Last Sunday we went to Longdong, a town on the scenic east coast of Taiwan. Initially, 6 people were going to go there, but only 2 made it there eventually. I don’t believe in the magic of numbers, but this is probabably due to the fact that it was 13th day of month (number 13 is unlucky).
So here is how it went:
On Thursday 6 people were definitley committed to going there.
On Friday morning one guy said “I have to work weekend, I cannot come with you. Have fun”.
On Friday afternoon the second guy said “Looks like bad weather Sunday. I cannot come with you. Sorry”.
So, on Sunday morning 4 of us gathered in the guest house. We departed at 8 AM, and went to the nearby restaurant to have breakfast.
Then, the thrid person suddenly felt sick and she said “I cannot come with you guys. I need some time to recover”.
We offered her a ride back home, and then – surprise, surprise the fourth guy said:
“I need to make a phone call to my wife. Go ahead without me”.
So, at around 10AM Sunday only 2 out of 6 people remained – a guy called Vis and me. And, you guess it right, the next-to-last guy said:
“I need to visit my sister in Taipei today”.
So, that was it, I thought, as I was the only one who remained, and I could not drive the car as it was someone else’s car. But, above any expectation, that guy said: “But I can still come with you”.
Yes!! Finally somebody adheres to his plans. What a relief! For some reason, it reminded me of the following quote from the Bible:
For many are called, but few are chosen (Mat 22:14)
So we went to Taipei to meet with Vis’s sister. Then finally we went to Longdong and arrived there a around 1PM. It was a nice weather, despite gloomy and innacurate weather forecast. So we rented snorkeling equipment and went, yes, snorkeling. Compared to Kenting, the water is somewhat cooler, but still pretty comfortable, maybe around +20C. However, there are fewer kinds of fish, and it is much smaller.
Snorkeling in Longdong is less enjoyable than in Kenting, but it is much closer than Kenting, so it is still definitely worth going there once in a while. In fact, while in Longdong we met with another group of people from ITRI. Those were summer interns from France and Germany. They were also snorkeling, and then one guy discovered a cliff 5 meter in height, and we all jump off that cliff into the water. A bit scary, but rather fun.
Then we went for a dinner together. Eating meat after a day spent swimming is rather enjoyable, I really felt hungry despite the hot weather. Then at around 6PM we went back to Hsinchu, made it through traffic jam to highway, and then arrived back at around 7PM.
It was a nice trip, despite the fact that it was nearly cancelled.
I participated in Ez Fun #2 – a trail run in the mountains near Taipei. These mountains are located in the north of the city, near Songshan airport. Compared to previous EzFun run a few things were different:
Now it is May, and the temperature gets above +30 from early morning
These northen mountains are much steeper than their southern counterparts.
The trail is rather wild, there is no stone pavement. Part of the course goes through a brook.
The mountains are higher than those in the south. On the picture you can see the mountain we were going to climb 5 times during that day
People in a show…
all lined in a row.
We just push on by…
Its funny…
how hard we try.
In fact, I arrived to Taipei Friday night and stayed in Taipei Youth Hostel since it is located near Songshan airport. It is just an apartment in a residential building and it is located on 11th floor. So you can enjoy a beautiful view from the balcony. In addition, the hostel was half-empty, so I definitely liked my stay there. For some reason, I could not sleep for long during that night (probably a cup of coffee at 8PM is partly responsible for that), However, when I woke up at 5AM I found out that the city was already bustling with life – lots of people on the streets, cars, etc. Indeed, the city never sleeps.
What surprised me in Taipei: people playing badminton. On Saturday. At 6 AM. And lots of them. Boy, I could not be awaken that early!
After checking out from hostel I went to 7-11 convenience store, grabbed a cup of cappuccino and chicken pasta, and this was my breakfast. I went by a small park with badminton courts. The thing that suprised me was there were lots of people playing badminton. On Saturday. Before 6AM. And they’ve been playing for a long time already.
Then I went to subway station. The subway train was waiting for me. It departed right after I jumped into the car. Today is a lucky day, I thought.
The race began at 7:30 AM. We were going to climb a mountain 5 times: up and down, again and again. To make things worse, the path was not clearly marked everywhere, so after being 30 minutes into the run we (a bunch of people running together) lost the track. Then the people from behind piled up, in total about 50 people, and they started calling the organizers to clarify the route. After 10 minutes running around we found the right direction and continued.
