Shanghai Tan

I just had my first golf practice session yesterday at Tianma Country Club (天马乡村俱乐部), it’s about an hour of driving from Shanghai. A friend of mine has to bring his employee for a golf course, and he didn’t mind me joining (for the same price anyway). The instructor is an old Australian gentlement, he’s a good instructor indeed. I have to say that it was more than 6 months since I last played a game, so I was trying so hard to get the same distance as I used to make with the 8 and 6 irons, and boys did it hurt! I’m still feeling all the muscle today, from my legs to the neck, and my palms have broken skins all over, it was a disaster! Luckly the instructor came by later and guided me to hit the ball with much less effort and less body movement, but by then my palms were already injured so I couldn’t improve as much as he expected. But anyway it was a good practice.

What surprise me more is the country club itself. It is called a country club but it has nothing to do with the village where it is in. This golf club is nothing short of a four stars club by any western standard! On our way of driving in, there is a long entrance road, both side green with some well maintained flowers and trees, a few holes and people playing. Arriving at the parking, there are mostly luxury cars: Porsche, Mercedez, BMW, Cadillac, Audi, plenty of them! There are people everywhere to cary the golf bags and greeting. The 19th hole is huge, all marble, with very confortable leather seats, quite impressive for a 乡村俱乐部 (country club). When we were set to go to the driving range, we went behind the club house to get a cart to drive there (it was far). Surprising I see all the people handling golf bags as well as caddies are young laddies (20 – 35 yrs old). My friend told me there are around a hundred of them in this club! A caddy is mandatory in Chinese golf club, they might or might not know how to play a good game, but they know the holes really well (for seeing so many people played there) and their eyes follow the balls. Some of them are so so but a few of them are actually good looking, unfortunately they had to wear an extremely ugly uniform (like restaurant servers), and worse, they have to cover their head with a piece of cloth. My friend said they look like Ninja (covered head), but I think they look like the farmers!

Indeed there are lots of farmers around, I see them washing their clothes beside the river, others are working on their little piece of land in front of their home, some have a bicycle repair shop, small and old houses, dirty kids running around, etc. For a moment I feel like I’m very very far away from Shanghai… Having such a chic 27-holes golf club in this village is like seeing the greenery of Las Vegas within the desert of Nevada. There was something funny, the balls out at the driving range are being picked up by two people, bare hand without helmet walking around while we were driving, I think it’s dangerous, but I don’t know what they think… Then at some point there was a dog running by and it seems to enjoy playing with golf balls also.

So that was it, after the practice I went to the Broadway Mansion hotel to pick up Adrian who just arrived afternoon, we had a good walk on the Bund and Nanjing road, and diner and conversation. I’m hoping to practice a few more time, and when my palms don’t hurt anymore after a session, I’ll try to play some games with the people here, and Mary of course. Some golf clubs are extremely expensive and exclusive (but so far not as expensive as HongKong), a poor expat like me will have to follow somebody else or play during weekday where sometime it doesn’t require membership.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under Shanghai Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.