Energies in Asia & WCG

Energies

Australia3225 Posts

December 26 2009 11:51 GMT

This blog covers my Trip to China – WCG and my post WCG trip to Phuket. A month since I returned, better late than never. I have collapsed the majority of the photos into spoilers.

Apologies for any spelling or grammar mistakes, it is a massive pain trying to proof read something this long. You may also notice the tone changes throughout the blog, many bottles of beer and wine were consumed writing it. If I sound coherent, I was sober, angry - Beer. Mellow - Wine.

Free candy for anyone that makes it to the end!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Thank you, would you like some drinks to start?
I'll just have some water.
Sure thing, would you like that warm or hot?
“(Silence)...What?"
*long pause*
"On second thought, I'll have a COLD beer please"

This was definitely a fun and interesting year, both for a holiday and WCG. I departed Perth on the 8th of November heading for Chengdu China, Flight path - Perth -> Kuala Lumpur -> Beijing -> Chengdu

The flights were all as comfortable as economy can get, I had a 3-4 hour stopover in KL and I spent the time looking around at disgustingly expensive "duty free" shopping, I also enjoyed the worst cappuccino I have ever had in my life, it cost $12 from Starbucks.

Kuala Lumpur waiting for my transfer to Beijing. I spent an hour talking to a cute French girl who was living and working in Thailand, she was on her way home to visit family. =). I approached with “do I know you?” lol.

Kuala Lumpur

I arrived in Beijing and felt very awkward. I was wearing a light t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. Initially I was fine, but my flight did not have a corridor access way, we had to shuttle to the plane. It was about 3-4degrees Celsius and snowing, here I am freezing on the bus on the way to the plane with dozens of people staring at me trying to not laugh. We get onto the tarmac, slowest line onto the plane ever; I'm standing there freezing to death, half naked and getting snowed on. I had a security guard about 2 meters away from me pointing at my face and laughing. I was expecting summer... The promo videos showed summer dang namit!

Chengdu & WCG

I arrived in Chengdu, it was a lot warmer, I checked my WCG itinerary and messaged one of the refs who had already arrived to confirm hotel booking. Typically awesome WCG organisation, referee hotel had not been booked until the following day. So I took a cab to the cheaper of the two WCG hotels and paid my own way for the night.

I showered, got changed and headed out to the lobby, registration was already open for the players so I figured if I hangout in the lobby with a beer, a familiar face would eventually show up, and that they did. Caught up with a few familiars and a couple of new faces and headed out to meet with the other reefers for dinner.

18 Steps Hotel

18 Steps, player registration.

Dinner with other refs who had arrived early.

After a *few* beers

The next morning we all packed and headed out to the Holiday Inn where our WCG reservation had officially started. We somehow managed to get a bus, but it was a mission fitting everyone in, not to mention our entire luggage. We arrived at the Holiday Inn (Probably the best if not second best WCG hotel to date) for the official referee registration, received our badges and got a chance to catch up with all the other referees.

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

Our awesome little volunteers.

The guy in the red shirt and glasses is the grand final tournament coordinator, aka god.

They’re all so cute; you just want to keep them.

Holiday Inn player registration.

WCG (Hell) starts! We went out to the venue which was amazingly less than 5 min walk, our hotel was well located. If you see any WCG venue a couple of days before the opening ceremony you'd automatically freak out and wonder how they are ever going to get anything going. The place always looks busy yet deserted, most of the exhibitor stalls are only partially setup, there are incomplete wiring and lights everywhere and the stage is guaranteed to be incomplete, most of the computers are being setup and there are also usually some of the performing acts practising in some corner of the venue.

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

whoop!

performers practicing.

That evening we had the official referee meeting, typically it involves the tournament coordinators introducing themselves, and wishing everyone luck followed by the head referees briefing everyone on how the event is going to be run and explaining all the nitty gritty as well as answering any questions. It also gives everyone a chance to introduce themselves to the group. By now we are really only seeing 1-2 new faces each year. This year had a nice catch. We were given 300 volunteers by the city of Chengdu, all adorable university students, these guys were truly amazing. They were extremely excited to meet us and didn't hesitate to try to start conversations and ask questions. Their English was also surprisingly good. As for the help they provided, they did anything we asked of them, even going as far as getting us drinks or lunch if we had no time to leave our venue. I really miss those guys!