Since my previous EzFun run in March, I remembered that the most difficult part is in fact the final climb, so I started slowly this time. Typically, the organizers who plan the route try to put the difficult mountain in the beginning, and easy part in the end. These organizers do it the other way round: the most difficult part in the end. And I like it! I like people who push themselves to an edge. This is why we come to such races: try to do something beyond normal!
Typically, organizers plan route so that difficult mountain is in the beginning. These guys put the most difficult part to the end. And I like it!
So, I did not push myself very hard, and because of that I was always surrounded by people. Most of them were pretty young, probably they were students. For some reason I thought that in this kind of difficult races older (and more mature) people should prevail. But the youngsters have a lot more endurance, as it turns out. Totally surprising.
The interesting part is that there is forest only half the way up, and after that there are stones. Really huge ones. You have to make your way really carefully, otherwise you might end up in a big crack in the stones. This becomes especially dangerous during descent. Since I am not used to this kind of runs, I went down very slowly and carefully. But local people went down very fast. Also I noticed that there was not a single stretch of flat surface in this race. Always either up or down.
After about 12km we approached a mountain area with lots of Buddist monasteries. The architecture is really gorgeous, the above image shows the wide ladder leading to one of the Buddist temples. In fact, this is only 1 stretch of this ladder, it has 3 more stretches. And this is really where people started to suffer because of over heating. The organizers provided water stations at every 5km, but this was definitely not enough in this kind of hot weather. Some people were lying in the shadow, some of them throwing up, one guy just sat on the stairs under the sun and was barely able to speak. We called up the emergency for him, I don’t know whether it arrived or not.
So, things got heated as we approached the final kilometers. And there was the toughest climb – right through the stones, no trees near you, the sun burns you all the time. And there is no water (I did not take any water with me, but most other people did; I did not dare to ask them, though, I thought of this as an additional challenge).
My careful tactis worked out nicely: I still had some energy for the final climb. But overheating was a real threat: I felt like I was going to throw up, but I kept telling myself: 10 more minutes and I am done, and this worked out nicely for entire hour. Sometimes it is possible to convience yourself not to throw up… Please, please.
All right, here I approach the finish line. I got my towel (they always give towels after finish), and then immediately grabbed a cup of water. Another one. And the third one. My breathing gets back to normal, I receive my medal. I walk into the shadow and drink ice-tea. My stomach gets back to normal, not going to vomit today. I am feeling lucky!
Well, my time is not that great today: 4 hours 55 minutes for just 19km, but this race is something special. Many strong people are left behind sitting in a shadow, waiting for ambulance to pick them up. And I already crossed the finish line, and hold my certificate of completion, with a deserved medal around my neck. This race re-energized me. I feel like 20 year old now. Again – young and strong! In this big beautiful city that I like so much! It reminds me of my youth that I spent in NYC, but it is even better, as there are no mountains in NYC.
Big city, tough race, feeling lucky.. What can be better?
Same as previous year, we decided to go to Kenting near May 1st holiday. I tried to recruit a bunch of friends for this trip, but most of them had some other plans. So we went with Paul and K-C, the two colleagues of mine. In fact, K-C went to Kenting with his entire family, so we only had lunch together, and then he went to enjoy his 5-star hotel. Me and Paul stayed in some simpler locations.
In fact, Paul went to Kenting area on Friday to give some talks, and I came there Saturday. I left Hsinchu at around 7AM on a high speed rail train, and in 1.5 hours arrived to Gaoshiung. Then I took a so-called Kenting express bus, which made lots of stops, so in another 2.5 hours I arrived to Kenting and called up Paul so we could go for a lunch. While waiting for him I could not resist the temptation to rent a motorcycle. The lady in the shop asked for a local driver license, which I did not have, so she could only offer me an electric motorcycle which speed was at most 30 kmh. Very slow ride indeed, but it was enjoyable, as Kenting is a place where you don’t have to rush. Evertyhing is so close.
After meeting Paul we called up K-C and met in a Thai cousine restaurant. Then a rain began. It lasted for more than an hour. In fact, we gave up waiting for it to end, and went on our motorcycles through the rain. Before we left Paul predicted that the rain would stop as soon as we reach the beach – and his prediction was true! So we spent a couple of hours snorkeling. That was my first time snorkeling, previously I only tried scuba-diving. I liked it a lot, as you can see many interesting species of fish in this part of Taiwan. Paul even spotted a lionfish, and he said it was very rare.
