In the year 2008, after 1.5 years selling vacuum cleaners in Malaysia, I decided, enough of vacuum cleaners. Let me get a REAL job,…like playing poker online professionally (if you read my earlier posts you could see how I was trying to make it, but it was WAY harder than I thought it was going to be so that didn’t go through), and at the same time try something new like…..golf.

So that’s when the golf adventure begin, 2 sets of 10x lessons with a local pro and I was playing at least every week at the course since then. Scores never really improved I was always at the 100-110 level, occasionally breaking 100 which I will then go celebrate.

As if golf wasn’t expensive enough in Malaysia, moving to China, golf became 3-4 times more expensive for a regular round of 18 than in Malaysia. However, I thought to myself, I don’t want to give up the sport, so I spent less on other stuff, and saved up to play my weekly tournament with the Beijing Golfer’s Club. Have met quite a few friends there now like Jack Murphy, Kevin Connolly, Liujianqiang.etc. Most of them with kids that are older than I am, and so far picked up a RMB700 Italian restaurant voucher for a nearest-to-pin for one of the par 3′s sometime last year that I enjoyed with Huiwen when she was here sometime this year.

Until last Sunday, when all of a sudden, the golf gods were on my side and the first 5 holes that I played I had a 1-under par (birdie, par, par, par, par). Something was wrong. I finished the game with a gross of 85 (previous best was 89 at Ming Tombs), and since I have a ridiculously high handicap of 26, my net for that day was 59, easily winning the B division of the weekly tournament.

Since that day so happened was the TianAn Monthly Medal, they had bigger prizes than normal and I walked away with the Gold Trophy and a free roundtrip flight to anywhere in Europe on a Finnair operated flight.

Of course I had to screenshot the results that they sent to our emails. (I was this close from printing this out and framing it and putting it on my wall): They did a miscalculation and put net 58 when it was supposed to be 59.

So here is the trophy with the award letter, sitting at the Nuffnang China office, waiting for me to use it up, by sometime before Nov 27.

So Europe here I come!

No we didn’t do the 100km. That would just be suicide.

We braved it to do the 10km. I was super reluctant. Back in high school I could barely run the cross country 5km run. Coming back to the finishing like high and proud but couldn’t find the finishing line, because it had already closed. So I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to sign up for this torture.

Well, I did. And had quite some fun on race day. Good thing is that I did manage to finish it. WAY AHEAD my friend Szeto, which is the dude on the right in the first picture. Wandy on the left came in like 20 minutes before me, took a nap, had lunch, then only did I arrive.

Szeewon on the left, and Szeto having a stare down.

The whole running crew: (minus Steven, who was our cheerleader without the pompoms). Ok wait, maybe he was just cheering for Wandy.

Szeto trying to be superman:

For some it was a walk in the park, for some of us it was torture. But we all made it through alive. The unfit ones died 2 days after.