The organization where I work put together a dragon boat racing team for an event in nearby Bad Malente. We had one day to practice with the boats the day before the race, and we had a very international team, with Germany, India, France, China and of course the US represented. We even had a Chinese drummer to beat out the rhythm in the front of the boat (who had been in a dragon race boat in China before). The first day we practiced in cold rain. The trick was coordinating so we didn't bump into each other with the paddles because we were sitting so close together, with one row paddling on the right and one row on the left. The directions were barked out in German, which I made a couple of mistakes with and messed up the paddeling on my side. At one point I felt like I knew what it was like to be paddling for a viking ship. On the day of the race the weather cleared up a bit and to add to the strageness of being in a Chinese sport in Germany a Punk-Scottish band was playing modern Celtic music at the festival. There were a couple of professional teams that came in, but we didn't do bad and placed in with most of the other teams present. The first time we completed the distance in 1:09 and the second time in 1:02 (I think the distance was 200 meters, but I'm not completely sure).
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