In the evening we took train to Taitung, a city on the east coast. Paul was going to participate in triathlon. He went there in the morning, and I was just exploring the city. It is quite unusual compared to other cities in Taiwan. It is very spacious, and the buildings are not very tall. This is why it reminded me of Finland, or maybe some cities in the United States. Both are big countries, and therefore people try to settle down apart from each other. But I did not expect to see lots of unused land in Taiwan.
This was a very hot day, with temperatures well above +30C, and sunny. I wondered how would Paul make it through 50KM triathlon. But he finished pretty early and with a good result, and then he was saying he did not feel tired at all. So we went to another Thai restaurant (for some reason Thai became our favourite cousine), and celebrated Paul’s success with some beer. In fact, I taught Paul to say “Cheers” in Russian, and then we drank beer “za Hsinchu”, “za Taiwan”, and of course, “za triathlon”.
Then we decided to go to a beach to do some more snorkeling, but it turned out that there is no equipment rental, so eventually we decided not to go. So, we took train and I went back to Gaoshiung from where I took HSR train to Hsinchu, and Paul went back to Kenting where he was going to spend a couple more days. He wanted to take some surfing lessons, which were offered in the hotel where he stayed.
So, it was a very nice trip, and I feel really passionate about triathlon now. Paul told me the next one is in Yilan in July. Maybe I should prepare for that one!
There is only one thing that can be better than a weekend getaway: a getaway with a couple of friends. So, last weekend we went with Bonnie and Michael to Hong Kong to hang out there. Neither Miahcel nor Bonnie have visited Hong Kong before, so they definitely enjoyed their trip to Victoria Peak and the laser show in the evening. I did not come with them during that part of our trip, so we actually spent only 1 day all together.
We stayed in a Parkview Hostel which is located only 3 subway stops away from Central. What a convenient location it was! The hostel was in perfect condition and later I learned that it was opened less than a month ago. It is located on 14th floor, so you can breathe fresh air, and avoid being disturbed by the noise of the city, but still you are in the downtown. Nice!
Besides its tourist attractions, Hong Kong is known for its delicious food! I was told to try out dim sum, a kind of dumpling, but it is smaller in size and it is stuffed with various things – meat, fish, vegetables, etc. Typiaclly, only 4 dumplings of each kind are served, so when you have lunch you order 5-6 different kinds of dim sum. And then you share it with friends. This is so much fun!
As you can see in the picture gallery below, Bonnie was our translator in the restaurant (even though she claimed that she did not understand local dialect of Chinese called Cantonese), but I should definitely admit that me and Michael understood much less than Bonnie. So, after arriving to restaurant we spent 20 minutes translating the menu, then another 10 minutes discussing which dim sum is better: shrimp dim sum or meat dim sum, finally we ended up ordering all kinds of dim sums, and then spent another hour eating those dim sums, and after being unable to finish all of them taking out the rest.
Besides wasting time in dim sum restaurants we visited a beach. Here in Taiwan it still pretty cold, only around +20 centigrade, but in Hong Kong it is around +30 centigrade. And many people attend beaches. Michael was smart enough to find out directions to the nearest beach (or I should say he was well-prepared), so we took a double-decker, enjoyed our ride through Hong Kong down town and in about an hour arrived to a Repulse beach. And we swam in the ocean, so warm and calm! After that we went back to down town and had more dim sum! Can the life get any better than this?
Sometimes, you live your life, and it might seem boring, day after day same place, same people, but then you go on a weekend trip – and the life starts all anew! This was a great trip with so much fun we’ve had together. Unforgettable!
Today I went to a dentist, the first time in Taiwan. I am quite surprised with the price/qualitty ratio once again, especially comparing to the countries in which I happened to visit dentist previously. So I decided to create a buyer’s guide to dental clinics around the world.
1) The United States. The health care is notoriously expensive. Filling a small hole in a tooth can cost about 500 USD or even more. The insurance does not cover these expenses. Due to high prices the foreign students often go back to their home countries to get their teeth fixed during a summer break. Until then you’d have to tolerate the pain. Being a graduate student is painful.