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

Joe – Referee Manager

At the end of the day Chengdu was probably one of the more successful WCGs yet, especially from an outsider view looking at the event. It was by far the largest WCG event to date, with the largest number of competitors and spectators it also had the largest setup. From an organisation point of view, the stress nearly destroyed us. We showed up to the venue on the 10th, there were only a couple of things I wanted my refs to do, check to make sure all computers for Starcraft were working, check to see that the network and sound are working, setup the computers to a private network so I could batch grab all the replays and get all the computers to join a few games and make sure they work. I guess there were sponsorship issues or something, Steelseries had replaced Logitech. Steelseries had supplied us with their base level keyboard/mouse/headset, and we were only given half as many peripherals as computers, straight off the bat that shit me, I don't like cheap sponsorship for such big events. That's fine I figured, most of the guys bring their own equipment.

"Alright, don't worry about that, lets just get these computers turned on and test them out"
*2 minutes later*
"Uhh, Armin.. None of them work, we're getting boot error messages"
"Lets see."
"Motherfuckers"
"None of the computers have windows ghosted on them"

We ran it by headquarters and basically get told "oops, sorry".

So everyone spent the next 5-6 hours ghosting windows off 12 USB HDDs onto hundreds of computers. We had plans for dinner reservations that night for 8pm, around 6pm we finally managed to finish everything, there was only a handful of us left when we were told none of the AMD practise computers had windows on them either. We were looking at about 5-6 of us, 60 computers and 12 HDDS.. With an average 14 minute ghosting time. "Fucking damn it, you couldn't have told us this shit a couple of hours ago?" "Fuck". I wasn't going to miss dinner. We started opening up half the computers, ghosted a bunch and ripped out the HDDs and used them to ghost the remaining, it cut installation time down to about 6-7 minutes. We finished up around 9pm, missed dinner. By the time we got back to the hotel, showered and got changed, everything had closed. A couple Counterstrike refs and I went down to the local supermarket, got a few drinks couple of packs of cookies and sat there eating "dinner".

The next morning, WCG had organised a panda exhibition, due to some delays we were told we'd only get an hour at sanctuary, so a few of us opted to check out the city and do some shopping instead.

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

Luckily there were no games on the 11th so we managed to test and workgroup all the computers and get them ready for the following day. As you guys are aware there were dozens of stage matches this year, I think between NeoTV and Main stage we had roughly 10 a day, more than any other game. The issue we had was that none of the stage matches were played at the time or order of the rounds, for example the 7th round stage match might have been played at the same time as round 2, I didn't have any of the match schedules on the 11th but I did have the stage match times. Admittedly this was partially my fault for not coming up with a system, I had decided to play it by ear. It was crazy. When you have 4 players disappear at the same time for two simultaneous stage matches and you're only 4 refs, you automatically lose 2 refs, you also have to try to play scheduled matches with the remaining players when their scheduled opponents are on stage, argh! We were hours behind on the first day, at times I was borderline about to cry from not knowing wtf to do. We had broadcasting constantly hounding us for the stage match players, not to mention thousands of pushy and rude Chinese spectators, it was doing my head in. On top of that we had players randomly leaving, or promising they would be back in "5 minutes" and not returning for an hour. To be fair the mess around wasn't the players fault so I couldn't start disqualifying everyone. Oh, did I forget to mention, during the hour of practise time the guys were suppose to get before their matches on the 11th... the power had gone out, just for Starcraft mind you. At the end of the day, we somehow survived and managed to get through it all.

