wet dragons

ok - it was a great day, this one. But as I am lazy - I will simply copy the article I wrote for the company (with a headline and all - well, more or less ...)

Ok, here goes:



Rain is only liquid sunshine
“Testsieger” team comes in second place at the Company Dragon Boat Race in Frankfurt!

The Frankfurt Dragon Boat race is traditionally part of the Museumsuferfest, but this year it was shifted to the Osthafen to promote this area of the town. It was the event the national diversity team was looking forward to participate for the last 2 months. And finally this weekend we managed to participate very successfully with two full dragon boats at this wonderful yearly event on the river Main.

Our “Testsieger II” team (the blue group) consisted mainly of the Schwalbach summer interns and friends, the “Testsieger I” team (the red group) a group of other employees. And the T-shirt colours turned out to be shaping the happenings of the day with the intern boat having to fight in the first of many races in pacing rain and the red boat making it into the finals.

With the first race at 10:20 in the morning the meeting point was the Frankfurt Osthafen at 9 o’clock Sunday morning. Surprisingly most of the people actually showed up at this indeed very early hour. Once the T-shirts and badges were distributed, there was not too much time for coffee so the intern boat had to race quicker to earn their morning coffee. And they did! They came in second in their first race – setting a high standard for our other boat and thus motivating to also make a good race. Here is a photo of the intern boat participants shortly before boarding the boat (still dry!!!)



Only half an hour later our other boat had its first race and to another big surprise of us all we won our first race!!! This qualified us into the semi finals straight away!!!
Here is a picture of the second boat – highly motivated as you can see ...



The next race followed at 12:30 for the interns as a last chance to qualify into the semi-finals. This is where it started to rain which only motivated all to paddle even more to get out of the soaking rain quicker. Too bad the other teams also got motivated and so the intern boat finished the race third in this race against a full-man team of the Mainova.



The time between the races was spent eating potato salad, fish & chips and all kinds of other typical food of the region (Bratwurst), a show of race boats and watching the local diving unit dropping a car into the river and diving for it. Unfortunately the weather was a very mixed one with rain and sun rapidly changing – though overall rain was dominating the day.

In the semi-finals our red boat raced against Mainova and another team we raced against in the morning. With the Duracell – Bunny as our drummer we had enough energy to also win in this race to our and the other teams full surprise - a team that has only trained once and even had people on board that never trained winning against an all-men team! With team work more important than muscles our hopes were up for the finals.



When the finals approached it was raining cats and dogs. The boats were ordered back from the river as a thunderstorm was approaching. Five minutes later as the rain started to really come down on us and we were waiting in our drenched clothes to get into the boats, someone said the words “Rain is only liquid Sunshine” and then the magic happened. We got into the boats, paddled to the start and raced our biggest race of the day. At our third and final race of the day we had the most fun of the day as we managed to almost catch the winning team after a bad start and finished in SECOND place.



And only 13 hours after we met in the morning we celebrated our victory with our prize – an original Dragon Boat Drum (in a bit smaller version of course for practical reasons).



PROLOGUE
after the ceremony Alba dropped me at a cash machine near my place to get some money to be able to order some take-away as I had no food at home. Needless to say the cash machine did not work and so I kept walking to the next nearest one in my wet clothes. Oh well - f*** it - after such a day, I don't really care - my laundry has also been waiting for me all day, nothing really matters any more...

oops - almost forgot - here are all the photos including the weird place with the fan performance and the kid who put his arm into the water without his mum noticing