SHENZHEN, China -- I had a phenomenal flight.
I've been banking up my sleep the last couple weeks, getting up with my daughter three times a night because that's what she does. So I haven't been sleeping a whole lot. When we got on that plane I was determined to sleep the whole way. I slept the first six hours and then I got up and played two hours of cards, lost a little bit of money, and then I slept for another six or seven hours. It was pretty epic.
I originally had planned to try to get on the same time zone as China. We left at 2 a.m. in China, so I wanted to sleep right away while it was essentially their night time and I did that. And then when I woke up, I was still tired and there was just so much time left that I couldn't sit on the plane for that long. I mean, I could have played cards for a while but I wasn't doing very well. I lost a lot of Skittles, but that hurts more than losing money. Because I like Skittles.
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We had a doctor and a dentist who were just cleaning house. It was me, Cam Neely, Tuukka Rask, Jay Pandolfo, our coach, and our team doctor and our dentist. I think everyone was winning but me. We were playing poker. I'm not a big poker guy, I like to play shnarps. That's what we normally play. So I had to leave that game. I was going to go to sleep, wake up and play again, but then I just ended up sleeping the whole way. I actually woke up partway through David Backes' announcement over the loudspeaker on the plane that I was breaking records.
I was on China time literally the second we got here. It was incredible.
I brought my guitar with me to China. The reason I brought it is because I didn't do as well over the summer as I had planned. Summer ended up being crazy busy and I had very little free time to play, so I wanted to get back into it. Because I made some pretty good progress last year. My goal is to play an hour a day at least, so I figured I could get an hour before bedtime. So if I can kick it off now and try to get that routine back in for the season, O figured I'd bring it and try to chip away at it a bit and get it back.
I was getting pretty decent for my skill level by the end of the year, but I didn't have a ton of time to play over the summer. We were really busy building a house, were living in the basement of my parents' house for a while. The only time I'd have to play was when my daughter was sleeping and the last thing I wanted to do was wake her up, so I didn't play a lot and didn't really improve over the summer, which I was a little disappointed about. I've tried three times now to play the guitar; twice I've failed but this time I actually stuck with it. So I want to get back into it, make sure I make some big strides this year.
But I almost left it on the plane. I was still sleeping when we got off the plane, so I left it. But I beelined back for it.
Yesterday was a bit of a tough day because we were in limbo, didn't know if we were practicing or not, so we were just hanging around the hotel. Once we found out we weren't practicing we had a team stretch, a little bit of a warmup workout, and by the time we actually got to spend some time to ourselves it was almost 5 p.m. A few of us got together, walked around the mall that's across the street and toured around the second-tallest building in China, the Ping An International Finance Centre, which is right beside our hotel. We checked that out for a bit and then we went to a restaurant down the street and hung out.
I tried duck feet last night. It was interesting. It was tough to get around the fact that it was duck feet. I had to try it, though, because everyone was talking about it. I'm not great at trying new things. I think duck feet might be the only thing I try this trip. But I feel like I earned my stripes.
