Last Head Race: cue "Aww moment"

Not really, though.

It's been a sweet week, all in all, marred only by the death of my camera. It was kinda trippin' ever since the Inauguration, probably from exposure, but last week it decided to kick the can, like some Brits wish Jane Goody would already. At least I do. Oh, too soon? Nevermind.

This week has also been a bit hectic as I've been trying to finalize plans for my Easter holidays. I'm heading to Amsterdam after chilling in London for a while, then back to Bristol, up to Cardiff, back down to Bristol to fly to Frankfurt, go visit my friend Boris in Mannheim, then to Jersey to visit my awesome flatmate, Suyin. However, getting to Europe requires a Schengen visa, which probably should have been taken care of since last week, but after a run around with a German "consulate" which was down the street from my library, I ended up having to send my passport off to London for visa processing. Maybe I'll just have my children born in Singapore so they won't need to worry about visas when they're off travelling the world. Just a thought.

Anyway, today was my last head race for my time in Bristol, as well as the time my boat raced together. After rowing training in April, we'll be switching out two of our rowers for some of the rowers from the second VIII for regatta season, which is a sprint season with races having a standard length of 2000m. It's guts out, everything on the table, and usually pretty gruesome afterwards, but always a good time.

Today we rowed at Kingston-upon-Thames, right near the Hampton Court Palace, where King Henry VIII reigned from, and the ghosts of his dead wives still haunt the stairwells. It's a grand piece of architecture, but unfortunately, we didn't have time to take it in. We launched from less than 500m off the starting line, but we had gone for a short warmup row a little before. We queued up for the start, the adrenaline started pumping, we turned and we started. We had a bit of trouble finding our flow off the start, but we settled into our rate pretty well at 30 strokes per minute. Within the first 1000m, we overtook the boat that started just before us, and we set off down the course with some really good strokes making some good speed.

It was a really long course, around 5km, snaking around from the Hampton Court Bridge, past the Hampton Court Palace, and finishing past the Kingston Bridge, near the Kingston Rowing Club boathouse. With about 1.5km to go, we fell apart a little bit, and I admit, it was definitely hard work. I slipped twice, missing some precious water, but we managed to get up to a 32/34 over our last 1000m, and really got it together. All in all, I felt it was a good race, not our best, but a good race. You can tell if a rower has really worked hard from the look on his face at the end of a race, and all of our boat had that face.

After trying to sit upright and catch our breath, we had to turn around and paddle the 5km back to our trailer. It was a bit ridiculous, since in the head races here, all the boats launch at the same time, but are sent off at different times, so before the race, you can have an excess of one hundred boats on the river, and it gets a bit messy. On our way back, we saw this firsthand, but not as bad as we saw at Reading Head. The course marked for us on the way back was sticking hard to the banks of the Thames and as far away from the middle of the river, the race course, as possible. It was essentially a limp back rather than a paddle at the speed we were making with the mess of boats, but we made it back in good time, derigged and it was back home to Brizzle.

Now, I should be doing my Chinese homework or focusing on an essay that I've got due, but that's no fun if I did. I'm abroad, and having fun is what it's all about. Well, that, and actually studying. But with such little class contact time, and so much time for independent study and collaboration with classmates, I'm realizing that college isn't about taking classes, as necessary as classes are. It's about the people you meet and the things you learn from them that you take with you. This is where I pull the plug on my philosophical rant. Til next time, probably in London!

Epic Weekend

So at Bristol, I have a sweet four day weekend, and so I decided to take full advantage of it this past week by doing some travelling. A few of my good Vassar friends are also studying abroad in the kingdom, and are conveniently at universities in the south, meaning they're not far away at all. As Vassar students, and as students in general, we decided to meet up in the sweetest place for any student to go: Oxford, probably the most recognized name in the entire academic world. My friend, Jamie, is study abroad there, and her boyfriend and one of my good friends, Jeremy, is studying at University College of London. As I had no place to stay, I contacted a friend from Singapore, Gerald, who is studing at Oxford's Pembroke College. Sweet place.

