It's all over the news today, so if you don't already know that there was a total lunar eclipse last night, what rock do you live under? (Would you like me to flip it over for you and scrape you off the underside? XD)
So, after my event last night, Eunice had her show to run as well, and since hers was scheduled to be over and done with by 9pm, Keldren and Amy decided to hang around and wait for the people on her side, so we could go and have dinner.
While waiting, I go up to the office and start sorting out stuff, since I'm meant to be on leave until Wednesday (but it looks like I'll be making a short trip back to the office tomorrow to carry on sorting out some stuff... sigh). Wai Xin then tells me not one, but
two things that I had never heard of:
1. Stage 1 of the Indoor World Archery Championships is being held in Singapore tomorrow (which means today, since this was told to me yesterday; more on that later).
2. There's a total lunar eclipse happening, like, NOW.
So, after Eunice's show was over, we (she, Jun Jie, Amy, Keldren and me) piled into Keldren's car and he drove down to Thomson for our favourite fried rice post-event supper/dinner. :D
While we were on our way there, Amy looked out the window and noticed that "the moon looks weird".
"Yeah," I said, "my friend told me just now that there's a total lunar eclipse happening tonight."
"So cool!"
Which then cues Eunice, Amy and me squishing over to look out the window on Amy's side, and then when the car turns, squishing over to my window, and then squeezing back to Amy's side when the car turns again. Rinse and repeat for the next 10 minutes. Add in a lot of, "It's here, it's here, I see it!" and, "There, there, see it's so small already!" and also, "Hello, moooon!!" (mostly Amy).
During our ride down to Thomson, we saw the moon go from being half-covered, to being mostly blotted out except for a small toenail-like sliver. Then we stood in the carpark where Keldren had parked for half an hour and watched it become fully covered and dark red .
I've seen pictures of blood moons, but it's so cool to finally see it actually happen.
Picture courtesy of Keldren, who had his DSLR with him at the time. :)
And now we come to today, and the Indoor World Archery Championships at Marina Bay Sands.
Seriously, no publicity at all. Dumb AAS. If Netball Singapore can splash out on publicity for the Nations Cup by placing ads on buses and stadiums, why couldn't AAS have done just a fraction of the same?! If you want the sport to grow, the first thing is generate an interest in it, no?
And the spectator turnout at the venue was dismal as well; probably because of the $30 admission fee. Because honestly, even if you had heard about the sport and were curious to come see it, if you didn't know anything about the sport and who was shooting, $30 might kill your interest pretty fast, wouldn't it?
Anyway, we arrived about halfway through the individual knockout rounds, and we saw the Bronze medal matches for both recurve and compound, men's and women's. Bit of a shame that Si Lie lost at the men's recurve bronze medal match, but the Singaporean girl (I forgot her name, oops) shooting for the women's compound bronze medal won her match. It was kind of scary to watch her shoot, because she was so skinny, and looking at her, you honestly wouldn't think that she could draw a bow, but she CAN and she's pretty damn stable too.
Women's recurve bronze medal match: a girl from Chinese Taipei against a lady from... oh dear, I can't remember the country. All I remember is that it was a Caucasian lady. Haha. The Chinese Taipei girl was awesome to watch. She started out a little slow on her first end, shooting 8s and a 9, while the other lady had a perfect score, but after that, her opponent faltered and she came back, shooting at least two 10s in every end; the Chinese Taipei girl won in the end.
Finally, the two recurve gold matches. These two matches alone made it totally worth the $30 paid for entry.
Women's recurve gold: two Chinese Taipei girls. So once that other girl had won the bronze medal, Chinese Taipei had secured all three top positions for recurve. Amazing. And even more amazing was that during the gold medal match, both girls were shooting at least two 10s in each end, if not perfect scores. Up till this point, the spectators would usually clap every time a 10 was scored, but 10s became so common in this match that no one really clapped anymore! LOL. They eventually tied and went into a shootout, but that match was awesome.
Men's recurve gold: one guy from Chinese Taipei against a French guy whom I didn't like very much because I found his attitude annoyingly uppity. At this point, the other Chinese Taipei supporters around us suddenly became very vocal and supportive of their teammate (they weren't even this encouraging - some of them weren't even
awake - when their female teammate was shooting against the other Caucasian lady... WTH?? -_-), shouting encouragement when he was drawing, and cheering when he scored a good shot.
French guy didn't start off too hot. Chinese Taipei guy was sort of okay. Both guys drew in the first end, but while the Chinese Taipei guy continued to perform well, French guy couldn't keep up and lost every end after that. So Chinese Taipei won both the recurve men's and women's titles.
We scooted off after that, as we weren't too interested in the compound matches, and we were kind of starving. Fred and I hadn't had breakfast or lunch, and Wai Xin and Weiquan hadn't had lunch either. We'd arrived at the competition at about 1.30pm, see, so it was kind of a weird timing in between breakfast and lunch.
So, since we were in MBS, we had TWG for tea! \(^-^)/ Ah, the happiest point of the whole day. o(^▽^)o
