Day before i leave

So today is the day before i leave China. I woke up late and had lunch with all the ladies before heading to the men's Final game. The game was Canada vs. Russia. It was a fun game to watch and Canada ended up losing 2-4. Russia out played them and it was a very physical game. We then went back to the hotel and packed, i have to leave at 8am in the morning for a 11:30 flight to Beijing.

When i was done packing Stacey told me i was to collect "tick" money from all the girls before we went out to dinner. To explain what "tick" money is, it is 10 Yuan for every tick mark that we got throughout the entire tournament. Now how do we get tick marks? If you fall down during a game, get hit with the puck, when the supervisor thinks someone deserves one on or off the ice, etc. They kept track on a whiteboard in our conference room back at the hotel. I collected the money for the Women and we put it all together and went out to dinner with it. The men definitely had more tick marks than the women, Matt gave out multiple ones for some people. It was funny!

So the officials all went to this huge restaurant with some of the Chinese staff and volunteers and sat at a huge long table. Then the rounds of Harbin Beer started coming out onto the table. The servers put a huge bottle (almost 40 oz.) in front of everyone at the table, i took a couple of picture of this because it kind of looked like we were drunks or something. There were sooo many bottles, there had to have been more than 30 people at our table. Then came the rounds of meat on skewers. Unidentifiable meats, chicken hearts (only found this out after i had eaten it), chicken wings, silk worm cocoons, and hot dog looking things (definitely not a hot dog). Everything was grilled and was pretty good. Every 3-5 minutes someone was lifting a glass and either saying something or just an all out "ehhhhhhhh". It started out with the Chinese guys slamming back their beer and the other male officials, then our end of the table lifted up our glasses every few minutes just to make them drink more but our end would take just a sip and set it down. It was a fun night and we took a lot of pictures. The food was good, but most of us were still hungry afterwards. We are used to eating vegetables, rice, or bread with our meals and didn't eat too much of the meat. So we went to Mc Donald's afterwards and bought some fries, burgers and nuggets and went back to the hotel and hung out for a while. I'm really glad we had a great group to go with to this tournament, everyone was really nice and fun to be around. I had a great night, not looking forward to all the traveling tomorrow....

Night!