Fun with Fubon

This morning, I ran the Fubon Taipei Marathon. Well, the half marathon part of it. It was a lot of fun! After I woke up at 5:15 cursing my alarm, I hopped in a cab and headed to Taipei City Hall. The start was quite the scene. It was dark and basically all of the signs were in Chinese. Luckily, I was able to navigate to the bag check somehow. I checked my bag at about 6:45 and the race started at 7. There were still hundreds of people waiting behind me to check their bags. Once I got to the start however, I was WAY back in the pack. The race started on time, with the elite runners going first. They had athletes from Ethiopia and Kenya brought in so it was the real deal. The grand prize was $1.3 million NT, which is about $40,000 USD. Not too bad if you ask me.

Anyway, the race began like any other race in Taiwan: 8 guys standing in a line with some corny music playing and then simultaneously firing 8 guns at once. It took me about 4 minutes to cross the finish line though. Then, once I did, I had to pass thousands of people. I spent more than half of the race passing large groups of people. I'll know next time to arrive a little earlier. Ha ha. The race itself was nothing too interesting. It was basically a big square around Taipei, sticking to all of the major roads. Before I knew it, it was over! I'm guessing I ran between 1:25 and 1:30 but not sure yet because it was chip-timed so I'll be curious to see what they say. The reason why it went well was because race officials were holding motivational signs such as "Insist!", "Fighting", and "Bravo." I made sure to do all three of those things.

Afterwards, I hung out by the finish line waiting for the elites to finish the marathon. I ran into 2 different hashers that I knew. The finish line was quite the scene. Announcers on multiple stages were constantly chattering in Chinese, with a little English sprinkled in. They kept on talking about Christmas too. I'll put pictures up shortly.

Yesterday was Principal's Christmas party for the kindergarten students. It was a 6 hour work day in which no one got paid and I only had one task to do that took an hour. The rest of the time, I took a ton of pictures of the kids in their costumes. Very cute. It was a very over-the-top spectacle that I'll remember forever. 'Nuff said.