Date: February 15, 2013
Team: Myself + “Straits Cup” Tour Team
Duration: 5 Days
Type: Business Trip/Guided Tour
SOT:
Crazy - Simple Plan
I received an invitation from my drum coach Mr. Dong to the “Straits Cup” competition. On January 2 of 2013, I achieved 1st place at the drum competition in Suzhou. Under Mr. Dong’s suggestion, I planned to head to Xiamen that winter holiday to participate in the national competition, plus a 3-day tour in Xiamen/Kinmen. I thought this may be a good idea since me and my family did not have any plans for that winter, so I went. Not only would it allow me to kill some time by traveling to some places I’d never been to, I also got a chance to competitively play drums again and that’s fun. The tour company paid for all my travel and hotel, and oh yeah, I was going there by myself. It’s my first time traveling on my own and technically my first business trip ever, I would say. More or less, it stressed me a little bit at the beginning haha. There’s only a few photos of this trip. I almost never appeared in the photos because they were all taken by me. However, that’s when I trained myself to take photos while traveling.
The hotel in Xiamen for my stay:
It’s a 5-star hotel, mmm yummy!
The lobby was arranging and organizing the competition event and rooming. I was rooming with Lee, who’s also from my hometown Suzhou and he’s an Erhu player.
Two days later, the event started. I was playing drum for the song “Crazy” by Simple Plan. When it came to the bridge part, I panicked and made some mistakes. Eventually it got me a Gold award, the second award after Super Gold. Honestly, I was pretty satisfied.
For the remaining days, we were exploring Xiamen as a team, including Kulangsu Island. We were traveling with a huge shuttle.
Finally, we arrived at Kinmen, where the local stuff got pretty similar to Taiwan. We had to exchange our currency to Taiwan dollar, which I thought was so inconvenient. All the text switched to traditional Chinese which was interesting.
And sometimes, I felt Taiwan dollars were so valuable!
Took some shots by the flight back to Shanghai, and that’s a wrap.
To be honest, this trip wasn’t that exciting for me as a teenager. I saw this as a training trip for me to learn how to survive in the outside world by myself, well, sort of. In the end, it didn’t impact me that much. I had a team looking after me, so there wasn’t much for me to worry about. It’s just that almost all the other kids went with their family except for me, I was a little lonely as time went on. But overall, it felt like a school trip haha.
(By the way, this might be unironically one of the fakest trophies I’ve ever seen):
2013 was full of Chinese journeys, next up brings us to that summer. It's a big one - North-east!
Comments