Over the last two days, dopeshow and I spent our time at the LGD headquarter at Hangzhou, a short one hour bullet train ride from Shanghai. Prior to taking off, I have heard many great things about Hangzhou; some friends even dubbed it as "Heaven on Earth". My expectation threshold was all the way up the roof.
After the usual proceedings of rolling over 100x on the bed and falling on the hard floor, we got up at 1 PM on Wednesday and headed to the train station. What I didn't know was that the train station is nowhere near the city. In fact, the train station is RIGHT BESIDE the airport, which is about 50 minutes drive away. Spending all our precious RMB aside, the train station was freaking humongous. Upon entering the airport-like train station, chaos ensued. There were people everywhere and the ticket line was ridiculously long. There were no English signs anywhere and the fact that I couldn't read Chinese did not help our situation.
What a hassle! After asking around and line-cutting, we finally got our ticket and we are off to Hangzhou. However, Hangzhou wasn't as "heavenly" as I intially thought: The city was as busy as ever and the smog was pretty bad too. We got into a taxi and 30 minutes later, we were knocking on LGD.Int's gaming house front door. In case you don't know, LGD.Int and LGD.cn have different houses now. It's approximately five minutes walk apart.
We were greeted by LGD.Int's nanny, a lovely lady who cleans, cooks and does the laundry for the team. A few minutes later, we were greeted by Pajkatt. We then stumbled upon Misery who was smoking on the balcony. The rest of the team were playing public games, so we didn't bother to disturb them. LGD's gaming house is a lot bigger than I thought it would be. Upon entering we have the dining room and the kitchen on the right, the players' computer and lounge on the left. On the second floor, it is the players' bedroom followed by kent's, LGD caster, room on the third floor. Kent's room is so awesome. Nic, the LGD manager, kept bragging about the TV the team just bought. Dude it's just a TV!
Pajkatt gave us a brief rundown of the normal proceedings in the house and we chatted a little till all the players were called for dinner. While the players were eating, dopeshow, Helen (XiiTuzi), Nicholas and I went out to get the so-called best BBQ pork and milk tea in Hangzhou. It was pretty good actually.
After we finished dinner, Nic assembled the players for a meeting upstairs which I failed to eavesdrop nor take a picture of. While waiting for them to finish the meeting, dopeshow, Helen and I watched the loser's bracket finals between RattleSnake and Vici Gaming. The meeting was longer than I thought it would be because they were still behind closed doors after two games passed. When they finally came downstairs, I was glad to finally be able to interview Misery. There were a lot of funny questions and answers about their training regime, their life in China and their upcoming trip to TI3.
It was pretty chillax for us after the interview and the players went back into training mode, this time against TongFu. After their first game, which the Int boys convincingly won, they told us that scrims normally work in best-of-three or best-of-five. One thing I noticed though, the guys were extremely loud when they were playing but do whatever it takes to win really. It's definitely no win for the 80 year old guy living below them according to Helen.
While we were watching them destroy TongFu for the second time, Helen suggested that we go for a foot massage, at 1 AM (because it's China). I felt so bad when I heard that the massage girls had to return to work after they reached home. The massage while watching Shanghai Knights 2 was pretty awesome, and at a rather affordable price too. I mean $10 for an hour, come on. I would tip them if Helen didn't insist on paying. (Helen is stingy).
By the time we got back, four of the Int players (excluding Brax) were watching a movie. Theeban told us that Brax normally goes to sleep at around 11 PM. I realized later that Brax does this to play with his friends in America early in the morning. Since dopeshow and I missed our final train to return to Shanghai, we gave our offerings to the mosquitoes on the couch. Damn you whoever turned off the air-conditioner.
Droplets of water on the balcony floor woke me up from slumber the next morning (actually it was the mosquitoes) just as Helen was about to leave for work. Continued rolling on the couch for the next two hours before we freshened up to meet Ruru, Queen of LGD and possibly the strongest (not physically) woman in Esports. We had a few small talks before leaving their office to go to our final stop, LGD.cn's base.
There were two big flags outside their house and it really portrayed their pride for playing for their country. Inside however, the house was rather similar to iG's gaming house, it was very SPARTA. The living room area has been transformed into the main gaming room while beds and whatnot were upstairs. Yao was the loudest in greeting us but the rest were very concentrated on their upcoming scrim game against LGD.Int. We took some pictures and wished them good luck for their game against Rattlesnake in TI3 East qualifier grand final. You should have seen dopeshow trying to pronounce "da jia jia you" (good luck everybody). He sounded like my hypothethical gold fish.
After we departed from the LGD's base, only then we saw what made Hangzhou the true heaven. Our taxi driver drove us past the Hangzhou West Lake and it was an amazing view provided a little rainy was present (and also the pollution), making it even more "heavenly". We took the next train back to Shanghai and that is all from us at Hangzhou. We wanted to visit Vici Gaming's house too but we spent too much time at LGD's place. Sorry about that and also apologies for the delay in posting this blog post. If you live in China, you will know how big of a pain it is to upload video to Youtube. We also visited Dota 2 Super League and will be posting a walkthrough video and interview with Yao tomorrow.
