Day 16- June 16: These Guys Can Ball

Taking advantage of Rich’s request, I slept in until about noon and made it to Lush around 1:00 PM. But my short day at work was not a waste and I was productive while I was there. I outlined and started planning the 4^th of July party, I created an Excel spreadsheet that I would use for competitor analysis and I started to research summer program coordinators that I could contact to set up mixers with when they arrived in Beijing. After work four of us met up and decided to go play basketball at the outside courts on the PKU campus. When we got there we could not find anyone to play against us (the language barrier had a lot to do with that). Finally a group of four Chinese students wearing matching uniforms came up and offered to play against us. These guys were big, the shortest one was close to my height. They also all looked serious. One guy was rocking the Dwayne Wade/Dwight Howard full Nike armband. Fortunately, one of them spoke English and he quickly explained that they were the Peking University basketball team. Once we started playing, it became obvious that they were not lying. These guys could ball. They were shooting lights out and they fought for every rebound. We played them for almost two hours and got beat up and down the court the entire time. Afterwards they were telling us that we did a great job and it was nice to have some competition on campus. We exchanged numbers and told them that we would play them again sometime soon. After a quick shower a large group of us caught the subway to Ho Hai to get dinner. We finally settled on a nice and fairly inexpensive looking place where we were able to eat on the rooftop terrace. We had an assortment of meats, vegetables, dumplings, and a delicious fried pancake. The view was awesome. We were looking out right over the water and you could see all the activity happening on the street below us. After dinner we bought a fruit smoothie and walked around Ho Hai. We later caught a taxi home. By the time I got in bed I was exhausted and sore. That was the first exhausting physical activity that I had been able to do since I arrived in Beijing.