The Net Fiasco, but it’s in China

soccer nettingAlright, I should probably jot down a few of my thoughts after the trip. Or type a few of my thoughts…same thing, really. I actually enjoyed China a lot more than I thought I would, which sounds terrible, but I was mostly worried about the language barrier. First time I’ve ever been to a country where they don’t primarily speak English, and I was freaking out over getting lost and literally not being able to talk to anyone.

Not much problem there. Turns out the average Chinese person’s English is a LOT better than my Chinese, especially since I still don’t know the Chinese word for ‘sports netting‘ and I really should by now.

Yeah, so we had a bit of an incident. They had this amazing sports center at the school, much better than ours. But at one point we were warming up and some of the netting came down. Our coach told us to go to the storage cupboard and get a replacement, but we might’ve taken a wrong turning. Instead of a cupboard filled with sports netting, we were instead led on a merry chase around the building with a bunch of people on the way misunderstanding what we were after. We couldn’t read any of the signs, of course, and the building is absolutely massive. Eventually we found a cupboard with supplies and just grabbed the first bit of netting we could find in what I can only describe as weariness. And then we took it back, only to discover that we’d grabbed soccer nets and they weren’t nearly big enough. At that point we pretty much just gave up. The coach just laughed.

We had to have ONE lost in translation moment, even if it was less to do with language and more to do with net types. Also, signage. Their sports center has to be at least four times as big as ours.

-Jerry