By Jordan Delp

Jordan Delp is a men’s basketball player at Augustana. He is blogging about the team’s trip to China. For more posts about the Vikings’ journey, click here.

Today started with a good breakfast buffet at the Holiday Inn Riverside hotel that we are staying. Kind of nice getting a little bit of home mixed in with the Chinese culture. The food was good, with a nice mixture of Chinese food and American food. Again, it was good to have some Frosted Flakes and get a little taste of home.

After breakfast we returned to Central China Normal University for practice. Today, instead of practicing in the basement facility we used yesterday, we got to work out in their 5000-seat, air-conditioned arena. It was a cool atmosphere that none of us had ever really practiced in, and some of the students and more influential people at the University were there to watch us practice. After we were done with our practice, some of the guys had the opportunity to scrimmage against the University’s players.

Afterwards, we had lunch at the University hotel and restaurant with their players and some faculty. It was interesting to learn that one of their professors, Ms. Fu, was getting ready to head to Rock Island to teach advanced Chinese this school year at Augustana. The relationship between our college and the University has helped make our stay in Wuhan as accommodating as we could imagine. It was cool being able to talk with their guys, and learn how their college life compares and contrasts with ours. One of their guys told us that Kobe Bryant was his favorite player, and that Michael Jordan was the best player ever. We can definitely relate to that sentiment. A lot of their guys were P.E. majors, and a couple of them even admitted to skipping class every once and awhile. They said that we were all much more experienced at basketball, but that they would dominate us playing ping pong.

Lunch was another buffet style, made up of many different Chinese dishes. A couple of them really stood out, the first being a cup of half-dried noodles. These noodles are especially famous here in Wuhan, where they were first made- it was kind of like a peanut-butter tasting spaghetti. Another dish that we tried was Chinese pizza, which tasted nothing like the kind of pizza we have in the States. Basically, it tasted like an egg-and-rice omelet. It wasn’t exactly what we were expecting when we heard we were having pizza, but it was good nonetheless.

Our last stop today was at an agricultural village in rural Wuhan. On this stop we got to see rice and cotton fields, tea-leaf fields, and a specialty village where they manufactured cranes. We were able to meet the governor of the village and he gave us a tour of his village, ripe with insight into the daily grind of the agricultural workers. The process that these workers go through on a day-to-day basis sounds unbelievably difficult and taxing. One of the more interesting tidbits they were able to give us was that China is able to feed its population (20% of the total world population) on only 7% of the world’s land.

Tomorrow we play our second game on the trip, and we are looking forward to putting our team to the test against some of the better competition in China. Right now though, we’re going to try to go find a KFC or Pizza Hut and get more tastes of home.