4

Back home, the story about China

The trip started out Thursday and ended Tuesday. My english will sometimes be funny, but im betting you will understand it. Im always looking to improve my languages, my swedish too, but as for this story youll have to live with my current skills.

Thursday/Friday: So i think everyone is really nervous. Jarek, Hyddae, Away and Awesome all drives from their town to mine. Im still not sure what i packed, always before any trip i hesitate into the last second with doing my packing and the same thing was for this one. It ends up with my wife doing the packing while im focusing on beeing as nervous as i possible can be. I was definently successfull.

So we drive to Arlanda. Its a 200km drive from here. About 350 for the other guys. Arriving at the airport and i realise that eventho i traveled 1 time before im currently travling with pretty much guys who have the same experience like me. As we are suppose to stay with the car to put in the creditcard for the parking Away fails to do so and hes forced to step out and put in the card. The nervosity is soon completely changed into insane laughter. And it stays that way.

We check-in, got some Chinese money, buying some possible reading for the airplane and manage to both understand what gate we are supposed to be at and get our luggage in the right place. Awesome!



We have our meal in some pastashop at Arlanda. This is nothing we understand beforehand but that meal is gonna turn out to be the most expensive thing in this trip. By far. We eat, enter the plane and the trip takes off.
The plane takes like 8hours to Peking, and when we arrive here we realise that the Swedish airport is supersmall. This airport is HUGE, we are almost lost but with some luck (and ofcourse mapawareness) we manage to get to the right terminal for the next flight that leads to Shanghai. We are starting to get a little bit dizy tho. Nothing is written in real letters and people seem to wanna touch us and see our passport wherever we go.

The flight takes off and soon we are to land in shanghai. At one point during the last flight im thinking "Wounder if we would manage to solve anything around here if our friends arent meeting us in the airport" and my next thought is something like "They will show up, but if they wouldnt we prolly would manage"
They showed up ofcourse. But thinking about it afterwards im pretty sure we wouldnt have solved shanghai solo. Not even as a team. So im happy they came =)



So we come to Shanghai. They are all there. Tom (The guy that helped us beforehand with visas and stuff), Frank (The guy we met at Dreamhack after winning that event), Scott (A workfriend to Frank, running the DYA project with him), Sisi (One off Franks friends i belive, a lovely lady with good knowledge in English and Chinese to help us out , Cammy (The Editor, a girl whos been around the gamingscene for some time, with wings on her back) and the mediateam. Yeah. About that. There is 2 people employed ONLY to take pictures and film EVERYTHING that we are doing. This is just so wierd.
So we walk up through the airport. Cammys asking if we are ready for the heat. And im like "lol sure, wazzup". As the airportdoors opens up and the heat of shanghai strikes us right in the face. Its around 40 degrees. There is no wind. Holy crap. Were gonna die.

Ill refer to these guys as "The team" from now on. Sometimes some of them are missing, but mostly they are all there. So the team has rented a bus. A pretty big one. With aircondition. And alot of water. I sit down, so does my team. It feels like we have entered a completely different word.
Traffic is about whos honking first. Unless you have a bike. Then its about whos got the biggest load. Some people have like 8 times the size of their bike with stuff with them. The collition between wellfair and poor people is obvious. You can see really nice new cars here, and people on bikes that almost fell apart. In the same street. Honking at eachother.

So Tom tells us about the schedual for the nextcoming days. And i tell you its packed. We have like 20minutes before the first activity starts. We get to go to the hotel first. To like dump our bags. We live in the "not-so-2010-part" of Shanghai. So its not just nice cars and fancy people. Its normal people. Im worried that the hotel shouldnt keep any standard. But as we enter our rooms we find out we were wrong. Its really really nice. And at the same time as we are enjoying luxury in the hotel we can also be a part of the "real china". I really like that fact. We meet up with Shanghai team and China team and Tobi. In the beginning  its like old people say. "Every asian person looks the same" but it doesnt take more then a few minutes before i realise that they are wrong. We sit down at a pub and talk more about the schedule as we drink some refreshing drinks. It feels really awsome.



The day ends up with some cultural food. We are eating at a really local place, its not in the touristparts of Shanghai. Having all kinds of meals, porkhoof, duckskin etc, it doesnt sound so delicious but it really is pretty good food. After we fought the wars with sticks versus the food, one of the persons in the crew tells me hes gonna solve a fork for me, im happy for that. The only problem is that there are no forks in the complete building, thats how deep into the culture of china we are. So i ended up having to learn to eat with sticks.
Ricewine makes it pretty easy to sleep btw!




Saturday

So this is the only day consisting any type of gaming. We are traveling in to the Swedish Pavilion at the World Expo in shanghai. This place is huge. Im telling you, ive never seen so much people. Someone said 400.000 people visits the world expo every day. The lines were like LONG and people had to wait about 5-6hours to even get in there. Not we though. Our cool nametags with some kinda information on made us able to just straight walk pass every person in the line and go inside. Awesome! I can tell you i wouldve dodged that world expo, atleast this time of the year if i had to stay in line for so long. It was just too damn hot!