That night I sat down with my refs. "Guys, we can't do that again, that was ridiculous". One of the refs turned the scheduled for the 12th into an Excel spreadsheet which made my life so much easier. The plan for the following day was basically that no one leaves the Starcraft area unless I say so, if you're more than 5 min late, yellow card. 10 Minutes Disqualified, it wasn't something I wanted to do, but I was sick of the players "I'm going to do whatever I want attitude". I should mention most of the guys are very mature and professional, but there are always a handful of cunts. We got all the players gathered around, explained the situation to them, I apologised to the group and did so to individuals throughout the day for not being able to leave to eat or smoke. My plan was to basically play any available game at the time. If the players for round 8 (5pm) match were available at 1pm, they were going to play. And if I had to play a round 1 match at round 8, so be it. We still had some issues with NeoTV stage disconnects and some peripherals not working but at the end, the day went exceptionally well. While we finished hours behind everyone else on the 11th, we were the first to finish on the 12th.

The rest of the week followed a similar pattern of smooth sailing and occasional rough waters but it was getting easier everyday as the event went straight from group stages to Round of 8.

The spectators, more suitably referred too as the merciless horde. This is something you wouldn't believe unless you witnessed. The Chinese spectators were what I like to refer to as blind fanatics, some knew why there were there and who they were supporting, but it almost seemed that the majority were just following the crowd, if they saw someone they thought was famous they horded him. We had people throwing pens, books and bundles of paper at Bisu yelling at him to sign it. Although he was use to attention I don't think even he was use to that sort of behaviour. At one point he was taunting the crowd by swinging back and forward on his chair towards them.

Bisu is by far the least humble progamer I have met over the years, polar opposite to players like Stork or Xellos. I quite liked that in him though, even if the little princess always made sure his hair looked good before starting his match, lol. Stork was quiet and professional as always and Jaedong is just adorable, always the likeable cool kid.

We organised walkie-talkies for all the head referees. We basically had to setup security escort groups for all the Korean Starcraft Players, PJ, and a bunch of the WC3 players. When transporting the players, we had to split them into 2-3 groups, we had at any point 4-10 referees along with team leaders and WCG press creating a circle around the players and moving them through this enraged crowd of spectators who were literally pushing and shoving into us trying to get to the players. We even had to escort them to the toilets. You haven't seen anything until you've seen 100 people trying to push into a toilet to take photos of PJ peeing. At one point during the PJ vs. Stork match an entire side wall of the Starcraft area almost caved in with the amount of people pushing against it, we had nearly a dozen people pushing back against it trying to keep the thing from collapsing. I remember the head PC ref over the walkie-Talkie one day. "Armin.. Honestly. This is not our job, I am nobody's pee guard"

It took a couple of days, but we managed to get quite proficient at our jobs and the rest of the event ran as smoothly as it could.

WCG Photographs

Emlary and Energies! ^_^ - I had to pull up my shirt, display my Teamliquid pony tank top to show who I am.

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

Represent! – VIP Seating.

Refs

Idra

White_Ra

Princess Bisu

The horde

Volunteer

Stork vs PJ – Spectators nearly collapsing the wall.

The horde

Back stage before Stork vs. Jaedong

Spectators during Stork vs. Jaedong match.

---

The food in China was amazing, you would never think to get such amazing textures and flavours with such minimalist ingredients, it’s one aspect I truly enjoyed., it was also rather healthy, if any of you guys have followed any of my blogs or fitness thread, you know I am into my health and fitness. For the first week in China I was eating anything and everything, but it was all Chinese food, not only did I not gain any weight, but if anything. I actually got leaner.

We also checked out a local karaoke with a few of the volunteers, it was around $50 for the room until 5am, and the drinks were quite cheap even though it was more expensive than other places, $2-3 a beer. There were also seedier karaoke bars were girls will join you for the duration of the night, singing and dancing but I didn’t get a chance to attend one of those.

And lets not forget the amazing massages, extremely cheap full body and foot massages leaving you feeling totally relaxed and body stoned every time.
--

The nightclubs deserve their own section here. An interesting and fun experience is the least I could call it. They are somewhat similar to standard western clubs, but with a slight catch, it almost seems like they mixed a night club with bear in the big blue house. You might be standing there having a drink with people dancing all around, suddenly all the lights flash, the t dancing stages clear and dirty dancers get on, that’s fine. Next they hop off and people jump back on to dance. This goes on for a bit and the same thing happens, lights start to flash, everyone clears off and a rapper jumps on stage and starts singing, followed by performance dancers and more dirty dancing. This all seems fun and exciting until you start getting costumed children’s characters jump onto stage and start singing Disney jingles to the sound of techno music. By that point you’re not quite sure whether this is all happening or you’re just really drunk.

