white water rafting

So I will try and describe the strangest day of my life, but I'm pretty sure the description will not do it justice. Still, I'm willing to try. . .

The engineering team at JCI decided to go on a team outing. A nice 3 hour white water rafting trip 4.5 hours outside of town. So 35 folks got on a bus at 5:30 am and headed out for our little adventure.

Crazy item #1: Two guys were late for the 5:30 departure. Their punishment. Unaccompanied Karoke with the song of their choosing. I'm pretty sure if we were in America, the offending parties would have given the tour leader the bird and sat down and fell asleep. In china, you stand up and take your medicine like a man. Albeit a warbling man, a man none-the-less.

Crazy item #2: Traveling games. Pass the ring with the straw without using your hands. 4 teams racing up and down the bus. Refer to crazy item #1 for how americans would have handled this suggestion. Next, 'describe your perfect mate' game. Me being the whitey in front got to get it started. All the women in the bus stood up. The host would ask me questions and I would give my preference. If you met the criteria you stayed standing. The best part about this game was seeing how chinese would delineate physical attributes. Height and hair length made sense, but then when they could not use hair color or eye color, they went with eye shape. Big eyes or small eyes. I don't really know what this meant, but decided to go with big eyes (I'm still hoping this was not a euphemism). The winning lady then got to pick her ideal mate. Luckily, I lost. Final game: Telephone. In english. Turns out the chinese are very good at copying things, so they were able to take a series of sentences they did not understand and transmit it through 9 retellings and still end up with 95% accuracy of the original statement. I've played this game in the US with everyone understanding the language and ended up with 50% accuracy at best.

Crazy item #3: Cases of beer on a work outing. Not used to that. Also not used to being offered a beer at 7 am. I think the 2 white guys were the only ones who said no to this offer. Also the bring your own lunch was a little different between the chinese and me. I brought PB&J. No one else did. They all brought meat sticks, cucumbers, soy based pita stuff with crazy spicy dipping sauce, etc. . . If they knew what PB&J was, they definitely would have brought this instead of what they brought.

Crazy item #4: Bathroom break. This is where words begin to fail. An outhouse with 3 rectangular slots in the floor. No walls, no barriers. Just a small room with 3 holes. The bathroom was up on stilts to allow fresh air to flow over the waste products which was nice for managing any offending smells, but it did provide a little too much light on the subject. Unfortunately it was also easy to see that the ground had been graded to facilitate the flow of the waste into the passing stream immediately adjacent. This is was a bit disconcerting being on a trip to go rafting downriver later in the day. Sometimes its better not to think about such things.

Crazy item #5: Arrival in town/base camp. Lots of people selling squirt guns and metal bowls. I mean a lot of people. This is where we were supposed to change into our swimsuits, except there were no 'places' to change. Apparently the bus was the place to change. A little odd on a co-ed work outing. I think the locals are so used to being around a gazillion people that they have become experts at creating their own mental state of privacy, wholly independent of the reality around them.

Crazy item #6: The rafting infrastructure. So how do you get 10,000 chinese folks out of their buses/cars, into rafts, down the river, out of their rafts, and back to their bus. Interesting question with a very well thought out answer. All of the folks are dropped off in this wharehouse by the river. The people are routed through 10 cattle chutes, where life jackets (and squirt guns) are handed out. The rafts are all on the 2nd floor and are sent down to the waiting people on free-wheeled conveyors. People get in and float down the river. Good system. Good plan. Horrible execution. The people in the chutes plunge into the river en masse. The boats come down the ramps and are claimed by the most aggressive person willing to claim the boat. This leads to people climbing up the ramps to jump in the boat on its way down the ramp. Pure chaos. Literally 1000 chinese folks in bright orange life jackets all along the rivers edge fighting for each raft that gets thrown out to the masses. Absolutely crazy.

Crazy item #7: So no instructions. No warnings. No 'what to do if you fall out of your boat'. Just a 'here is your squirt gun and your one paddle for the 8 of you. Good luck'.

Crazy item #8: So it turns out white water rafting in China is actually just an excuse to act like a 3rd grader for 3 hours. I don't mean this in a prejorative way. Just imagine what 1000 3rd graders would do if they were all floating down a river with each other. They would be unihibited and would splash each other for 3 hours straight. Exactly. Literally 3 hours straight of water guns and metal bowls hurling water at anything that moves. There did not appear to be any special rules of who to get or not get. If you were on the water, you were fair game. Although I must say that being in a boat as 1 of 2 white guys made for some special treatment. About every 5 minutes, we would float near a new group of people. One of the persons in that group would see the 2 gringos. You would hear him mutter something to his compatriots, and then 20 heads would immediately swivel on their necks and stare at our boat. Big smiles would spread across their faces, and fingers would begin pointing. My Chinese is still a bit rough, but I'm pretty sure I could translate what followed as something akin to 'hey, check it out. We got a couple of crackers on our river. What do you say we show em a little hospitality'. This was then followed by water cascading toward us from every angle. After this went on for 60 seconds, mercy would begin to set in. Then to finish us off, they would always want us to know that could 'speak english', so they would all shout 'hello' and giggle amongst themselves. This set of events was repeated identically every 5 minutes for 3 hours.

Crazy item #9: The bathing suits. So the guys wore these hip hugger spandex suits and the women just wore their regular clothes. Not sure if women don't wear bathing suits in china or if you just don't wear them on a white water rafting trip. Curious.

Crazy item #10: The system for retrieving the boats was quite impressive as well. 24 rafts stacked on the back of the trailer. Very efficient. Also, the life jacket hopper filled up for the return to the start. Not so crazy I guess, but amazing to watch.

Crazy item #11: The group shower after rafting. Probaly not so crazy in light of crazy item #4, but still strange getting in a big group shower with your colleagues.

Crazy item #12: Riding home on the bus and watching movies. There was the japanese movie with chinese sub-titles and the french movie with chinese sub-titles. It struck me that I was seeing three different cultures represented and mine was none of the 3.

Final crazy item, #13: Bathroom break on the way home. New town. Same facility. Same little creek. Same 3 slots. I don't normally have a shy bladder, but I managed to go the entire day without using the restroom. Funny what the mind can do to the body.