Naw Ruz and the US women's volleyball team

With a title like that how can I fail. Thursday evening was the Naw Ruz dinner for all the Friends in Tianjin and TEDA (Tianjin Economic Development Area). We met at a restaurant in Tianjin and ate and ate. We got to meet many people we had not met before. Once a month the foreign Baha'is are allowed to meet in TEDA for devotions. The first one since we have been here will be in April. There are pictures of our dinner in Tianjin.

Thursday evening we were trying to decide if we should go out singing or not when someone brought up that the US Olympic Women's Volleyball team was going to be in town Friday evening to play the Tianjin city team which are the national champions of China and has several members of their team on the Olympic team. I, of course, got very excited because I like watching volleyball - at least high level volleyball. Apparently several other people felt the same way because we soon had agreed to go the following evening instead of going Karioke singing.

So last night we went to a Olympic caliber volleyball match. I'm sure you want to know who won but I think all I'm going to say about it is that the games were very exciting and close. I was very impressed with how hard the players hit the ball - I mean they hammered it. We were not really close but we weren't too far away either so we got to see the action really well. Some of those girls can really jump. The other really interesting thing about the match was that the photographers and videographers seemed more interested in the awards presentation after the match than in photographing the actual match. And, there were no concessions at the auditorium where the match was held. Some people brought things in but I did not see anything for sale inside the building. (There were Pringles and some bottled water, maybe some candy. I notice those things. No popcorn, though, of course).

So I still haven't gotten the hang of uploading pictures in reverse order. I hope you can all figure out which ones go with Naw Ruz and which ones go with the volleyball game.