Speaking of alcohol, the standard beer in China is 3.5% which means none of the locals can hold their drink. You can honestly down 10 beers and only just start to feel tipsy while small Chinese guys around you are stumbling around. The alcohol percentage is respectively low for spirits as well.

One thing we discovered which meant we were getting drunk for free was that in night clubs, when it starts to quieten down - a little past midnight, everyone gets a table for their group, they order a bottle of Jack Daniels, a few bottles of green tea and a few bottles of water along with a large jug, they fill 1/3 of the jug with JD the other 2/3 with green tea and water, it basically tastes like lolly water, but it goes down so easily you have no idea you are getting drunk. As a foreigner we would be dancing around having fun, all we had to do was approach any table and say "hi" we would immediately be given a glass and they make sure it was full 100% of the time. So we'd basically start dancing, go to a random table, say hi and talk for a few minutes, down 5-6 drinks and go back to dancing.

Which leads me to the girls and the dynamic of the clubs, unlike western clubs, Chinese girls don't seem to have that inherit bitch(protective) shield on when they head out. I guess it is the result of not being constantly hit on. What blew our mind is that (and I promise this is all true). You can approach any girl at the club, regardless of whether they are in a pair or group of 10. Approach the girl, say hi and start dancing with them, if you wanted to, you could grab their hand, take them to the bar and try to talk to them or buy them a drink. And not as easy as starting a dance, but it wouldn't be overly difficult to lead them out of the club and take them back to the hotel. It was a revelation or a reality that completely blew our minds, we felt like gods. At one point I was playing a game with one of the refs called "Pick a girl" which was basically one of us pointing to any girl and the other would approach, pull to the dance floor and start dancing with. We both had 110% success rate.

One of the nights we went to a nightclub called the 88 bar I believe. The bartenders play games of chance, strange versions of rock-paper-scissors, the loser having to take a shot of whiskey or cognac on the house, and if the bartender lost, they would drink. This was also something I hadn’t encountered before, the staff drinking. I didn't realise it initially, but one of the bartenders was obviously (or rather not so obvious at the time I guess) gay and was playing one of these games with me for ages, I managed to drink 3/4 of a bottle of XO cognac for free, every time I went to the dance floor and came back, he would give me another shot. At one point I was standing and having a beer, one of the staff tapped me on the shoulder and motioned to the bar, the bartender was signalling me over. I went over the bar and he had a piece of paper, on it he had written "I teach you speak Chinese". "Sure!" I said. He would write a phrase phonetically, say it, ask me to say it a few times until I got it right. He'd point to a random girl and ask me to say the phrase to them. I'd run up to the girl like a giggling school girl tap them on the shoulder say the phrase and wait for the response. I'd then go back and ask what it meant. The phrases were things like "Pretty girl" and "I like you". One of the Counterstrike refs came up to me at one point and laughing said "dude, that gay bartender has been hitting on you all night" I just replied with "So? I don't care dude, I'm flattered. This is what girls must feel like, and I haven't paid for a drink all night!"

(Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos inside the clubs)

Scary, I know.

+ Show Spoiler [photographs] +

Food, glorious food!

Teaching the Chinese girls how to use a fork and knife.

Kobe beef, sooo good!

Karaoke bar.

Beijing

Prior to WCG a group of refs and I had organised a post WCG trip to go to Beijing for the week, relax, sightsee and just have some fun. There we 8 of us, we travelled on 2-3 different flights/times but had all booked at the same hotel. An amazing 4-5 star hotel in the centre of Beijing, for something like $55 a night for a double room, it was really an amazing place.

Random Photos

MySpace/Album cover photo!

Some amazing bars and restaurants around a frozen pond.

The hotels were well stock with state of the art anti-terrorist technology!

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

Steve – Head referee for consoles.

View from the hotel during the day.

Peking duck restaurant.

Awesome duck soup.

Chefs carving the Peking duck.

Sign on the great wall.

One of many Engrish signs.

4 Litres of low quality vodka. Less than $10

lol, super store!

One of the fake markets.

