Taichung Baseball & Badminton

We had a great weekend traveling South to Taichung to see our cousins this last weekend. We had our first experience taking the High Speed Rail (HSR). It runs on time, is shockingly clean, very smooth, and very fast. The trip to Taichung is about 165km (102 miles). The express train only makes a few stops and will get you there in about 45 minutes. The HSR tops out at a speed of around 185mph. You don't really realize just how fast you are going until you are passing another 20 car train going the other direction it's like there's a 2 second flash outside your window.

The cousins had an awesome weekend planned for us starting out with us attending a Taichung Brothers baseball game vs the Taipei Dragons. The Brothers are a part of the 6 team Chinese Professional Baseball League. It was great high level competition and the crowd loves them some baseball here. Crowd participation is constant throughout the game. Singing, dancing, and flag waving is non-stop. At one point in the game, with the Brothers down 1 run, the crowd did not stop cheering for the entire bottom half of the inning. If you were to show me the video of the crowd on mute, I would have thought they were playing "Jump Around" by House of Pain. But the 12 minute extended mix. It was awesome.

The team plays a 120 game season, and looking at the schedule this was around game 70. The Brothers are coming off back to back championship seasons and looking to 3-peat. It doesn't look promising as they currently sit in 4th place and have a record right around .500. They lost the game on sacrifice fly in the 12th inning. For such a mediocre season, many of the cheerleaders (The Passion Fruit girls) were crying and consoling each other after the loss, just demonstrating even more how much they love baseball here. Both teams come out of their dugouts independently after the game and collectively bow to the crowd to thank them for coming. It was very cool.

Jean's cousin, Mark, invited all of us to go play badminton. It was incredibly fun given how humbling of an experience it was. Mark's two kids, Jing-Yu (11) and Yu-Wei (8) were great little players. Yu-Wei might come up to my waist in height. He absolutely crushed me. And it wasn't like it seemed funny to him how bad I was. His facial expression reminded me of this interview I once heard with Kobe Bryant talking about his mentality during a game against the Knicks where he scored 60 points. "It's a competition, my mission is to destroy you...I'm gonna keep going until you figure out something to do to stop me." The kid was cold blooded in the 90 degree indoor facility. Oh, and I hit Poppy in the face with my racquet. No blood and no concussion assessment needed. But there were tears.

After badminton, Mark took us out for a traditional Taiwanese dinner. It was fantastic. Mark somehow ran in this restaurant and locked down a table for 11 people within 10 minutes. Within 5 minutes of sitting down, food just started getting delivered to the table. Mark pre-ordered everything and it was incredible. Noodles, clam soup, calamari, some part of an octopus mouth deep fried (dragon balls), cabbage, beef, the most delicious onions I've ever had, fish cakes, etc. Notice Yu-Wei still staring me down from across the table, ready to rip my heart out of my chest. The kid is relentless.

Such a fun evening and more of family being so kind and generous to us during our time here in Taiwan. Thank you so much again to Jeff, Jean, Kerai, Enzo, Mark, Jing-Yu, and Yu-Wei! -- Trae