5:41 PM View

Volunteering at the Jiangyin Half Marathon was a lot of fun.  Our task was to give water to the runners; and scream encouraging words at them.  A lot of the runners were pleased to see this bearded foreigner doing so.  One runner stopped to take a selfie with me.  A lot of runners said ‘thank you’ to me which was surely a record for me — the record being amount of gratitude received in an interim of time by yours truly.  

To get to the course of the micro marathon, I had to leave the apartment at 5:30 AM.  There was confusion getting to the exact location but we got to our station and waited for two hours for the runners to come.  

To while away that time, I wandered around the nearby park, read books on my iPhone, and chatted with the other volunteers.  The park, located near the freeway going to the Jiangyin Big Bridge, was well maintained and had a lot of interesting fixtures like slides and parking spots below the freeway.  I read some Romano Guardini and was cagey when a local asked me what I was reading.  I talked to an Italian who had an electric car.  He told me he loved the car and found recharging convenient; but this was because, he said, China could support the infrastructure for it. He didn’t think it was a good idea for Canada and the USA because they didn’t have the population density and it was too cold in Canada as well.

We ended the volunteering with a nice meal at a swanky local restaurant.  What got my attention, about the building that the restaurant was in, was the dress of its doormen and parking attendants:  they looked like military general staff — their uniforms were so well done. (I took a video of them which you can see in the April 14th AKIC Daily Video)