Tag Archives: China

Augie in China: One last stop

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Augustana senior Kyle Nelson and his teammates took a summer trip to China. He will be blogging regularly on D3hoops.com about the team’s journey.

Augustana players and coaches on the Great Wall

Our last day overseas. The most amazing trip of our lives is finally coming to a close. To close out the trip we had a forced layover in Japan, due to having a connecting flight to Chicago the next day. That allowed us a little bit of time for some sightseeing. We traveled into downtown Tokyo and made our first stop at Tokyo Tower. This is the largest free standing steel structure in the world. It had an observation deck to go up in. Immediately we could see why Tokyo was the most populated city in the world with about 37 million people. It was huge! The city stretched beyond what we could see from the tower and it was truly an impressive sight.
 
Next stop on the Tokyo-in-a-day tour was the Imperial Palace, located in the center of the city. This Palace is where the Emperor and his family resided. The current Emperor is part of a family that has been in the Imperial Palace for 125 generations. That is an incredible amount of time. Currently, however, the Emperor of Japan serves no purpose other than being a figure-head for the country. All political power has been removed from that position and resides elsewhere within the political system. The Palace was closed on this particular afternoon so we were not able to go inside, but we got a view of part of it from across the moat that surrounded the compound.
 
We made a brief stop at a Buddhist Temple (Asakusa) before heading to our meal. This meal was easily the best of the trip. Each table had its own little grill on it and there was a buffet of at least fifteen different kinds of raw meats that you could choose yourself and cook yourself. I’m pretty sure that everyone ate way more than they could handle, but it was good none the less.
 
At dinner, we had a special guest waiting for us. His name was Phil Hoffman and he was the Minister-Counselor of Public Affairs for the United States Embassy in Tokyo. He also happened to be an Augie grad (1974) and an ex-student for Dr. Moline. Phil spent about half an hour talking to the group about what he did overseas and how his Augie education has really helped him in his job that has taken him from Greece to India to Nepal and to Japan among other places. He was really an impressive and well-spoken man and his stories were truly one-of-a-kind because no where else could you experience what he had gone through.
 
Our flight to Chicago leaves in and hour and a half. One more blog coming when we land back home!
 
Kyle Nelson

Augie in China: Pick and roll comes in handy

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Augustana senior Kyle Nelson and his teammates are in China. He will be blogging regularly on D3hoops.com about the team’s journey.

Currently at a comfortable cruising altitude of 32,000 feet, I think back about what we saw on our last day in China. Our final day was dominated by a seven hour trip to the Great Wall. We boarded the bus and took the two hour drive from our hotel to the far outreaches of Beijing where the Mutainyu section of the Great Wall is. This part was built over 600 years ago during the Ming Dynasty.  Driving up we were able to catch glimpses of it on the tops of the mountain range.

Once there we prepared ourselves for the long climb up more than one thousand stairs to finally reach the wall. We figured this hike would be some good training for the upcoming 2 mile. The hike took a while, but once it was done it was definitely worth it. The Great Wall was a sight to see. It seemed to go on forever. Just walking around on it gave you a great sense of pride just for being up there. We were on the Wall for at least an hour and a half, snapping photos and just looking out onto the mountain range.

After spending time up there we took the cable cars down and got ready to eat our final Chinese meal as a team. By now we were pretty used to the food served at these places; baked fish, eggplant, cabbage, pineapple chicken, spicy beef and egg drop soup. However, that doesn’t mean that were not thinking about having some good American food once we get back home.

Our last stop was at two of the largest markets we saw during the whole trip. They were the Pearl Market and the Silk Market; both located in downtown Beijing. These markets we essentially like the department stores we are used to, as they were indoors and were either four or five stories tall. But we were still able to barter with the salespeople at these places. The Pearl market was most obviously known for its extensive pearl vendors and the Silk Market, you guessed it, had practically a whole floor dedicated to silk materials. The popular items continued to be watches, scrolls, and souvenirs, but bootlegged DVDs made their first appearance in a market this trip and were a popular purchase.

We have quite a bit of time to kill on this flight to Tokyo, Japan (about three hours), and I’m sitting next to Bryant Voiles. Here are his thoughts thus far about the trip:

Thus far China has been an incredible experience individually and as a team. Not only have we been able to bond as a team at some of the most influential places in Chinese history and one of the seven wonders of the world, but also places such as the markets, hotels, dinners and night life. For example, in Beijing the silk market had some very determined people wanting to sell their items. On more than one occasion, they would corner someone in their store and block them from exiting until they bought an item. Being the skilled basketball players we are we managed to effectively use the pick and roll on the salesman so that we were able to leave the store.  The person not being blocked in the store would walk up unknowingly behind the salesman and set a back screen, then the person being cornered would run the salesman right into the screen being set free of the trap and both people would then jog away as the relentless salesman yelled at us to come back. I entered this trip with an open perspective on the culture that I was about to embrace anticipating major differences. Looking back I realize that I have earned a greater appreciation for my own culture and even the little things in life that are sometimes taken for granted such as a toilet seat and clean water that can be drunk from the tap.  
Bryant Voiles ( Senior Co Captain)

Kyle Nelson

Augie in China: Arriving in Beijing

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Augustana senior Kyle Nelson and his teammates are in China. He will be blogging regularly on D3hoops.com about the team’s journey.

