Monday, November 17, 2008

Kite Festival



The Shenzhen Kite Festival featured tons of countries from all over the world and, as our contact teacher (who is also the head of the Shenzhen Kite Flying association) told us, "All of your foreign kite flying athlete friends will be there!"
Quick test! Check out the flag in the right of the picture with a moon and star and otherwise is just an american flag. Bonus Andy points for whoever guesses it!

Sadly the winds were so strong that many of the kites had to be grounded because they were breaking in the air or being swept away into the ocean. My favorite kite of the whole fest was this awesome carp one, which narrowly avoided disaster via the incredibly swimming abilities of its owner.
The carp kite, however, is not to be messed with and can be easily provoked into anger.

I bought a friendly kite and soon the crazy carp and me were buddies!
Even though the wind typically blows in a uniform manner, my kite for some reason always flew perpendicular to every other kite on the beach. This led to some suspenseful kite battles of which i won 2 and lost 1 (see below).


The korean team let out this crazy hyper-kite, built from a string of many kite attached about 2 meters apart and stretching 500 meters into the clouds! They had 6 guys working on the kite at any given time.


The most dramatic "kite fight!" happened when my kitemy kite fly directly over the korean super kite and crashed. Instantly some dudes went racing for my kite and which i figured would be to lift my kite back up and send it up. I kept shouting at them and thanking them, when one dude pulls out his big knife and just slices my kite right off. But that is what you have to expect when you enter the dark world of professional kite flying. One moment you are flying up above the clouds but one wrong move and your life line will be sliced!


My other favorite kite at the fest started out as "Everyone's favorite Basketball man, YAO MING!" So it was a little yao ming head with some legs, but then his head blew off into the ocean and there was just a flying pair of legs. Then later 3 more pairs of flying legs came up to join it.







2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The flag in question is the flag of Malaysia. Besides the star and crescent moon,the flag differs in the American flag by having 7 white stripes vs 6.

Unknown said...

Meters? What the hell Andy. English units or go home.