2) Finland. The situation in this country is more complicated. There are a number of state clinics which are quite good and cheap (about 20 EUR per tooth), so you really want to go there. The problem is – there are too few of them, you might need to wait for up to 1 month in a queue. I wonder what kind of pain you might have to go through in the meantime. The alternative is to go to a private clinic which is more expenseive (maybe 1/2 the rate of the US), but they are available immediately.
3) Taiwan. I don’t know how much it actually costs, but the insurance covers it. So, today I only had to pay 5 USD to get my tooth fixed. It was a private clinic with modern equipment and friendly staff, so I really liked it.
So, if you have teeth problems consider coming to Taiwan!
This is an amazing book, but it is available only in Russian. It is written by two prominent linguists/journalists, one of whom worked as a translator for Russian presidents – Gorbachev, Eltsin, and Putin.
Despite the fact that those people are connected with the highest ranking officials of Russia, the book is written in a humorous style and is fun to read. The authors even dare to crack jokes about presidents and claim that during international meetings it is the translator who owns the world, not the world leaders.
The book presents interesting facts about world languages. The most surprising thing is the complexity of language. It turns out that the more complex the language, the fewer people there are who can speak it. For example, some minor language of Caucasus region has 16 noun cases, 17 verb tenses, and 10 verb moods. On the other hand, English has just 3 cases, 6 verb tenses, and 3 moods.
So how come all those ancient languages are so complicated? The authors suggest that earlier people put a lot more sense into each word depending on circumstances because they thought that words have magical power. These days, people often don’t pay attention to what they are saying. Gibberish is the norm of our society. But earlier people were frowned upon when they used a wrong word even if they did not intend to offend anybody. For example, today we can always use Mr/Mrs. to greet somebody. Earlier, greeting depended on the social class the person belonged to.
The authors try to explain why the old languages are so complicated. Their answer is that there is a master mind behind language design, that primitive people simply could not design languages of such complexity. However, as the time went by, people dropped features that looked unnecessary to them. It is interesting that not only theologists share such views.
Then the authors jump to a natural conclusion that there was a common predecessor of all human languages, a so-called pre-Babel tower language. So the Bible story is true, according to these prominent linguists. The authors claim that it is possible to track down evolution of language but unfortunately it takes a lot of learning to do that. One of the authors can fluently speak 30 languages, and apparently he was able to identify many similar roots in those languages. When people ask him, how many languages he knows, he typically answers that he knows just one language – the language of human beings.
Even present-day languages can put some influence on its speakers. When the authors who studied foreign languages in university worked in student labor camps, they were divided into groups based on which language they studied: “German” students, “French” students, etc. The authors say that German students were the most diligent, French were fighting for human rights all the time, etc. Time was passing by, generations of students were changing, but this rule was always true.
Then several chapters discuss the current state of Russian language, and how it transforms due to influence of Internet. The authors claim that it is not possible to artificially augment language with new words, the language will pick up what it needs to survive. In other words, the authors treat language as a living creature, not as a set of rules.
The speed of evolution is different for different languages. For example, Russians can read Pushkin (200 years ago), but they cannot read what was written 500 years ago. It was a totally different language. On the other hand, traditional Chinese language has not changed for several thousand years, and people can still read nowadays manuscripts written in B.C. era.
In Chapter 7 one of the authors describes his childhood. He was born in a small town in Moscow region in the family of teachers. From early childhood he discovered passion for foreign languages, and at the time of graduation from high school he could speak 5 languages. He says there was no particular incentive to learn languages, as in Soviet Union the travel abroad was strictly limited. Still, he says he often found the dictionaries of some esoteric languages in the town’s bookstore, and he was the only customer. But through these unusual books he was able to pick up valuable knowledge that happened to be very useful throughout his professional career as the Translator of President.
Well, this review is getting too long. I can only suggest that everybody read this book. It provides a fresh look at linguistics and can encourage you to learn more foreign languages.
It is well written. The narration goes from simple to complex
So what is this all about? Javascript is easy to learn, and this is what its creators aimed at. But as a result you get lots of headache when you try to use some advanced features such as classes, inheritance, etc. Are those really advanced features? In those days when Javascript was designed, they were. So, Javascript is simply showing its age, and the time to give it a major overhaul has come.
Recently, people have come up with many nice languages such as Python and Ruby which share many common features. Nobody claims they are easy to learn, but they are easy to use. So, the initial goal of building an easy language has been achieved. A new set of language constructs and idioms has been adopted (such as using indentation instead of brackets, arrow instead of function keyword, ranges, comprehensions, etc.). A new generation of developers expects iterators, maps, ranges, closures to be standard features of any programming languages. To most C++ programmers those look like quite advanved features provided by libraries such as STL. But Java revolution has happened: people got used to this syntactic expressiveness.
