India...
Categories: just-life
Date: 24 March 2010 09:14:02
Ok, I've been back for a week now, but I've only really put my photos up in Flickr at the weekend and I've still not put most of my videos up on youtube.
The trip was awesome fun. It was my debut on the international archery scene which made it quite special. I had shot for Wales already last summer at the British Target Champs for the Home Nations competition. But this, being the test event for the Commonwealth Games later in the year, was a lot further away than Shropshire and against a much greater number of countries than just England and Scotland.
The first thing we noticed when we arrived (3am on a Sunday) was the traffic. There are apparently rules to the road in India... I'm not sure that anyone knows them. A great example of this was on a tuk-tuk trip from the Red Fort in Delhi down to the Lotus Temple. Our drivers wanted to turn right onto a dual-carriageway (they drive on the left in India) but there was a central reservation... so they drove for a couple of minutes the wrong way down the street until they got to a gap that they could cross... it was... interesting!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaKubV6DvxI
Some of the other things that I noticed out in town was that even though it was all quite dusty and dirty and a lot of the areas appeared to be fairly poor, is that people seemed to be quite cheerful, indeed I was impressed at the range of colours of the saris that the women wore. To give an example I would need to break out the bumper book of colours but there were blues, greens, reds, purples, golds, oranges, yellows... other colours.
I also did some shooting. Monday was practice, basically so we could look over the grounds, make sure everything was working and to get our equipment checked by the judges. It was also our introduction to what the weather was going to be like... blue sky and +30 degree temperatures. It was lovely!!
Qualifiying was on Tuesday and while I didn't do as well as I'd wanted to do I managed to achieve the very important goal of not coming last!!
Wednesday had the individual head-to-heads and the lower team head-to-heads. Having finished in nineteenth postition my first match was against the fourteenth place archer. Ironically, despite travelling all the way to India my very first match was against an English archer who lives in the very next county. In our first set he took the points 56-55, though as I dropped a 7 in with my last shot in all fairness I really lost that set rather than hin winning in. In the second set he won again, this time 57-53, which left me in joint 17th at the end of the day.
In our first team match we were up against Scotland. Scotland started well, pulling out a three point lead after the first twelve shots, but we had a strong second half and not only caught up but ended up winning by five points. Yay us!! Into the semi-finals and the possibility of a medal.
Thursday was finals days for the team event. Our first match was against the #1 ranked Malasian team and it went exactly as planed... they scored more points and won!! But never mind, for there was still the bronze medal match against India (who lost to England). While I can't really claim that we were keeping India worried I can at least claim that we ended up with a really good reason for not winning when one of the guys had an equipment failure that meant he missed the target and caused us a couple minutes of worry as you are not given any time to fix things during a head-to-head match. So once the arrows had been scored we either had to be ready or forfit the match. Thankfully we managed to get the bow fixed and were at least able to finish the match.
Friday were the individual finals and though we had no archers who'd made it that far we all went along anyway to watch... and to teach the Indian team how to chant from the stands.
Saturday saw most of the team heading home, apart from three of us who hadn't been able to get seats on that plane so we decided to go see the Taj Mahal... it is a truely amazing building and if you ever do get the chance to go I would highly reccomend it!! We weren't there for sun rise/set where the Taj Mahal is supposed to change colour with the sunlight, but even so it was a truely amazing building.
All of my photos can be found on my Flickr Page
And here's a taster of what's there.