As Obama was in town, anywhere you saw a Chinese flag, they’d be an American one right besides it.

Knocking down a building right in front of a bus stop.

Everywhere we went was always really clean.

I won't get too in depth on Beijing, but we did the typical tourist things, Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City and a couple of temples. Not to mention endless amounts of markets and food. We even spent a day taking a cooking course, amazing experiences to say the least. We really enjoyed looking around the fake markets and bringing prices down of say shoes from 1400 Yuan to 80yuan. It actually became a game, to pick an item and see who could get it the cheapest at the market, and later compare back at the lobby. I hold in my possession a '250gig' USB thumb drive, which seems to hold around 60gig bought for $8.

I was a bit turned off by the presence of 'pimps' I guess, in the quiet back alleys of hotels and restaurants. I've travelled all around the world, I'm no stranger to the presence of prostitution, but this is the first time I saw and heard kids being pushed for that reason.. Comments like "sex, sex come. Young, 14 years only, come" It as quite off putting and somewhat depressing.

A lot of hotels, restaurants and the airport had temperature scanners, they were constantly weary of swine flu. The underground access ways to Tiananmen Square also all had bag scanners and metal detectors which we had to go through before being allowed in.

We also arrived a day before Obama arrived in Beijing, we even saw his cavalry one night when we were heading out to dinner, traffic seemed to slow down and stop, as we were sitting there we realised the road coming in the opposite direction was completely empty, a few minutes later, dozens of police cars, followed by black secret service vehicles followed by dozens more police cars passed. I'm pretty sure Obama waved at me, I think I even heard, "Armin, over here! BIG FAN! BIG FAN!" as he was passing, it may have been my imagination, but I'm pretty sure it happened. He visited the forbidden city the day we went to the great wall, so the forbidden city was closed down for him, and the following day we went to the FC and he went to the great wall, so that was closed down. We somehow managed to time it well.

Photographs!

Great Wall of China

+ Show Spoiler [ Photographs] +

Cooking Class & Food Markets

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

Forbidden City

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

Tiananmen Square

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

--
Some side notes about China and my thoughts on the place. I entered the country with a blank slate, I tried to reserve all judgements and preconceptions of the country. Still my thoughts returned to government state, restricted freedom and repressed society. I do need to clarify. Their freedom in no way seemed to be restricted in a way that they felt it was, and the repression was only due to a complete ignorance of the outside world. You cannot possibly feel trapped or imprisoned if you know no different. The media seemed to be completely government controlled and the internet is heavily filtered. We thought some of the guys were joking when they said you cannot search for 'Freedom' on Google. Just for a laugh I tried it, I received an error message and lost internet connection for about 20 minutes, another example would be if you type 'Tiananmen Square' into google anywhere in the world and you hit the images tab, the first image off the ranks is the famous university student standing defiantly in front of a row of tanks. You try the same in Google.cn you get pretty images of the square, children playing and parks. I feel if this continues at this rate, the next generation of Chinese will know nothing of these tragedies. The world is quite a happy place if you perceive it from the view of China, bad news rarely seems to exist, there was an accident on one of the mines in China, I believe hundreds of people died due to a collapse or an explosion, this happened while we were in China, I didn't find out about it until I got back home and read an article about it.

They don't seem to encounter foreigners too often, Beijing was better but Chengdu was ridiculous. We were constantly stopped by people who wanted to take photos with us, I was personally stopped a couple of times a day by a random Chinese person so they could take a photo with me. There was a black American/Canadian dude at the WCG venue. I must have counted at least 30 people lining up to meet and take their photo with him as they had obviously never seen a black person up close before. He wasn't even anyone special.

Phuket – Thailand

I had organised with some friends from Australia to go to Phuket for a week, I figured what better time than a relaxing stay following WCG. We had planned it so I would fly from China to Phuket and they would fly from Perth to Phuket all meeting at the same time.

Well, somebody fucked up. It may have been me, in fact I’m positive I fucked up the dates, I arrived in Phuket 2 days before everyone else. Having nothing to do, I spent those 2 days catching up on sleep, eating feed and going to the beach, not to mention a couple of massages a day.

