Day 8: Kunshan - Competition Day! Celebration!
By Margaret Wong
Today marks the last full day of our trip for the Dragon Dance International Competition in Kunshan, China. It has been an amazing trip so far and I wouldn’t trade it for anything! I am trying my best to not think about the crazy amounts of work I will have to catch up on once I get back to school…
For the last day of the competition, we went on stage once again with our new routine from this trip specifically. Professor Hu worked really hard to put together this routine for us and fortunately for us, we get to perform the routine twice! As we prepare ourselves for the second part of the competition, all we wanted was to be able to do better than yesterday and make sure we don’t make any mistakes. Obviously, we want a higher score than the score we got yesterday.
Today, we got to use another dragon from one of the other teams. It was a blue dragon! The Shanghai University of Maritime Studies was nice enough to lend us their blue dragon. Not only that, they also cheered for us throughout our entire performance! “Team USA! Jiayou (Add oil)! Team USA! Go, go, go!” We did well and scored better than we did yesterday! After our performance, the entire team was determined to cheer on all the other teams. We developed our own chants, made sure we said their team names correctly, and even teamed up with the team from Taiwan for chants!
The awards ceremony was also a great experience. Ryan represented us to accept the bronze award and Harris represented us to accept the popularity award. After accepting our trophies and certificates, we spent a lot of time on stage taking pictures with other teams and… ourselves! Everyone took solo shots with the trophies, jumping pictures, etc.
The competition ended midday, meaning we had time to go sight-seeing! We went to Zhou Zhuang with the team from Hong Kong. Zhou Zhuang was a small and old water town with a nice river, shops, restaurants, etc. We had a great time! Some of us took boat tours and others did some last minute souvenir shopping.
We went back to the hotel around dinner time and enjoyed a buffet dinner at the hotel. After dinner, everyone was pretty exhausted from the day and mostly, the entire trip itself! Everyone started packing and thinking about what we should do for our last night in China. A couple of us spent the entire night playing card games with Professor Hu and the two students from CUG, Wenwen and Yongfu. A couple others had a “Wifi/Candy Crush Party” with the team from Hong Kong in the hall way of our hotel rooms on the sixth floor. I lost the most card games and treated everyone to late night KFC! Nonetheless, everyone had a great last night in China.