There and back again, an archer's tale by Robin Eriksson.

Day 1, 2, 3 and 4 published below.

Day 5, never trust the Chinese.

Same breakfast again… Waiting for the bus to the arena, again… To shoot four arrows… Scored 19 points I think. Missed the first one… After that first, I started to focus more and the last one was in the yellow field. It’s not that hard actually if you do everything right and don’t cut anycorners. You have to be clear in your mind and only focus (don’t think!) on your target, not the whole target, one tiny spot, in this case the yellow centre.

After the target shoot we shot some flight and one man from Hungary won. I got his card afterwards and apparently he shoots over 500 meters! With a bow made of modern materials and a flight arrow, but anyways… I haven’t shot over 200 meters yet, that’s my goal this summer.

As usually there were a lot of pictures taken, we were dressed up for the last day of the shoot.

Back to the hotel again, same lunch again, then back to the stadium for the closing ceremony. They talked a lot in Chinese and everyone was clapping their hands. People came forth to receive prizes and suddenly there were a lot of prizes given away to all the superb Chinese archers… And afterwards we found out that we had competed against modern bows made of fiberglass and arrows of carbon fiber. I was really pissed! It felt like they had just used us for “propaganda” for the people to look at, take pictures of and touch (lots of touching). And to see the great Asians beat the lousy Westerners.

The competition went reasonably well for shooting against modern bows, I think I ended up in an 8^th place and Bengt in 9^th of about a total of 70 archers.

Same dinner again… We had a talk with the hosts of the event about losses in information and communication. We had to pay a lot more than we thought we had to do and so on…

The evening ended with a good party. Lots of singing in Chinese and the manager of the hotel, who was some kind of Chinese opera singer, sang in such high pitch that the glasses almost burst. I and Linda tried to drench us in some kind of Mongolian moonshine we passed to each other on the spinning glass disk in the middle of the table.

A good ending for a lousy day.