When my friends arrived, we ended up hiring a scooter each, and just spent the week riding around the island, eating, drinking and relaxing by the beach, there wasn’t much else to it really. On of the days we spent the entire day riding around the island, we saw some truly amazing sites and beaches, the place is the epitome of paradise.

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

View from resort

Outside the hotel

We took a day trip to a series of Islands, I believe the collective names for them were Phi Phi Islands, it’s the place the movie ‘The Beach’ was partially filmed. I manage to make friends with an American girl who had been living in Thailand for 3 months studying. She was quite clever, studying micro organisms or something. Made for a few interesting conversations.

+ Show Spoiler [Photographs] +

Well, that’s pretty much all I can recall for now, I might make some follow up posts if anything else comes to mind. For now, if you managed to make it this far, I applaud you, and here’s your candy. *candy*.

Thanks for reading guys, and I hope to have another one of these next year for WCG LA.

And if you enjoyed this blog, you may also like to read Energies in Europe

Cheers!
Energies.

GTR

51280 Posts

December 26 2009 12:01 GMT

pee guarding hahaha

good read thanks =]

uriel-

Singapore1867 Posts

December 26 2009 12:34 GMT

yay candy

Amazing read, 5/5!

St3MoR

Spain3256 Posts

December 26 2009 12:53 GMT

i liked your blog, also very nice pictures thx!

Spenguin

Australia3316 Posts

December 26 2009 13:53 GMT

Wow, the amount of stuff in this blog was amazing!

p4NDemik

United States13896 Posts

December 26 2009 13:58 GMT

Downright awesome blog. 5/5 would read again.

aTnClouD

Italy2428 Posts

December 26 2009 14:16 GMT

88 was the shit been there 4 times in that week

NarutO

Germany18839 Posts

December 26 2009 14:22 GMT

Seems like a lot of fun!! 5/5 , ~~would~~ will read again.

KrAzYfoOL

Australia3037 Posts

December 26 2009 14:24 GMT

Awesome pics! You look a lot like Carl Barron

lilsusie

3861 Posts

December 26 2009 14:58 GMT

#10

SO JEALOUS!!

Aerox

Malaysia1213 Posts

December 26 2009 15:43 GMT

#11

Wow, I would have thought tournament organizations systems would be passed down or something. Regardless, great read. 5/5

Xeofreestyler

Belgium6755 Posts

December 26 2009 16:22 GMT

#12

Aw man this makes me wish I wouldve been there even more
great blog

Zona

40426 Posts

December 26 2009 18:59 GMT

#13

On December 26 2009 20:51 Energies wrote:
We showed up to the venue on the 10th, there were only a couple of things I wanted my refs to do, check to make sure all computers for Starcraft were working, check to see that the network and sound are working, setup the computers to a private network so I could batch grab all the replays and get all the computers to join a few games and make sure they work. I guess there were sponsorship issues or something, Steelseries had replaced Logitech. Steelseries had supplied us with their base level keyboard/mouse/headset, and we were only given half as many peripherals as computers, straight off the bat that shit me, I don't like cheap sponsorship for such big events. That's fine I figured, most of the guys bring their own equipment.

"Alright, don't worry about that, lets just get these computers turned on and test them out"
*2 minutes later*
"Uhh, Armin.. None of them work, we're getting boot error messages"
"Lets see."
"Motherfuckers"
"None of the computers have windows ghosted on them"

We ran it by headquarters and basically get told "oops, sorry".

So everyone spent the next 5-6 hours ghosting windows off 12 USB HDDs onto hundreds of computers. We had plans for dinner reservations that night for 8pm, around 6pm we finally managed to finish everything, there was only a handful of us left when we were told none of the AMD practise computers had windows on them either. We were looking at about 5-6 of us, 60 computers and 12 HDDS.. With an average 14 minute ghosting time. "Fucking damn it, you couldn't have told us this shit a couple of hours ago?" "Fuck". I wasn't going to miss dinner. We started opening up half the computers, ghosted a bunch and ripped out the HDDs and used them to ghost the remaining, it cut installation time down to about 6-7 minutes. We finished up around 9pm, missed dinner. By the time we got back to the hotel, showered and got changed, everything had closed. A couple Counterstrike refs and I went down to the local supermarket, got a few drinks couple of packs of cookies and sat there eating "dinner".