They had solved it with outdoor aircondition. It was fans blowing airconditioned winds into the lines of people, but also in the roof there was fans blowing water on us. Not even conforting, just enough to keep you alive.
We visited the swedish pavilion where we learned nothing i guess, i mean it wasnt superinteresting since we know the most. Like what we do with garbage and how we changed the envioroment of lakes and stuff. This is nothing new for me atleast, but it was cool to realise that this is something new for other cultures. And the way that the swedish pavilion had presented all of this was definently impressive.
Downstairs at the pavilion there was like a windowed cage with 10 computers in, this is where we played the games versus the singapor and chinese team. There was no competition and the games were played on Japanese servers. We had some fun, but both games were considered losses. The other teams looked strong to be perfectly hounest. Its gonna be really amazing to play for real versus them at the dreamhack event in the end of november. Looking forward to that!
So we played to 30mins concede games pretty much, i might give you the gameID. The games were played with other accounts, secret!!!


After that we had some lunch at the pavillion, and then we went off doing some more heatwork at the singapore pavilion. This was pretty cool too. The only problem was that it wasnt airconditioned. They really had put down some amazing work at this place and there was a video showing what their leaders idea of enviroment was. I enjoyed the stay at the singaporian pavilion too, eventhogh the heat was really really rough on us.

After this we went home and in the evening it was time for the real Chinese Karaoke. Lovely. There might have been some duet here between me and Tobi but i really dont think there is any video of that. If there is i might need to kill anyone sharing it with the world. Because someone, im not sure who, decided to go with SPICE GIRLS. And seriosly. You can just imagine how that ended.
We got pretty drunk and had LOADS of fun atleast. On the bus home Tobi actually phoned my wife and made a special shoutcast for her about my performances as a man in Shanghai. Ill try to upload the soundclip of that, it was just so much fun!




I can tell you it was easy to fall asleep that night. Sake means "Fuck sleepingpills" in chinese, i think(?)

The next morning the sleepingpill still worked for some of us!!


Sunday

We visited Korean pavilion and Italian pavilion this day. Was nice both places had aircondition so we could survive the rough heat that i think was even worse this day. Interesting places again, with so nice people showing us around and giving us the possibility to enjoy the event. We had some real fun today too, im not sure how the jokes went, and im pretty sure that even if i did tell you guys how the jokes went on you wouldnt appriciate em, so im not gonna try. But laughter was definently a big part of this day, aswell as the others.



I enjoyed the movie that the Korean pavilion had done, and the italian pavilion was obviously about cars shoes and dresses. Nothing that wasnt interesting tho, even if i do think i my wife wouldve appriciated it somewhat more then i did.



In the evening we had dinner at the hotel. And this is when im starting to get suspicious. First off we got COLD drinks. I dont know if you know it but Chinese people only drink hot stuff since its suppose to be better for their bodys. But for this dinner we had real cold beer. And i think someone from the staff told someone in the staff at the hotel to get me drunk. Cuz whenever my glass was emptied there was a cute Chinese girl refilling it for me.
I dont know who to blame though. Hey, lets just blame Tobi.

Later that night we played some poker and discussed the future of gaming, it was pretty interesting and eventhough i didnt win it was fun playing some cards, was long since i did that actually. I think that was the latest night that we had during the trip, but thank god for the swedish "RESORB" that kept us alive eventough we consumed both 1 and 2 glasses of SAKE.

Anyways the dinner was the last event we had as a full group since two of the DYA people had to leave for some jobs that night.




Seeing this every day makes you feel a little bit wierd to be hounest =)


Monday

Farewell day. As Jonas explained. This day is about moving around to places, getting photoed and hugging people. Thats pretty much what we did. We said bb to the Shanghai team, to the PMS girls, we were hanging around the airport. Getting on that MAGLEV train, eventhought its suppose to be like able to go 400-500km/h it wasnt faster then 300. But the way it leaned over the road made me be scared enough to enjoy it atleast.

We took farewell of all the teams, and in the evening it was time for us to say farewell too. We left Shanghai about 1900 Shanghaitime. And the long long trip home. FIlled with noodles and emotions.

Some people said this was a short trip, and in one way it was (only a few days) but the way that we got to meet people. To enjoy the culture of China. To talk to the gamers of Singapore and China and even female gamers. To get to know Frank, Tom, Scott, Siss, Tobi. To have the chance to sing real karaoke.

This was one of the best moments in my life. Atleast outside myself. (My marriage and my kids not counted)

So id like to say thank you to everyone on this trip. And i really mean everyone. The professionalism and joy that was given to us during this trip is beyond. I take my Swedish hat off. Forever

If you want the real nasty details, then you have to come ask us in private. This story is for everyone tho!


http://www.digitalyouthaward.net/
http://www.dreamhack.se/

some video

http://swedenexpo.cn/en/news/detail/article/video-heroes-of-newerth-china-vs-sweden/

1 Blewd:

Hey man! I wanna see the tobi video get it nao