Coffeescript adds syntactic sugar to Javascript, bringing its language constructs on par with those of Python and Ruby. The good thing is that it compiles down to Javascript, so you can paste the output in existing web pages without any problem. No server support or library is necessary. You can even use interactive compiler that converts your Coffeescript into Javascript on the go.
The book is nicely written. Each chapter is dedicated to a certain aspect of the language: classes, idioms, the good parts, etc. Each chapter starts with a few simple examples, but it concludes with some really tricky stuff which can keep your attention for several minutues. For example, the chapter about classes mentions Mixins in the end, which is essentially a way to implement abstract classes (interfaces) in Javascript. Still, some people claim that CoffeeScript introduces new problems while trying to fix Javascript issues. This is why some language hackers added even more sugar to CoffeeScript. One such attempt is called Coco, look at all the new syntactic constructs it adds. They are awesome! So concise and powerful
(I wanted to say – strange and beautiful).
To summarize: CoffeeScript will make life of JavaScript developer F-U-N.
There is lots of free information on the web – and Wikipedia is the most prominent example. I think that it makes it possible to learn about any particular subject. The quality of this information is getting better and better. One can say that information on Wikipedia is rather limited – there are few examples, etc. If you want to learn something in a greater deapth you typically need to read a book (textbook) and those used to be not free. This year demonstrated a change in the education capabilities of the Internet. MIT and Stanford are now offerring online interactive courses, to which tens of thousands of people sign up.
Another interesting example is free books written by professional authors. They are published by well-known publishers such as Oreilly. You can pay if you want, but more and more often, you can get these books for free. So here are a few examples that are currently on my mind:
Think Complexity – a great textbook explaining algorithms and Python with some interesting examples such as fractals, life game, etc.
Little book on CoffeeScript – CoffeeScript is a new language similar to Python but it compiles down to JavaScript. I am reading this book right now.
This is a new book by Fred Brooks, the author of much acclaimed Mythical Man-Month. Overall impression: a book of a retired professional who is doing a retrospective of his entire life: recalling how he built a house, how he wrote a book, how he worked in IBM. Such a wonderful, wonderful life. But what does it have to do with most readers who did not happen to know Fred in person, nor visited his marvelous beach house? Nothing. As another reviewer mentions on Amazon, this is a book of wandering mind.
Still, Fred is obviously a distinguished person and listening to him often pays off. But don’t expect to learn any specific technique from this book. There are lots of practical guides on the Internet. The book is a collection of wisdom, most of which, however, I have heard before.
In the first few chapters the book stresses the point that design is iterative process, that it is not possible to get the design right from the very beginning. True. Then he mentions several cases of how the design of complex system was done in a wrong way. For example, designing a military chopper without consulting with pilots. Therefore, even during early design stage it is important that users be taken into consideration. And this is indeed why open-source systems are so successful – because they are driven by users of the product.
Brooks mentions that earlier the designers were actually the users of the product: think of Wright brothers, Ford who rode on the car that he designed, etc. But as the time goes by this happens to change: do you think that space rocket designers are same people as astronauts? Obviously no. And this is going to happen to the software as well, Brooks claims. And I can only add that this is already happening. As a proof I can mention numerous UI frameworks that were designed by UI designers who have little connection with develop teams, not to mention the end users.
Apart from UI design, it is obvious that as the library of software components gets bigger and bigger, the process of building software becomes more like that in assembly factory: take piece labeled S1 and S2, connect them together, wrap them into S3, etc. In such a scenario the designer might not even know how to program. He can use a visual tool to create software. Is this good or bad? I always thought it was good as this makes it possible for people without programming experience to write programs. MIT Scratch is one such example, a hugely popular visual framework not just for kids.
In further chapters of the book Brooks delves into philosophy – empiricism and rationalism. He mentions that abstract math was generated by French philosophers who were mostly into rationalism, whereas applied science was created by Brits who are into empiricism. Brooks claims that software engineering is totally empirical, that is, requires constant verification, and so is the design of software.
