WBT Thailand!

I wanted to apologize in advance for how long it took me to write this blog. Been very busy the past few weeks traveling and finishing up the summer quarter for school. Finally have some time to sit down and wanted to share my experiences from Thailand with everyone.

First, the plane ride. This was sheer torture LOL. We flew from Chicago to Houston at 5am and then had an hour or so layover in Houston where we then flew from there to Narita/Tokyo Japan. We had a six hour layover there so we hopped on a train and went into downtown Narita where we walked about 3 miles around the city and found this cool temple that we walked around in. From there we went from Japan to Bangkok and finally got in around midnight the next night, total travel time was just under 30 hours!!!! The key to trips like these is to time when you sleep on the plane right. You want to ultimately have your body clock on local time by the time you land wherever you’re going. I was very lucky that I timed mine correctly but I felt bad for Jackie as she struggled all week with it and felt sick most of the week from not sleeping.

I cant say enough how incredible the federation was to us. They had drivers waiting for us at the airport. One to pick us up and take us to the hotel and one to take our equipment to the bowling center, which oh by they way was on the 7^th floor of the largest mall I have ever been to in my entire life. THIS CITY WAS INCREDIBLE. I was told the total population was around 20 MILLION!!! The traffic was the only thing that kind of sucked. There were 3 malls that were all within ½ mile of one another. All three malls were bigger than any mall I have ever been to in America and each of them had like 6-8 floors. The food court in the mall where the bowling center was had roughly 100 places to choose from to eat. There were 3 McDonalds in the food court alone!!! And I think 5 in the whole mall (Of course that’s what I notice LOL). There was also an aquarium in the mall that we went to. I really cant even to begin to explain these places. One of the other malls was like a discount mall where the price they had listed on the item, you were allowed to make offers and bargain with them! The federation also set up drivers to take us to a zoo about 90 minutes away where we could ride the elephants. There are people who live there who own elephants as pets like we would own a dog or cat. Elephants are believed to be good luck there is what we were told.

OK now for the bowling. This was an interesting format with interesting rules. They allowed us to pick which lanes we wanted to bowl our squad on and we could bowl with who we wanted. The format was we could bowl as many squads as we wanted and they took our 3 highest squads as the total pin fall, each squad being 3 games so 9 games total. My three highest squad totals were 711 696 696 (2103). Marshall and I bowled together for the majority of our qualifying blocks. For the fresh I would just use 360 grit and stay right of 10 and then for the next block I would stay on the same pair and try to put up a number. My ball reaction was pretty good! The Koreans who were there found a pretty nasty look throwing urethane and they dominated the fresh doing it, however it really played with my breakpoint and my carry percentage went down with how tight they got downlane. During the Finals when they did that, all I could do was grind and I got to 1263 for 6 and fell short by 9. It was disappointing. I felt like I should have done better with how I felt like I was throwing it but it’s a learning process and now I need to figure out what to do next time the Koreans try that. It worked really well for them though. I think there were like 6 in the top 7 after the first game.

This is another stop I would definitely recommend hitting up if you’re thinking about going overseas for the first time. It’s one of the few lone stops that are worth going to.