Amazing Race: Team Win!

On Saturday June 5th, we woke up early to catch the 6.40 am campus bus to get to the other campus (Xuhui). That was the starting point of the Amazing Race that the IPO staff had planned for us. Throughout the day, we had to follow clues that would be given to us and that would take us to different parts of Shanghai. There were 5 teams. One of the rules of the game was to not have more than 2 Chinese speakers in each team. So we had exactly two and boy we had no idea what gems they were.

Contestants

At 8 am, the rules were read to us and the clues were handed out. Each team immediately ran to a corner, took out a map, and began mapping out the stops. It wasn't very easy since we were given clues about the place and not exactly where the place was. Immediately the 2 Chinese speakers, one of whom lived in Shanghai, whipped out their phones, made phone calls and got us the names and addresses of all the places we had to go to. Honestly, the only thing I contributed to the mapping of places besides my terrible sense of direction was the calculation of an integral that was required to figure out one of the clues. We were very thorough with our mapping and soon were the only team that hadn't left the campus yet. However, we were confident with our plans and set out for the metro station. Luckily, the staff had arranged for all of us to have unlimited one day passes so we could use the metro as much as we wanted. Realizing that we were the last ones to leave campus, we started sprinting whenever we could i.e. from campus to the metro station, in the metro station, up and down stairs etc. Soon we were exhausted and decided not to run for a while.

We got to our first stop, finished the tasks of taking pictures/videos and then went on to the second. This one had a time limit, as in we had to get there between 10 - 11 am. We made it in time and the task there was to make 3 consecutive basketball shots within 35 minutes. While one team member was trying to make the shots, another had to run laps around the stadium we were in. It took the girl making the shots all of 5 minutes to make the shots! That was amazing. All the other teams had to struggle quite a bit. After that we learnt a dance that we had to teach pedestrians on the street and video them! We weren't too optimistic about that one.

Next, we headed to the other stops. Some tasks required amazing bargaining powers for which we thankfully had an expert on our team who thankfully also spoke Chinese. She bought us a kite for 10 rmb and a chess set for 30 rmb ( all these were parts of tasks at the stops. Yes, one of the tasks was to fly a kite 20 m in the air for 7 minutes). After some time, it was time for lunch which also had a time limit of 1pm - 2 pm. We met another team on the metro on the way to lunch. They took the wrong exit out of the metro for lunch and thanks to our other Chinese master navigator, Peter, we went out the right exit and were a little ahead of them. We decided to keep our advantage so we sprinted yet again. In our attempt to completely outrun them, we missed our destination and ran an extra 2 blocks! No wonder they say slow and steady wins the race. We stopped running and walked to the lunch location. We were so ready for food after the exhausting morning full of running, walking, kite flying, haggling etc. Unfortunately, there was a challenge first. We had to eat a bunch of things out of which one was stinky tofu. Stinky tofu is the worst smelling thing ever! I had stayed away from it my whole stay here because the smell was so obnoxious. Now, we HAD to eat it to get points. I stopped breathing and gulped it down. The Chinese people on our team actually enjoyed eating Stinky Tofu so it wasn't a problem for them. One of our team mates almost threw up. But finally we were done with it and they served us actual real lunch!

This a famous pose that we had to imitate in front of the temple. We had to convince pedestrians to participate in the picture with us for bonus points

Task - Find this set of footprints.

Finding this was very difficult.

Task - Use super bargaining powers to

buy chess set for as low as possible

After lunch we set out on our mission again. We went to a place that was a former slaughter house but was now a shopping mall. It looked very very cool!

Task - Find this glass ceiling/floor in the slaughter house

Task - Locate this sign in the slaughter house

Task - Make the flower and pot that's in my hand

Task - Convince store owner to let Alex

try on Traditional Chinese Dress

The last thing on our agenda was to teach people to dance. We got bonus points if we could get 8 to dance at the same time however, we didn't want to waste too much time so we just got 3. It took a lot of convincing to make those 3 agree. Once we got our video, we sprinted to the final destination which was Carl's Jr. We were half an hour ahead of schedule and wanted to be the first to be done so we could get the extra bonus points. Unfortunately, a team had already reached there before we did.

Teaching dance steps to pedestrians on Nanjing Road

We all got dinner while the organizers watched videos and awarded us points. At the end of the amazing dinner they announced the winners. Guess who won... WE DID! WOOT! The people who came second were our close friends so both teams were really happy! First place got free tickets for lasertag and second place got free tickets for go karting. We are going to go to both together.

Winners - Joe, Peter, me, Alex, Andrew and Mindy

I absolutely loved this day! We got to see sights in Shanghai that we had never seen before and probably would never have seen if it weren't for this race. The sites we saw were not tourist areas and I'm soo glad that we got to see a different side and a different aspect of the personality of Shanghai. This city is beautiful both the touristy and non touristy parts! We took the metro back home, took long showers and went to bed to rest up after the long and adventurous day that we had had.

Nayana