| Wes Moodie blogging from Shanghai |
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| Saturday, 15 November 2008 21:48 |
 Travelling east over several time zones can be quite challenging. I perhaps slept a little too well on the flight over and arrived in Shanghai later than we had hoped on Wednesday – late afternoon. Thanks to a change in the EXPRESS visa service by the Chinese Embassy, we had to wait three days in London before we could leave for Shanghai. (Yes, apparently they do need 72 hrs to type your name on a piece of paper and glue it in your passport).Jetlag sleep is probably the most enjoyable sleep a person could have. The problem with jetlag sleep is that it never lasts long enough. I stayed awake as late as I could so I could have a fair chance of waking up at around 7 or 8am. I went to sleep at around 1.30am and felt alert when I woke up. (Which doesn’t happen often) After trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep – the room was ominously dark – I decided to have a peek at the alarm clock. 4.30am – 3 hours sleep! Fast forward two mornings and the most continuous sleep I had was five hours. Not the best preparation for the year end Masters. It was possibly the worst performance we had all year. The shock of playing such a bad match seemed to stay longer with us than expected. Although we felt a lot better, the first set of the 2nd match against Horna/Cuevas was worse than the first match. We had played 3 atrocious sets of tennis but somehow through absolute determination we started playing better, closing in on “playing well”. It was a hard fought match and we were even in a winning position late in the super-breaker but we came up short. Our third match was against the Bryans and we decided to try our best to reach 2-2 in the first set - something that had not been done before by Team Coetzee/Moodie in Shanghai. We did one better – 4-1 up. We ended up winning 62 26 12-10. It was the best way possible to finish an unsuccessful Shanghai Masters Cup. My family did not come with me but I did have two good friends who came with. (Jason and Tanya Smith) We didn’t do many touristy things but did the markets and local restaurants (once a little too local). Listen carefully here people: DO NOT buy an iPod from a market in China. DO NOT buy an iPod from the first shop you go into. However, if you do lose your mind and decide to buy an iPod, MAKE SURE you read the instruction leaflet that comes with the iPod. And MOST OF ALL, do not buy TWO iPods!! (From a market in China, from the first shop you go in to, without reading the instruction leaflet) - I managed to do all four. You don’t want to buy from the first shop because you don’t know what the going rate is. I bought two iPods and Jason bought one. We thought we had got a good deal BUT the girl’s STARTING price in the second shop we went into was less than half of what we paid. My friend asked the girl three times how much it was, perhaps hoping that maybe her price was in US dollars and not yuan. It wasn’t. We had been duped! We tried to “change our minds” but the guy in the shop said that “this was not America” – I guess we didn’t have a receipt either…. So it was off to the hotel to try our ChinaPods. I opened the box and started to read the leaflet in plain English. The first line was, “Please so operation” with instructions below. Not a promising start. The software seemed like it was cutting edge – if you were living in 1980 - and the rattling ear phones didn’t exactly produce that Bose-like sound quality I was looking for. Jason’s ChinaPod actually didn’t work at all. At least mine could belt out China’s Top Ten but Jason’s just did not work at all. We went back to our “friend” who had promised us that his iPods had come from the “good factory” unlike the cheap ones around the corner that were from the “bad factory”. My friend did something which had never been done before in a Chinese market – he got money back for the products that we had bought – not all of the money but two thirds of it. I was a little nervous that we were going to get ourselves into trouble when Jason said “we can do this the easy way, or the hard way”. But the tactic seemed to work - particularly Jason’s closed fist coinciding with “the hard way”. I also think the height advantage of about a foot from both Jason and I persuaded him to start digging in to his pockets. It was a good effort. In fact he may have got more because Jason was pushing for extra but I managed to squeeze my way between the fist and our friend to accept his offer - I figured a blood bath over $10 probably wasn’t worth it. Other than that, we did buy some other things including a black cashmere coat with Hugh Hefner lining. (We all have dreams - don’t we?) We bought the coats from the Fabric Market. An awesome place – it is all tailor made and you can pretty much give them a picture out of a magazine and say I want this, with that material, one pocket extra length or pretty much anything. Jason and Tanya were very impressed by the treatment we received. Jason had played a little bit on the satellite circuit so his airport pickup in the latest chauffeur driven Mercedes Benz definitely started him off on the right foot. It was a great tournament to be a part of. I especially liked the personalised silky pillow cases and gown in the hotel room. I really look forward to the year ahead and the possibility of doing well in the London Masters Cup in the O2 Arena. It is now on to London for a few days and then on to South Africa where the training will begin ASAP. It’s the end of the season and most players are dead tired. I’m still feeling fresh from my 3 ½ month break over the summer so I’ll be hitting the gym hard…. |