I got into Oxford around 4:30PM, just as golden hour was starting, so the photographer in me took over, and I walked all over Oxford taking pictures of things: down the Oxford Canal, past Christ Church College, down to Oxford Castle, through a few churchyards and across the Thames a few times. It's a beautiful place, no wonder so many ideas came from there. It's very conducive to sitting, talking about life and coming to grand realizations. That's the summary of it all, really. Around six, Jeremy came in from London, and we hopped over to a local burrito joint, The Mission, for a burrito with Gerald, who had just finished a tutorial. It was actually my first burrito (kinda weird having my first burrito in England of all places), but it was good. I approve of the burrito. They're good in my book.

Later on, we met up with Jamie at a local pub with a few of her Oxford friends, and since we were all tired from a taxing academic week at some of England's finest universities, we decided to call it a night. Gerald had to hop to London early the next day, so he let me stay in his room undisturbed. The cool thing about the Oxford colleges, using Pembroke as the example, is that they are their own self-contained communities. Only students of that college can come and go using scanners and things, which is pretty funny to see, since you've got this sick technology on the old buildings dating back some 500 years, in some cases.

I spent Friday walking around Oxford, with a guided tour courtesy of Jamie, and we passed some of the great sights, including this great street sign, rep it up to my Vassar folk.



On Saturday, I made my way down to London with Jeremy, because I was crashing at his place for the night. We got in pretty early, around noon, and met up with his mom, who would be in town a few days. We ate lunch in Russell Square, near UCL and SOAS, and then headed back up to Shoot Up Street near the Kilburn tube stop. It's a sweet little area with all this ethnic and cultural mixing, with a Baltic supermarket right next to the Chinese one, restaurants with names like, "African Grill" and "Brazilian Buffet" made the whole street so much richer. I met up with him down in Oxford Circus to chill with some friends and his sister, who had come in from Paris earlier that afternoon, for some chill time before bed.

The next day was race day. I headed down to Putney, as UBBC was boating from just off the Putney Bridge on the iconic Boat Race course. It was crazy to actually be there. Last week, I could say that I just rowed on the same river, but to be on the same stretch of river was really incredible. My boat had two outings, one was just a swing row down to the Hammersmith Bridge, where our race course ended, and then our warmup down past the Chiswick Bridge for the race itself. The Boat Race ends a few metres before you get to the Chiswick Bridge, and the whole time, I was kinda tripped out. My crew were mostly Londoners, as well as schoolboy rowers, so they all knew the course, they raced on the Thames all the time, and so it was no big deal for them. It was really hard keeping my concentration on the way down the row as we passed all the landmarks that you only see in movies like True Blue, but with what little willpower I have, I managed alright.

The start of my race was pretty epic, since when we first boated down toward Chiswick, the sky was blue and there were a few clouds. Mind you, we had to row near 7k to get down to our start, so there was plenty of time for conditions to change. First off, the Thames is a tidal river, making conditions a bit iffy when the tide changes. It just so happened we were racing when the tide was going out, making current a bit tricky to handle. As we approached Chiswick bridge to row past and turn, it began to rain. Not your drizzly typical English rain, I'm talkin Noah rain. Since it was sunny when we boated, nobody brought any shell with them, so we were literally chilling in race kit, getting soaked to the bone. I could feel the water slowly running down my back as it soaked into my longsleeve top, making things a bit uncomfortable, but in a race, you've got no time to feel uncomfortable, you just row and row hard. The wind added to the epicness, as the rain was blown across the boat. As we started down the course, it began to thunder, which was really, really epic. Every clap made the race seem more legendary, and we pushed even harder. Our base rate was supposed to be at a 30, but we managed to crank out a 32 straight from the start and overtook a boat within our first 2k, keeping them behind us the whole time, and we made some sweet distance on them for the remainder. The wind and the current made for an interesting mix of conditions, but we managed to plow through it all. Running back to our van for dry clothes and sheltering/shivering in the HSBC Rowing Club's boathouse until we got on enough layers to shiver mildly instead of feverishly. Then it was time to derig and go all the way back home to Brizzle.

Some other side notes from the day, I saw the Oxford and Cambridge rowing club vans and took pictures. I wet myself a little, I think. Also, once we were ready to derig our boat, the weather was nice again. It was a bit frustrating that the sun couldn't hold out for a few more minutes as it would have been nice to race in the sun, but hey, it's an outdoor sport. Occupational risk. It happens.

Til next time dudes.