Day 59: March 3, 2013 Badminton

     Today was also pretty uneventful. I got up early to study for thermo and took a break to Skype my mom and figure out some ideas for future travels plans. Besides that I spent the entire day studying except for breaks for lunch and dinner. After dinner, Adam and I had our badminton date and met our friend Jeremy down in the lobby.

     We were expecting it to just be four of us but we ended up heading over to the courts with a group between 10 and 15 people. We had people from all over the place including China, South Korea, Singapore, and Italy. It was great to meet so many students and they were all so nice and friendly and all spoke pretty good English. One girl, Berry, told me she was going to take me out for Korean food sometime and help me get something I would like since a lot of it is really spicy. It was also interesting to talk to the guy from Italy who is here doing his thesis in Mechanical Engineering and hear about what he was doing.

     Once we got to the courts we had to split up into both pingpong and badminton so that everyone could play, but I managed to get badminton. We split up onto different courts and just hit it around for a while. Adam got snagged to play with this older man before he even got on the court, and said that he got absolutely worked. Adam plays tennis so is definitely pretty good, but he said the guy was just running him all over the court, front to back and left to right like it was nothing. Meanwhile, for the first 5 minutes or so, I was absolutely awful and could only hit the birdie with it was right above my head. After a little practice though, I had kind of figured it out and was at least decent.

     We ended up playing some doubles, which was really funny. It’s awesome how much you can communicate through sports and how much fun you can have without even necessarily speaking the same language as someone. We all rotated partners for a while and at one point my partner hit me in the butt, which was pretty hilarious. The next time it came to him he hit me in the face and felt so bad that he was bowing for forgiveness. It was not a big deal at all so I felt bad that he even felt bad at all. After Adam had had enough of his side game he joined our game until we decided we had already stayed longer than we should considering we had an exam in the morning. We said goodbye to everyone and made sure that we would all get to play again since it was so much fun. After we got back and showered we stayed up pretty late to cram for thermo and all went to bed pretty uneasy about what was to come in the morning.