Bring on the Mongolians

This past weekend, Paul had a chance to travel to the capital of Liaoning province in order to play some hockey. Shenyang is a city of 10 million, and it is a five hour bus ride from Dalian. To get there you have to travel on a pretty monster highway through rural agricultural land and industrial wastelands. He had an opportunity to go last year and it was a highlight of his time here so when this chance came up again he jumped at it.

The rink in Shenyang... just waiting for coach Bombay and the Ducks.

Paul’s  hockey gear had not come yet- it is currently being transported across an ocean in a shipping container- so he only had his skates and a couple of sticks. He spent the last few weeks scrambling to borrow gear and finally amassed enough to make a complete set. Unfortunately, one week prior to the trip, he was told by his work that he would have to come in and work on the Saturday of the trip.

Every year Maple Leaf has a week long holiday (instead of a number of long weekends) at the beginning of October.  However, Chinese nationals only get four days off (scattered across a number of weekends) instead of the five days that we get during our week vacation. To make up for it, we are supposed to work an extra Saturday. For some reason the Junior High decided that they would work a different Saturday then the Senior High. This of course left Paul scrambling to find a way to get out of work so that he could legitimately go to the tournament in Shenyang.

Well it took some negotiating, and some pressure from the Vice principal of the high school (who is on the hockey team and related to the other teacher from the junior high that wanted to go on the trip- sometimes it is good to have connections!) but eventually a solution was found. In exchange for working extra classes during the next week and coming in on a Saturday later in the month, they were free to go on the trip.

The hockey this time around was much higher calibre than the previous trip Paul went on. Partly this was because the quality of our team had increased with a number of new rookie teachers arriving in town, but also because the quality of the competition was far better this time around. Ex-pat teams from Shanghai and Beijing flew in for the weekend, and a Chinese team from Shenyang hosted the tournament. To cap it off, a group of Mongolian players who play with the Mongolian national team took busses and trains for 58 hours to come and get ready for their season. Apparently there are no indoor rinks in Mongolia, and they wanted to get a jump on the other players trying out for the national team. The outdoor rinks don’t freeze up for a month or so, so this was a chance to get in game shape before the season.

Awesome.

The Kaptain of the Mongolian squad

Mongolian sweater and a felted camel hair blanket they raffled off to help defray the cost of their trip.

Mongolian national team jerseys... auctioned off to the highest bidder. They went for almost 350 CDN each!

Mongolian Canadian Summit Series photo

Someone on our team thought we would have enough player for two teams so we were scheduled for double the games of everyone else. We also had a number of players go down with alcohol related disinterest  (some of the older veterans on our team like the hockey trips for the chance to get away from work, family and the same old routine… they can really cut loose, but it costs their ability to play hockey).  So we were able to consistently field between 10 and 14 players of varying quality for the 9 games we played over two days. Seven of the games were on Saturday, and we were each playing every other shift for three of the games in a row. It was gruelling, but a hell of a lot of fun.

Our record included 6 losses, 2 wins (one against the Mongolians) and a game that ended with a bench clearing brawl (not kidding- don’t worry Mom, I’m fine).

In between all the hockey, the banqueting and consuming of fine Chinese beverages, we found some time to shuffle around the Imperial palace of Shenyang (shuffle because our muscles were seizing from so much hockey!). The palace was built for the Qing dynasty rulers before they moved their capital from Shenyang to Beijing. It is pretty impressive, and a wonderful place to be invited into the pictures of random strangers. For some reason, Chinese people really like to ask white foreigners to take a picture with them. Weird.

The Imperial Palace's throne room.

It was a great hockey filled weekend, and Paul can’t wait to do it again in a couple of months.