So we decided to go visit the ‘bottle opener’, the Shanghai World Financial Center, with a Sky Arena at 94th floor (423m), a Sky Walk with glass roof at 97th floor (439m) and a Sky Walk with glass floor at 100th floor (474m). It was nice, hot and sunny, and the smog had lifted for us to see the city all around us. 1500 tomorrow.
So now I’m in the dog house for sending a request out to the Faroese media, that they should clear any interview with us the team around Pál, rather than find him on Facebook or where ever, exploiting that he doesn’t like to say no. A request that tabloid news portal Vágaportalurin chose to put online.
(me and a rouge, private journalist setting up our radio studio at the European Junior Championships in Belgrade 2008, where Pál won 3 gold medals)
Now comes serious business, a possible qualification time for the London Olympics :-S
Yet again Pál and Jón amaze me. You cannot begin to understand how amateurish the rest of us are, down to the point where we had to have our T-shirts printed here in Shanghai, because nobody had time before we left. Pure guts and brains.
Alexander Dale Oen himself asked if I had been working out, with those legs. I told him no, I have been eating :-D
Amazing performance at the FINA Gala Dinner.
I haven’t met an unpleasant person in Shanghai, period. I’ve had teenage classmates robbed in broad daylight outside Macy’s on Broadway, a friend attacked for just walking home from a party in Copenhagen, and experienced the French in general in Paris. Shanghai Pudong district is nothing like that.
Norwegian swimmer, Alexander Dale Oen, mourned the victims of the recent tragedy in Oslo and Utøya in Norway. He set the fastest time (59.37) in the 100 breaststroke semi-finals at the XIV FINA World Championships in Shanghai today.
[Music: “Death of Aase” by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg]
Participation at World Championships sounds very exotic, but is in fact quite tedious at times. The swimmer’s need to rest between 1 or 2 swim sessions a day, which means that you spend most of your time either at the hotel, the pool, or travelling between those two places. With little time for touristing the place, it are the small things that keep our spirits high.