Then Brooks sheds light on what are the characteristics of a good design, in his opinion. The major design principles are: orthogonality, propriety, and generality. But those are just general principles. When you design something, you have to make thousands of micro-decisions and the way you make them is called style. How to achieve good style? Brooks mentions the importance of copying other people’s styles. He says one can achieve remarkably good results by just mimicking someone else. As an example he cites music: Respighi’s Ancient Dances and Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro (in the style of Pugnani). Listen to the latter, it is magnificent.
He mentions that even great composers such as J. S. Bach spent considerable amount of time studying other people’s works. So, design is a complicated iterative process. As always, documentation plays a very important role. So how can one document the design trajectories? For that tools are needed. Brooks cites a few tools available online, but I cannot say they are mainstream. On the other hand, he fails to mention Mind Maps, a recent tool which is hugely popular among engineers.
To summarize, this book is a message from a successful engineer of previous generation of computer programmers. Can the youngsters learn something from this book? Definitely yes. On the other hand, the book will not fix the problems in existing products, but it can help prevent even more mistakes.
Last Sunday I ran 18km which is less than a half-marathon. The result is rather mediocre – it took me 3 hours and 41 minutes to do that. So why so long? The answer is – it was a run in the mountains. And after few days of rains. As the above image suggests, we were sliding in the mud. It was actually kind of fun, it reminded me of downhill skiing I used to enjoy in Finland so much! So in fact I thought that this way of going down the hill is the Taiwanese equivalent of downhill skiing.
But first things first. On Saturday evening I arrived to JV’s hostel which is located 10 minute walking distance from Taipei 101. Still, this is one of the cheapest places to stay in Taipei costing around 10 USD per night. The price/quality ratio is superb! Of course, I had to spend a night in a room for 10 people, but you know, I really don’t care as I had to wake up 4 AM the next morning.
I left the hostel at around 5 AM and then the rain began! What an unexpected trouble! I thought that our race would get delayed or even cancelled. Luckily, the rain stopped almost immediately. The race is called EzFun. The start/finish line is located just a few kilometers east of Taipei 101. Taipei is a very interesting city: it is surrounded by mountains, so it takes only 10-20 minutes by walking to get from downtown to a nice mountain trail. This run included 4 steep climbs to the height of 300m.
Going up and down, up and down… After 1st climb I felt OK, after 2nd I was a bit tired but it was still OK, after 3rd climb I felt really tired, but I still could run. When we approached the 4th climb, after the previous 15km of climbing, I thought I could climb no more. But… There was no way back. So, I had to climb it no matter what. I had to use every single muscle to get on top of that mountain. Some people actullay used their hands. By looking at those people I reallized that our predecessors were using 4 legs for a good reason – when you have to climb a lot doing so with 4 legs is naturally easier than with only 2 legs.
After 1st climb I felt OK. After 2nd – a bit tired. After 3rd I felt really tired. When we approached the final climb I felt I cannot climb anymore. But there was no way back. I had to crawl almost 1km uphill on my 4 legs.
Overall, I noticed that I could go uphill a lot faster than downhill. The problem was that while going down I was afraid of slipping and tipping over, and I was carrying my iPhone in my back pocket. So I had to choose: arrive at finish line with good result but with smashed iPhone or arrive with a slightly worse result but with your iPhone intact. I chose the latter. There are so many trails on those mountains. Some of them are without any paving, while others have concrete steps or wooden ladders. At each intersection there was an arrow pointing where to go or some staff doing the same.
Overall, the race was very well organized. Except one place where everybody got lost. People in front told me that they spent 10 minutes running up and down trying to find directions but they could not. They asked staff, but they did not know either. They spent another 10 minutes discussing the issue over the phone. Finally, one of the members of staff led the pack in the direction he thought was the right one, but he was mistaken! After another 10 minutes of running around we were able to find the right trail.
We finished this race all covered by mud, from top to bottom. I received my medal and certificate of completion. My iPhone was not damaged and I was able to take a few nice pics along the way, such as this one. I wish I had better camera with me.
I went back to hostel to take shower. I felt really happy that I didn’t fall somewhere off the cliff. I think the organizers and those who participate in such kind of events are really brave (or maybe crazy) people! I amdire them. Good job, guys! This race reminded me of time spent in summer camps during highschool. We also had such sporitng events after which I felt totally exhausted. Today I woke up and reallized that every single muscle hurts.. Ouch, I can barely climb the stairs. But you know – in exchange for this pain I had another great feeling – I feel 15 years younger now.
