Rotten cake

糟糕 (zao1 gao1) in Chinese means "rotten cake." It also means "really bad," which is how I did at the Colorado Open badminton tournament last weekend.
Not that I had a bad time! It was really fun, but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't do very well. Fortunately, there are about 4 other tournaments in the area in the next couple of months, so I have plenty of opportunities to improve/try again.
To the right is a picture of me serving, with my doubles partner Note to the right.
We did well in our first match and moved on to the second round. There, we won our first game against a pair of brothers, I think, but then got sloppy and lost the next two games. Michala was watching from the rafters, and said we would have won the second game if we'd been keeping better track of the score, but such is the way of things I guess.
In mixed doubles, we had been sitting around for about 5 hours, then had 4 minutes or less to warm up. Things were running very late at that point, and needless to say we did poorly. We played an unscheduled match against a very good player -- and his 10-year-old daughter. If you ask me, that was a decision made in poor taste and sportsmanship. OK, he was giving her experience, but the fact was that she barely played, and we didn't want to smash at her (at first) so we got totally spanked.
By the time we caught on to the fact that the only way to beat them was to "attack" the little girl, it was way too late. Then, the same team beat the German guy I lost to in singles and his female partner. During their match I was trying to think of a way to tell him to go after the girl in German, but I couldn't think of it.
Later I thought it might be something like "blitzen der fraulein!!" but I'm not sure. That may have just confused him.
Well, the next tournament is the Fort Collins Open in April. But, I just got a large translation to do so I will likely be distracted by that. It is interesting in that it is written Cantonese, which is quite different from written Mandarin. Mostly the same, but some key words are altered.