usa vs canada

just a brief summary of the events that happened:

canada created a poomse team out of the people they brought for sparring. might as well, right? take home a few silvers. plus one gold. the judges in ring 3 were old style judges. they had no idea what poomse competition really was. so when carissa went up to do her individual forms, they put two of them together in the ring and announced, "taeguk pal chang" and she stopped and said, no, that's not the form we're doing. after more deliberation, they estalished that she would be doing taebek, and only taebek, and the judges decided who won by pointing to the winner at the end of the form.

we finally cleared it up that the womens' team was doing both forms, but the judges basically didn't understand the format or the standards. canada did an ok form - the style was all old, and the sync wasn't exactly on, but the judges ended up choosing them as the winner. only the korean judge with blond highlights chose alicia's team - and later rich would say that this guy definitely knew his stuff.

canada sparred well in the women's divisions, taking the heavy, light and fin weight medals, while we got the feather, and then all the others by default. our men were pretty dominant over theirs. johnny, james howe and tj whooped up on their men who were outsized and outclassed. one guy who usually fights in the senior nationals qualifiers, sven lorrimer, appeared as a representative of guyana, so he fought jason hwang and won closely in overtime. later, we had sparring matches with korea (yong in university), who were really good. you could tell they have a lot of experience and were not only powerful and fast, but smart.

at closing ceremonies, we got all of our medals, and were ready to leave when they called for teams to assemble for another parade of nations. this time it took about 5 minutes to start marching, which was a relief. then, there was more speeches - it was like another opening ceremonies, and we were confused when the mc said, "welcome to the start of the closing ceremonies" because we thought she was going to say "start of the pan am tournament." when they removed the pan am flag, the flagpole almost hit a ref in the head.

that night we went out to a bar/restaurant and then a karaoke club. these kids know how to PARTY. we went through a ridiculous amount of alcohol at the restaurant, and the waiters stopped carding after a while and just started bringing trays of shots. then at the karaoke place, we had a few 24oz and 40oz drinks, and someone brought jugs of sangria and white wine. later, back at the dorms, i remember sitting in a room while others played some drinking game, then i had to run out, hit the toilets, then pass out in my bed. once again, i somehow remembered to take out my contacts and change clothes. thus ends the competition, and the celebration.