Ridiculous. It's amazing what the on-the-floor organizers have to go through to make things work.

On December 26 2009 20:51 Energies wrote:
We even had to escort them to the toilets. You haven't seen anything until you've seen 100 people trying to push into a toilet to take photos of PJ peeing. At one point during the PJ vs. Stork match an entire side wall of the Starcraft area almost caved in with the amount of people pushing against it, we had nearly a dozen people pushing back against it trying to keep the thing from collapsing. I remember the head PC ref over the walkie-Talkie one day. "Armin.. Honestly. This is not our job, I am nobody's pee guard"

Holy crap - the crowd mind. But still, fanaticism like this means e-sports has potential in China.

On December 26 2009 20:51 Energies wrote:
Which leads me to the girls and the dynamic of the clubs, unlike western clubs, Chinese girls don't seem to have that inherit bitch(protective) shield on when they head out. I guess it is the result of not being constantly hit on. What blew our mind is that (and I promise this is all true). You can approach any girl at the club, regardless of whether they are in a pair or group of 10. Approach the girl, say hi and start dancing with them, if you wanted to, you could grab their hand, take them to the bar and try to talk to them or buy them a drink. And not as easy as starting a dance, but it wouldn't be overly difficult to lead them out of the club and take them back to the hotel. It was a revelation or a reality that completely blew our minds, we felt like gods. At one point I was playing a game with one of the refs called "Pick a girl" which was basically one of us pointing to any girl and the other would approach, pull to the dance floor and start dancing with. We both had 110% success rate.

Sounds like a blast. Does this work if you're not (East) Asian?

On December 26 2009 20:51 Energies wrote:
I hold in my possession a '250gig' USB thumb drive, which seems to hold around 60gig bought for $8.

Ahahaha. Keep us updated on how long this thing works for.

On December 26 2009 20:51 Energies wrote:
Their freedom in no way seemed to be restricted in a way that they felt it was, and the repression was only due to a complete ignorance of the outside world. You cannot possibly feel trapped or imprisoned if you know no different. The media seemed to be completely government controlled and the internet is heavily filtered. We thought some of the guys were joking when they said you cannot search for 'Freedom' on Google. Just for a laugh I tried it, I received an error message and lost internet connection for about 20 minutes, another example would be if you type 'Tiananmen Square' into google anywhere in the world and you hit the images tab, the first image off the ranks is the famous university student standing defiantly in front of a row of tanks. You try the same in Google.cn you get pretty images of the square, children playing and parks. I feel if this continues at this rate, the next generation of Chinese will know nothing of these tragedies. The world is quite a happy place if you perceive it from the view of China, bad news rarely seems to exist, there was an accident on one of the mines in China, I believe hundreds of people died due to a collapse or an explosion, this happened while we were in China, I didn't find out about it until I got back home and read an article about it.

Well the filtering isn't perfect from what I know, and those who are interested need only undertake some additional effort to get informed. There's plenty of people in the west who stay ignorant as well, I don't think things are entirely different (although they ARE different). I still say Google's cooperation with the government is pretty fishy, though.

Foucault

Sweden2826 Posts

December 26 2009 19:00 GMT

#14

Sick blog entry

Sauron

Romania169 Posts

December 26 2009 19:07 GMT

#15

Amazing blog! 5/5!

EvilTeletubby

Baltimore, USA22247 Posts

December 26 2009 20:01 GMT

#16

On December 27 2009 04:00 Foucault wrote:
Sick blog entry

Agreed, thanks for sharing!!

JoeKim

United States608 Posts

December 26 2009 20:36 GMT

#17

great coverage, very enjoyable blog entry

zatic

Zurich15306 Posts

December 26 2009 20:46 GMT

#18

NRGS! Made it to the end - thanks a lot for writing this up, you rock! Hope to meet you again some time.

China appears to be pretty awesome, I'll have to go there after all I guess. The broadcast from WCG was insane, so many people! Fun pics of The Horde haha.

More people need to write up travel reports! *looks at chill*