by feeding the fish zongzi(sticky rice packets). This is all unbelievable but a good story always has some fuzzy details. So this supposed race to save his body from the fishes is the motivation for the Dragon Boat races.(You can't get into Heaven without a complete body, I think the Catholics also believe this.)

In Tainan(and in most Taiwanese cities) there are Dragon Boat races. In Tainan, almost any school or organization that can get 20 rowers can sponsor a team. At the Cheng Da Chinese Language Institute we sponsored 3 teams. We has a few practices and our teams are made up of a very international groups. My team had maybe 5 Frenchmen, 5 Spanish speakers, 4 Americans, Koreans, Thais, ... Outside of class we all revert to our mother language instead of Chinese. So our boat could have been called "The Boat of Babel".

We had tons of fun and that was the main point. We won our first heat against two other boats. But I have to report that one team was a high school girls team( their high school boys team was good) and a team from Japan(they had good looking outfits). On the second day of competition we were smoked. The other two teams were boat lengths ahead of us at the finish.

Here's the equipment.

Here's my team.

Here's me.

This is from the first heat that we won, we are in the far lane. I am the last rower on the nearside.

These pictures were taken my one on one teacher.

This was great experience, I really appreciate her signing me up for this activity.