Augustana has arrived in Beijing, China!

After many days of travel, lots of sightseeing and three games, we have made to the last stop (in China that is, we stop in Tokyo, Japan also) of our China ’10 tour. We awoke in Xi’an at 5:45 am, ate a quick breakfast and drove to the airport to catch our 8:30 am flight. We were flying to Beijing early to prepare for our game against the Chinese Junior National team later that afternoon.

This team was the best group of Chinese players in the nation that were 18-21 years old. However, according to an inside source, an American weightlifting coach for the Chinese women’s basketball team, this team was playing as an 18-and-under team. Clearly age requirements are very loosely followed in China…just like their gymnastics team from the Olympics.

This team is also the group of players that will represent China at the World University Games in Shenzhen, China in 2011 and will be one of the gold medal favorites playing in its home country. We played the game against this team at the National Fitness and Training Center in Beijing. This center was a walled off area of Beijing, essentially like a gated neighborhood, that had facilities and training grounds for every sport that China competes in internationally. This is the location where they would have trained for the 2008 Olympics. As we drove in we got to see their female weightlifters, swimmers and drivers, and their gymnastics team all in training. It also appeared to have dormitories where the athletes would live on the grounds as well. It was a very impressive facility.
 
To say that their Junior National team was tall would be quite an understatement. On their frontline they had at least four 7-footers, including a 7’2 center. I am proud to say I won the tip from the guy although I don’t think my quick tip was legal. For the majority of the game we outplayed the taller Team China. Our energy and defensive intensity overwhelmed the Chinese players who were not as physical as us, which allowed us to outrebound them. Everyone that played did a tremendous job, but unfortunately the outcome did not go in our favor. We ended up losing by one as a last second shot off a nicely executed play drawn up by Coach Giovanine did not drop.
 
We came away from this game a positive note however. We competed and outplayed the best that China has to offer at our age. Of course we would have like to have been winners, but playing this caliber of completion in the environment that we did is something rare to experience in the summer.
 
We looks to bounce back today by facing one of the top five university teams in all of China, Tsinghai University. This team just back from a camp coached by American coaches and is looking for revenge after we beat them three years ago in a close game. This game is sure to be a tough contest, and we plan on leaving China on a winning note!
 
Kyle Nelson

Augie in China: A physical game

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Augustana senior Kyle Nelson and his teammates are in China. He will be blogging regularly on D3hoops.com about the team’s journey.

Our final day in Xi’an consisted of a morning sightseeing trip and a game. In the morning we gathered to see the 600 year old Xi’an city wall. The wall was 36 ft high and nine miles around in a rectangle shape. It was an impressive structure that had four entrances to the inner city at the North, South, East and West sides. Our guide explained that the entrances had to be altered to handle today’s foot and car traffic into the city.

We spent about an hour on the wall before heading to the markets and back four a pregame meal at the hotel.

It was an hour drive to Xi’an University, which is also called Northwest Polytechnic University. The campus was very modern looking and had a large basketball arena. Our game was played in front of about 1000 fans that there were not as loud as the previous match. The officials allowed a physical game, which was fine for us. We jumped to a big lead at half and rode the momentum for a 78-54 final to move our record to 3-0 in China.

We have a very early flight to Beijing in the morning and then play the National Developmental CBA team at their training center. This will be the second game of a three day, three game stretch and it is sure to be the best opponent thus far.

Vikes look to go 4-0 tomorrow!

Kyle Nelson

Augie in China: Back in the air

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Augustana senior Kyle Nelson and his teammates are in China. He will be blogging regularly on D3hoops.com about the team’s journey.

Our fourth flight of the trip brought us to the city of Xi’an in central China. The flight from Wuhan to here lasted only about an hour and a half. It seems like the flights are getting shorter and shorter. When we landed we were greeted by Mr. Chang (pronounced J-ong) our guide in Xi’an. Our first stop was lunch and then it was on to see the Terracotta warriors. The warriors were clay sculptures of an army that Emperor Qing (“Ch-in”) who reigned in about 200 B.C., had commissioned and buried along with his body so that he would have an army in the afterlife.
 
The site of the soldiers was massive. There were three different pits that we stopped at. The first was the pit where the first terracotta warrior was discovered by peasants who were digging for a well in 1974. What they happened to find was one of the greatest discoveries of this century. The other two pits that we saw were both discovered by archeologists when they began digging around the initial discovery site.
 
Terracotta warriors

The clay army was made up of infantry men, archers, horses, generals, captains and chariots. Much of the collection is either broken or undiscovered, but much of the army is exposed for this public to see. The warriors were made to be actual size, where as the horses and the chariots were scaled down to half of their true sizes. I thought that something very interesting was that not a single soldier was identical to another. Each warrior had its own face and given the massive scale of the army, that was an impressive undertaking. The terracotta warriors provided some once in a lifetime pictures because truly there is nothing else like them on this planet.
 
After seeing the warriors we went back to our hotel and then set off into downtown Xi’an on our own. We headed to the local market which was positioned right behind the bell and drum towers that have been at the center of Xi’an since the city was established. This market was one of the most lively and exciting and it sold goods that ranged from Rolex watches to squirrel on a stick.
 
Early night to rest for a game against Xi’an University tomorrow.
 
Kyle Nelson